The easing of sanctions, in a foolhardy effort to entice Tehran back into the JCPOA, has been a boon for jihadism — as anyone could have seen it would be.
Here’s another one for the “They Think We’re Idiots” file: The Biden administration’s claim that the $6 billion it just caused to be released to jihadist Iran had nothing to do with the unspeakable attack against Israel over the weekend by Iran’s proxy, Hamas, which is well known by Biden officials to be funded and directed by Iran.
Let’s put aside the least surprising news in the history of news, namely, the Wall Street Journal’s report that Iran’s armed forces — in particular, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, a U.S.-designated international terrorist organization — have spent the last several weeks collaborating with Hamas in the planning of Saturday’s attack, which Iran finally green-lighted last week (i.e., only after the Biden administration released the $6 billion for Iran’s benefit to Qatar, which also funds Hamas and harbors Hamas’s leadership). To repeat what I related on Saturday, Biden’s own State Department has acknowledged that Iran has “continued providing weapons systems and other support to Hamas and other U.S.-designated Palestinian terrorist groups,” in its most recently published findings about international terrorism.
Biden knew exactly whom and what he was funding, and he did it anyway.
That said, Republicans and others commenting on Biden’s dereliction of duty should understand the case. The $6 billion is only part of it, and not the major part.
To begin with, the White House is furiously claiming that Hamas did not get any of the $6 billion because (a) it is still being held in an account in Qatar, (b) it is reserved for humanitarian purposes, and (c) it hasn’t been spent. This contention would be laughable were it not for both this weekend’s slaughter and how deeply insulting it is to our intelligence (they really do think we’re idiots). Money is fungible. Once the $6 billion was banked, that freed Iran to redirect other funds to terrorism, which it has plainly done in arming and training Hamas and other Palestinian jihadists — as well as Iran’s longtime frontline jihadist force, Hezbollah, which has launched rockets into Israel from Lebanon in the north and threatens to escalate if Israel follows its ongoing air strikes against Hamas targets in Gaza with a ground invasion.
With that said, though, the Biden administration’s most recent $6 billion payoff — in part, a ransom that will only encourage jihadists to take American hostages (which Hamas has now done) — is only a small part of our government’s reckless support for Tehran.
After years of being squeezed by American and international sanctions, Iran’s oil-production-and-export sector was turbocharged in 2016 by the Obama-Biden Iran nuclear deal (the so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action). The JCPOA not only obliged the United States to assist and protect an Iranian civilian nuclear-energy program that would place the regime on the cusp of constructing nuclear weapons; it required no concessions from Iran — the world’s leading state sponsor of anti-American and anti-Israeli terrorism — on its promotion of jihad. By 2017, Iran’s exports were nearly triple what they had been in 2013.
In 2018, however, President Trump commenced his “maximum pressure” campaign, the objective of which was to starve the regime of resources and force it to make concessions on terror support and nuclear-weapons development. The economic pressure weakened the jihadist regime, making it more vulnerable to internal uprisings. By 2019, new U.S. sanctions had crashed Iran’s oil sector, which further contracted in 2020 due to the combination of sanctions and the Covid pandemic that resulted in a global economic slowdown.
When Biden took office in 2021, he immediately reversed the Trump policies and sought to entice Iran back into the JCPOA — which he was so desperate to do that he was willing to use Russia as his intermediary (when, adding insult to injury, Iran declined to meet with American diplomats). With Biden easing restrictions, Iran’s oil sector is once again humming. It is now producing over 3 million barrels per day. As the Heritage Foundation’s Robert Greenway explains, by late summer, Iran’s exports reached somewhere between 1.7 and 2.2 million barrels per day (compared to just 775,000 per day by the end of Trump’s term). Tehran is well on its way to exceeding last year’s export revenue of nearly $43 billion — which itself was a giant leap from $25.5 billion in 2021 and $7.9 billion in 2020. The windfall Iran has realized from the Biden relaxation of sanctions over the Trump maximum-pressure sanctions is in the neighborhood of $30 billion.
That is why Iran is able to lavish funding on its allied jihadist groups, such as Hamas. President Biden knew that is what Iran would do, not only when he recently released the $6 billion, but also when he eased restrictions in the self-defeating question to lure Iran back into the JCPOA. It is a mind-boggling policy precisely because its deadly results were so foreseeable.