The crack reporting team of Josh Rogin and Eli Lake has uncovered more evidence of the Obama administration’s massive blind spot when it comes to Iranian support for terrorism and other mischief. As noted by Michael Rubin, Rogin and Lake have found that once again the administration is knuckling under to a brazen Iranian demand.
This concerns important modifications to the visa waiver program recently passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama. Under this legislation, nationals of countries with visa-free travel to the U.S. will still have to apply for a visa if they have visited Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Syria, or other high-risk countries since 2011. This has prompted a hissy fit from Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, who claims that the visa provision is a violation of the nuclear deal signed with Iran. Zarif complained: “Now it is clear that this new legislation is simply absurd because no Iranian nor anybody who visited Iran had anything to do with the tragedies that have taken place in Paris or in San Bernardino or anywhere else. But they’re being the targets. I think it discredits those who pass these legislations, those who adopt them and those who implement them more than anything else. And it sends a very bad signal to the Iranians that the US is bent on hostile policy toward Iran, no matter what.”
That’s pretty rich coming from a country that is holding five American hostages, including a Washington Post reporter, and whose leaders regularly chant the slogan “Death to America.” So apparently in the Iranian worldview, hostility on their part toward the United States is perfectly acceptable, but even minimal action by the U.S. to protect itself from Iran is not.
The larger point that Zarif is making is even more absurd: He is complaining that because Iran was not involved in recent ISIS terrorist attacks, it is not guilty of committing anti-American terrorism. As Representative Mike Pompeo points out, Iran has been up to its eyeballs in anti-American terrorism: It is responsible for the deaths of at least 500 American troops in Iraq from 2003 to 2011 and of 19 Americans in the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1996. In 2011 Iranian agents also tried to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington.
Pompeo doesn’t even mention all of the atrocities committed by Iran in the 1980s, following the Iranian hostage crisis (for which Iran still has not apologized or made amends), when its agents and proxies blew up the Marine barracks and the U.S. Embassy in Beirut and kidnapped numerous Americans including CIA Station Chief William F. Buckley, who was tortured to death. Iran does not, of course, limits its terrorist offensive to Americans: It has also blown up Jews in, inter alia, Argentina and Bulgaria, supplied rockets and other weapons to Hezbollah and Hamas, and has supported and guided the Assad forces which have killed more than 200,000 Syrians. There is, in short, good reason why Iran is on the list of state sponsors of terrorism.
And thus, there is very good reason why Congress should be nervous about allowing anyone with an Iran connection to enter the U.S. without a visa. Which makes it all the more outrageous that Secretary of State John Kerrey is catering to Zarif (“His Excellency”) by vowing to use executive authority to waive the visa provision for Iran. This endangers American security and sends a terrible signal to Iran and the world: namely that if Iran says jump, the U.S. will respond “how high?”
Instead of catering to Iran by overlooking its support for terrorism, its ballistic missile program (which is in violation of U.N. sanctions), its human rights abuses, and, of course, its desire to acquire nuclear weapons, the U.S. should be putting together a comprehensive policy to contain Iranian designs. Unfortunately, it looks as if that will not happen until a new president takes office. Until then, the U.S. is in full appeasement mode.
