Obama protected Hezbollah drug ring to save Iran nukes deal.

Here’s the New York Post’s report on yet another scandal from Obama’s cuckoo-occupation of the White House. We choose it because it is a short account of a very long story.

The Obama administration protected members of notorious terror group Hezbollah from prosecution to save the Iran nuclear deal …

A team at the Drug Enforcement Administration had been working for almost a decade to bring down the Lebanon-based militant organization’s sophisticated $1 billion-a-year drug ring — which it found was smuggling cocaine into the US and laundering the profits by buying used cars stateside and shipping them to Africa for resale …

But the departments of Justice and Treasury delayed and rejected prosecution and sanctions requests from the team that had exposed the Iran-backed criminal network because the Obama White House feared “rocking the boat” with Tehran ahead of the deal … .

The taskforce, named Project Cassandra, worked for eight years out of a top-secret facility in Virginia with help from 30 American and foreign security agencies, unraveling the global crime syndicate that was funding Hezbollah’s Jihadi operations, the site reports.

Among those the team sought to bring to justice were Abdallah Safieddine, the group’s envoy to Tehran and a shadowy operative nicknamed “Ghost”, who it considered one of the biggest cocaine smugglers in the world. …

But the administration repeatedly stymied efforts to prosecute Safieddine — even though the team had eyewitnesses willing to testify that he’d overseen big weapons and drug deals — and ultimately shut Project Cassandra down once the nuclear deal was settled …

A  long report on the whole horrible story may be found here at Politico.

It includes this:

The man who would become Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser and then CIA director, John Brennan … recommended in a policy paper that “[Obama] has the opportunity to set a new course for relations between the two countries” through not only a direct dialogue, but “greater assimilation of Hezbollah into Lebanon’s political system”. 

By May 2010, Brennan, then assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, confirmed in a speech that the administration was looking for ways to build up “moderate elements” within Hezbollah.

“Hezbollah is a very interesting organization,” Brennan told a Washington conference, saying it had evolved from “purely a terrorist organization” to a militia and, ultimately, a political party with representatives in the Lebanese Parliament and Cabinet …

That was his spin on Hezbollah’s coup d’état by force. Brennan shared Obama’s warm feelings for Islam.

Obama was willing to pay any price (with tax-payers’ money), make any concession or sacrifice, bow as low as he could bend to the ayatollahs, to get a “deal” that permitted Iran to develop nuclear weapons and accumulate a nuclear arsenal, under the guise of a “deal” that it would not do so – for ten years.  After which, it would be equipped and free to attack the United Sates and destroy Israel and Saudi Arabia – its Sunni rival for power in Islam.

It could not be writ more large and clear on the Obama years that he wanted the victory of Islam in its jihad against the rest of the world.

A nuclear armed Iran was the most likely to achieve that high objective.

Meanwhile Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah, now the ruling power in Lebanon, grows in strength and threatens the Arab states as well as Israel.

Iran and Hezbollah need to be disarmed – and that can only be done by force.

A video addressed to the Senate Democrats who support Obama’s deal with Iran:

Here’s a moderately good satirical video making a very important point about Obama’s “deal” with Iran:

If Khamenei calls Obama now, he’ll get two deals for the price of one.

(And the price to Iran is zero anyway.)

Even if Congress were to nix the doomsday deal Obama made with the evil rulers of Iran, Obama could ignore the people’s representatives and continue to help the mullahs become a nuclear armed power hostile to America.

The Associated Press reports:

The September vote on the Iran nuclear deal is billed as a titanic standoff between President Barack Obama and Congress. Yet even if U.S. lawmakers reject the agreement, it’s not game-over for the White House.

A congressional vote of disapproval would not prevent Obama from acting on his own to start putting the accord in place. While he probably would take some heavy criticism, this course would let him add the foreign policy breakthrough to his second-term list of accomplishments.

Obama doesn’t need a congressional OK to give Iran most of the billions of dollars in relief from economic sanctions that it would get under the agreement, as long as Tehran honors its commitments to curb its nuclear program. …

What commitments would those be? Are there any?

With Republicans controlling both chambers of Congress, the House and Senate are expected to turn down the deal.

Obama has pledged to veto such a resolution of disapproval, so the question has turned to whether Congress could muster the votes to override him. And Obama would forfeit the authority he now enjoys to waive sanctions that Congress has imposed.

But Democrats and Republicans have predicted that his expected veto will be sustained — that opponents lack the votes to one-up Obama. More than half of the Senate Democrats and Independents of the 34 needed to sustain a veto are backing the deal. There is one notable defection so far — New York’s Chuck Schumer, the No. 3 Democrat in the Senate and the party leader-in-waiting.

In the House, more than 45 Democrats have expressed support and 10 their opposition.

The president could suspend some U.S. sanctions. He could issue new orders to permit financial transactions that otherwise are banned now. On the financial sector, Obama could use executive orders to remove certain Iranians and entities, including nearly two dozen Iranian banks, from U.S. lists, meaning they no longer would be subject to economic penalties.

Only Congress can terminate legislative sanctions, and they’re some of the toughest, aimed at Iran’s energy sector, its central bank and essential parts of its economy. Still, experts say Obama, on his own, can neutralize some of those sanctions and work with the Europeans on softening others.

The September votes won’t be the final word.

One looming question is whether Congress should try to reauthorize the Iran Sanctions Act, which authorizes many of the congressional sanctions. Sen. Bob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, and Sen. Mark Kirk, a Republican from Illinois, have introduced legislation to renew it.

Iran could interpret a U.S. move to reauthorize the law as a breach of the nuclear agreement. Administration officials won’t say whether it is or isn’t, only that it’s premature to address it.

Should Congress push for a different deal? The administration says renegotiating the agreement is a nonstarter. …

[But] Schumer and other opponents think the Obama administration should go back to the bargaining table. In the past, Congress has rejected outright or demanded changes to more than 200 treaties and international agreements.

The only way America can save itself is by electing a president who will tear up the deal. But by then a lot of harm will have been done.

Referring to the Associated Press report, John Hinderaker at PowerLine comments:

That is correct. The president has the constitutional authority to enter into an executive agreement. Which is where debate over the Iran deal began, with an open letter to Iran’s leaders that was signed by 47 Republican senators and posted on Senator Tom Cotton’s web site. The letter explained that the Iran agreement was not being submitted to the Senate for ratification as a treaty. Therefore, as a mere executive agreement, it could be canceled with a stroke of the pen by America’s next president:

First, under our Constitution, while the president negotiates international agreements, Congress plays the significant role of ratifying them. In the case of a treaty, the Senate must ratify it by a two-thirds vote. A so-called congressional-executive agreement requires a majority vote in both the House and the Senate (which, because of procedural rules, effectively means a three-fifths vote in the Senate). Anything not approved by Congress is a mere executive agreement. …

What these two constitutional provisions mean is that we will consider any agreement regarding your nuclear-weapons program that is not approved by the Congress as nothing more than an executive agreement between President Obama and Ayatollah Khamenei. The next president could revoke such an executive agreement with the stroke of a pen and future Congresses could modify the terms of the agreement at any time.

Tom Cotton’s letter was viciously attacked by liberals, but what it said was obviously correct. Now, with majorities in both houses of Congress opposed to the deal, the Associated Press tells us it can still proceed as an executive agreement. Of course it can. And the next president, who will probably be a Republican, can revoke it; and this Congress, or a subsequent one, can pass legislation inconsistent with it. That’s what happens when you don’t have the votes to ratify a treaty.

Even with the best scenario – a future president tearing up the treaty – the Iranians will have got even closer to building their nuclear arsenal.

If they haven’t started building it already. Which they probably have.

If Obama wants this deal to be a big part of his “legacy”, why can’t he understand that to a very great number of people – most of the Western world very possibly – it will be an abominable legacy? That he will be classed among the most destructive and evil leaders in history? Has that thought even occurred to him? And if it has, has he dismissed it as impossible? Is his arrogance that extreme?

Probably, yes. Hatred of America and love of Islam seem to be ruling passions of his life.

The Germans have always had the best tunes. Even the abominable Horst Wessel Lied is marvelous marching music if you don’t listen to the words.

And here is a clip from the film Cabaret set in the twilight of the Weimar Republic when Hitler was rising to power. A beautiful blond boy, a member of the Hitler Youth, sings a beautiful rousing song, Tomorrow Belongs To Me – all about a springtime of national life, nature, beauty, HOPE AND CHANGE. The song rouses a whole Biergarten full of young and middle-aged Germans, who rise and belt it out with the boy, passionately. Only one old man – probably a veteran of the First World War – looks full of sadness, regret and foreboding. And two of the protagonists of the story get up and drive away in disgust.

And yes, the beauty of the music and the youth singing it make the hope and triumph infectious. For a true insight into the rise of the Third Reich these few minutes could not be bettered. Anti-Nazi propaganda films, no doubt effective in their way – and certainly necessary –  could never give so illuminating an understanding of what happened to the German nation in the 1930s. They depicted ugly harsh military-authoritarian types barking peremptory orders or doling out death. Would such have won the heart of a European nation? No – it was Romanticism; the romance of race, of the earth, of beauty, of power that did it.

Watch and hear, and you will almost certainly feel how the song can stir the blood. And then, if you are a civilized and rational being, and have civilized values, you will almost certainly turn him off in disgust.

Many public voices are now pointing out how this moment in history recalls the 1930s and the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich; how Obama’s deal with Iran recalls Neville Chamberlain’s “peace for our time” deal with Adolf Hitler.

They are right.

What of Iran? The Ayatollahs? Islam? Plain plug-ugly though they are – will tomorrow belong to them?

Probably. And they will bring another Holocaust to the Jews (and everyone else) in Israel.

Mike Huckabee says that Obama, through his deal with them, “will take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven”.

Though we are not normally fans of Huckabee, this time we praise him for his foresight and candor.

PS. Chamberlain was not like Obama. Chamberlain was a decent man who misjudged Hitler. Obviously, Obama wants Iran to get the bomb, so  he must want Israel to be destroyed. There is a far closer resemblance between Obama and Hitler than between Obama and Chamberlain.