Why the Iranian Ransom Deal Was Wrong

This article first appeared in Eagle Rising.


While I am happy that four Americans who had been held in Iran on trumped up charges are home, I cannot feel happy about the deal that was made by the Obama administration. Anyone who doesn't believe this was a case of ransom being paid is delusional.

It is no coincidence that the planes  that carried the four Americans out of Iran and the unmarked cargo plane carrying $400,000,000 in cash met at the Teheran airport the same time. As a retired DEA agent, this reminded me of some high-level undercover heroin or cocaine transaction. The Obama administration paid ransom for those four Americans, pure and simple. For them to deny it only adds to the justified distrust that we have for this president, this secretary of state (John Kerry), and the rest of these scoundrels inside the Beltway. What they have done is to feed a hostage industry on the part of the Iranian regime, the world's largest state sponsor of terrorism as it is. This regime is nothing more than a continuation of the mullahs that took over Iran in 1979 and held our own diplomats hostage for 444 days under the feckless Jimmy Carter. And make no mistake: Barack Obama is at least  equally as feckless as Carter when it comes to dealing with Islamic terrorism and the mullahs of Iran.

I am not swayed by the arguments of the administration that the money actually belonged to Iran and would have been awarded to them by the World Court. When the Revolutionary Guards brag that we paid them ransom, I take them at their word over the weak protestations of people like White House spokeshole Josh Earnest. It is true that this money represented a previous payment by the previous regime of the Shah for fighter planes that were never delivered after the Iranian revolution (plus interest). Yet, there are numerous claims by the Americans held hostage under Carter and other American families who lost family members to acts of terror committed by or funded by Iran. A proud country would have awarded those funds to the concerned families and continued to do everything in its power short of military invasion to bring about the downfall of this evil regime. The previously-imposed sanctions were working until John Kerry crawled on his hands and knees to make his infamous Munich-style deal with the Iranian foreign minister, a deal that allowed Iran to continue to build its nuclear weapons capability while we shamelessly proclaimed that we had stopped it or set it back. Much of the money being given to Iran will be spent of terror activities world-wide. It will result in the loss of innocent lives.

Iran is a country ruled by an evil regime. My generation has never forgotten the utter humiliation that we suffered during the hostage crisis while Jimmy Carter was president. Now under Obama and his weak-kneed secretary of state (with all due respect to the groundwork laid by Kerry's predecessor, Hillary Clinton), we have once again allowed this gang of thugs to humiliate us. They actually believe that appeasing this evil regime will gradually draw them nearer to the West and cause them to join "the family of nations". Only fools would believe that. Have they never heard of Neville Chamberlain and,"peace in our time" ?

When will we recover our pride as the most powerful (and supposedly the most principled) nation on earth? We and the rest of the world needs to wake up and realize that it is 1938 all over again.