December 1, 2023
by Warren L. Nelson
The Republican Party in recent weeks has been strongly attacking President Biden as weak on confronting the Islamic Republic or even as supportive of the Islamic Republic—in what appears to be the testing of a major campaign issue for next year’s election.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is second in the polls as he runs for the GOP presidential nomination, even called his state legislature back into session to pass into law state sanctions on Iran, which the legislators quickly did, although the impact on Iran would appear to be close to nil.
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who is not running for the presidency this year, has made some of the most astounding charges, asserting that Biden has freed up $100 billion that Iran can now use for terrorist operations.
And former President Donald Trump, the leading candidate for the GOP nomination, is now talking about Iran at almost every campaign stop, giving fact-checkers much to write about—and they uniformly say most of what he says doesn’t check out. Trump’s main theme is that as president until three years ago he foiled Iranian plots at every turn while Biden just does Tehran’s bidding.
Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, meanwhile, has started echoing the GOP line, calling Biden “weak” in confronting the Islamic Republic. “The [Iranian] regime … is trying to push the envelope, trying to see whether they can take advantage of a weakness, which currently seems to be the case. That’s why they’ve become emboldened every time the West hesitates or doesn’t apply the necessary pressure, as it should have, to at least contain this,” Reza Pahlavi told Fox News October 31
“Right now, you have a situation where you encourage the regime that, if you take hostages, you will be rewarded and get some more cash in your hands.
“You have called for sanctions, but you have never implemented them,” Pahlavi said inaccurately, “like the oil sanctions. That is not what I call putting pressure. So, ‘be good boys and don’t harm us.’ Is that the message? I mean, come on.”
While Biden is under attack by American hardliners for being soft on Iran, in Tehran Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdol-lahian has come under attack from hardliners who say he is soft on the United States and Israel.
Majlis Deputy Mahmud Abbaszadeh-Meshkini criticized the minister’s “weakness in playing a central and effective role” in addressing the Gaza conflict.
Meshkini asked: “How is it that until recently, the goal was to eliminate the Zionist regime, but now the discourse has shifted.” It appears he is referring to the fact that Iran has recently endorsed a UN document and an Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) document that accept the two-state solution. But that appears to be simple recognition that brawling over the two-state solution would only have the effect of shutting Iran out of all discussion of the Gaza crisis.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanani said Tehran had always expressed “reservations” in the past about some of the provisions of documents it has agreed to, which is true.
Referring to the war in Gaza, General Mohammad-Reza Naqdi, deputy commander of the Pasdaran, said November 14 that while it’s true the Pasdaran have not sent any troops to Gaza, that does not imply that nothing is being done to help the Gazans.
“We eagerly await the order to deploy to Gaza,” he added, without noting that he has no way to deploy troops to Gaza.
Some 150 Majlis deputies have volunteered for deployment to Gaza, and the regime claims to have registered 10 million volunteers ready to join the war in Gaza.
Many hardliners in Tehran are calling for the Abdollahian’s removal from office, although that looks to many like mere posturing by the hardliners.
In the US, Republicans are lining up at the microphones to castigate Biden. The two main themes are: 1) that Biden is allowing the Islamic Republic to have access to billions of dollars in frozen funds that it can now use to fund terrorism, including against Americans; and 2) that Biden is caving in to Tehran’s demands because he wants to resurrect the nuclear deal at any cost, although the administration said many months ago that it had given up on resurrecting the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
Most of the GOP critics point specifically to the $6 billion previously frozen in South Korea and the $10 billion previously frozen in Iraq. Most ignore the fact that US policy has always allowed access to those funds by Iran for purchases of agricultural goods, medicines and medical equipment—an exemption that has been part of US policy since the 1970s when the US public rebelled against a Carter Administration sanction on the Soviet Union that barred Soviet purchases of US wheat.
But Seoul administered the frozen accounts in South Korea by barring Iran from accessing any of the funds whatsoever. Biden in September allowed the funds to be moved to Qatar, where Iran will have to submit medical/agricultural bills for approval before they can be paid, in keeping with the half-century old US policy.
In the case of the Iraqi funds, that is money Iraq paid into a frozen account for electricity and gas that it buys from Iran. Four months ago, Biden allowed a new exemption so Iraq could pay for electricity and natural gas bought from Iran. Now, he has extended that exemption another four months, and that is what the GOP is complaining about. The reason for the exemption is that Biden does not want Iran to end electricity and gas deliveries for fear the Iraqi economy will collapse and Washington will have to come to Iraq’s rescue. But, again, the gas/electricity funds will not be paid to Iran but put into another account for which Iran will have to provide receipts proving it is buying only humanitarian goods with the money.
Most of the critics just ignore those nuances and say Biden has given Iran $16 billion it can spend as it pleases. By the way, the Biden Administration says that in the last four months since the exemption for Iraq was created, Tehran has not spent any of the money.
More sophisticated critics grant that the money can only be spent on humanitarian goods, but note correctly that money is fungible, meaning that money spent from the previously frozen funds on humanitarian goods frees up other funds in Tehran’s hands that can be spent on terrorism.
But beyond the money issue, many Biden critics are demanding more military action against Iran, complaining that the four recent raids by US planes on Iranian targets in Syria are insignificant when Iran has launched more than 60 attacks on American troops in Iraq and Syria.
Ari Fleischer, who was White House spokesman in the George W. Bush Administration, said on Fox, “We need to militarily strike Iran” only one of many figures saying Biden should not confine attacks to Iranian targets in Syria and Iraq but should hit “the head of the snake” in Iran proper.
Fox contributor Keith Kellogg said the Biden Administration must threaten to kill Supreme Leader Ali Khamenehi and other Iranian leaders: “They [Biden] need to nip this in the bud and we need to tell the Supreme Leader, and very clearly, you’re on the docket, dude. We’re coming after you, if necessary. And we’re going after your infrastructure. And we’re going to go after the people as well, to include the leader of the Qods Force, which is Esmail Qaani right now. And you also tell their foreign minister, who’s at the UN,… that you’re going to be next.”
Mark Esper, who was Trump’s last defense secretary, told Fox that Biden needs to “increase the frequency and the scale of the bombings, the count-erstrikes we impose upon them.”
Fox analyst Jack Keane, a retired US Army general, urged Biden to strike targets inside Iran and denied that would lead to war, although hitting targets inside Iran would be an act of war itself.
All these comments were made on Fox News in recent weeks. Fox has been the leading media conduit for demands for more military action against Iran.
The critics complain that the few US responses to attacks on US troops by Iraqi militias backed by Iran have failed to deter further attacks. And that is clearly true. The US attacks have each been swiftly followed by more attacks on sites where US troops are stationed.
It is not clear, however, that the US retaliatory attacks have been mere pinpricks compared to what the Iran-backed militias have done. The usual complaint of the critics is that Biden has struck back only four times against more than 60 attacks by the militias. But the US Air Force is dropping 2,000-pound bombs, while Iran is using drones, most of which do not carry even 100 pounds of explosives. Furthermore, the US bombs have hit all five targets they have been aimed at, while many of the drones have been shot down or fallen in fields. The US tonnage-on-target may well be much greater than the Iranian tonnage-on-target. But the critics’ point that the retaliatory strikes haven’t deterred Iran from further attacks is certainly true.
The Biden critics almost uniformly also charge that Biden has relaxed the enforcement of sanctions on Iran and consciously allowed it to sell much more oil and bring in much more revenue. As addressed in another article in this issue, there is no evidence that Biden has ordered enforcement of sanctions to be cut back. But because China—which freely bought Iranian oil during the Trump Administration is now buying more crude, Iran has been getting more revenue.
Nineteen GOP senators signed a letter to Biden November 16 that said they “demand that you take immediate action to fully enforce US oil sanctions and interdict Iranian oil exports.”
Politically, the GOP is trying to tab Biden as naively thinking that he can work with Iran and moderate its policies. Newt Gingrich, the Republican speaker of the House in the 1990s, wrote in November, “For reasons that are hard to fathom, both Presidents Obama and Biden have had a fixation with trying to work with the Iranian dictatorship.”
Gingrich added, “When an American base is hit, the answer should be to hit an Iranian base, sink an Iranian warship, or shoot down Iranian military aircraft. It would not take many American efforts focused on Iran for the Iranians to decide they were in a losing game, and that trying to kill Americans is not in their interest.
“We have proof that the impact of directly taking on Iran works. When President Donald Trump authorized the killing of General Qasem Soleymani of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps the most important and best prepared Iranian force seeking to transform the Middle East the Iranians suddenly grew much more cautious.” Actually, the Islamic Republic swiftly replied by firing about 16 missiles at two bases where American troops were stationed, which tends to undermine Gingrich’s argument that a tougher response would certainly deter Tehran.
The most explosive allegations came from Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York who has more recently been Trump’s personal lawyer. He charged on October 22 that Biden “is working for Iran. Why? Maybe because they [Iran] have infiltrated his administration the way the communists infiltrated [President Franklin] Roosevelt’s Administration,” a reference to stories about a few Iranian-Americans working in the US government allegedly pushing what Tehran wants.
Meanwhile, in Florida, the state legislature passed what it billed as tough new sanctions on Iran. Actually, they weren’t new sanctions on Iran. The legislation updated laws passed several years ago as part of a flurry of laws states passed that forbade their funds for state employee pensions from being invested in businesses that did work in Iran. The new Florida laws expand the earlier laws by banning investments in a larger range of firms that have smaller investments in Iran. No one could say how many or even if any new firms will be impacted.
Most Republicans and Democrats voted for the changes. One of the few nays came from state Rep. Anna Eskamani, the sole Iranian-American in the state legislature. A furious Eskamani accused her fellow legislators of enacting the new legislation just to try to look tough to voters. “I do see this as just more politics. I see this as performance. And it’s frustrating because Floridians need us to focus on things like property insurance and funding public education and the affordability crisis.” In case anyone thought she was trying to defend the Islamic Republic, she pointed out that her parents “fled Iran in search of freedom…. So, when I say that I despise the Islamic Republic of Iran, I mean it.”
