On August 4, during the course of a press conference, Obama gave his interim assessment of his nuclear agreement with Iran. “It worked,” he insisted.
By Caroline b. Glick, JPOST
The time for complaining about President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran has passed. The time has come to overcome the damage enormous damage his signature foreign policy accomplishment has caused.
To understand why this is the case, it is important to understand the breadth and depth of Obama’s failure.
On August 4, during the course of a press conference, Obama gave his interim assessment of his nuclear agreement with Iran.
“It worked,” he insisted.
A year after the deal was signed, Obama argued, events have proven that he was right and the deal’s critics were wrong.
“You’ll recall that there were all these horror stories about how Iran was going to cheat and this wasn’t going to work and Iran was going to get $150 billion to finance terrorism and all these kinds of scenarios, and none of them have come to pass,” he proclaimed.
Obama then snidely swiped at the deal’s opponents saying that it would be “impressive” if the people who criticized the deal would own up to their mistakes and admit that it worked.
As it works out, everything that Obama said about the deal with Iran during his press conference was a lie.
Some of his lies became apparent within hours.
For instance, Obama falsely claimed that Israel now “acknowledges this has been a game changer and Iran has abided by the deal and they no longer have the sort of short-term breakout capacity that would allow them to develop nuclear weapons.”
Hours later, the Defense Ministry issued a stinging rebuke of Obama’s claim, parroted more diplomatically by the Prime Minister’s Office.
Obama’s press conference took place the day after The Wall Street Journal reported that in January 2016, the US sent an unmarked plane to the Tehran airport filled with $400 million in cash, on the same day Iran released four US hostages.
Obama angrily rejected allegations that the cash payment was a ransom payment for the hostages’ release. He insisted that the US had made the payment as the first installment of a $1.7b. payment the administration made to settle an Iranian government lawsuit against America.
Obama claimed that the administration agreed to the settlement at the urging of the Justice Department.
He said his administration was able to settle the dispute only due to the nuclear deal which placed US officials in direct contact with their Iranian counterparts for the first time in decades.
Within a day, Obama’s claims were exposed as lies. It turns out that Justice Department lawyers opposed the cash payout to Iran.
One of the hostages released in January told the media that the Iranians refused to allow the hostages to leave Iran until the airplane with the cash landed in the airport.
The Iranians, for their part, contemptuously mocked Obama, and stated openly that the $400m.
was a ransom payment for the hostages.
Two weeks later, Obama’s State Department admitted that the $400m. was a payment for …read more
Source:: Israpundit
