FPI / October 8, 2022
Geostrategy-DirectIn cities and towns across Iran, citizens are demanding freedom, women are removing and burning their hijabs, videos of mothers screaming “damn you Khamenei” are making it past the regime’s censors and onto the Internet.
In the United States, the Biden administration which purports to stand up for women’s rights continues to negotiate with Iran in hopes of reviving the Obama era’s prime foreign policy legacy — the Iran nuclear deal.
“It is a strange thing that the United States, the West’s engine of liberty and democracy, is so ardently seeking a nuclear deal that will enrich the men who are literally beating these women to death,” Reuel Marc Gerecht noted in a Sept. 29 analysis for Common Sense news.
Protests over the murder of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman who was beaten to death while in the custody of the country’s “morality police,” are continuing with videos showing police beating protesters — many of whom are women — with batons and spraying tear gas and bullets into crowds of protesters.
According to officials, at least 41 people have been killed in the unrest, though the Iran Human Rights group says the death toll is likely much higher, estimating that at least 76 people have been killed, though widespread Internet blackouts have made it difficult to confirm fatalities.
Team Biden’s reaction is practically a mirror image of 2009, when President Barack Obama largely ignored the Iranian regime’s brutal crackdown on its citizens.
It took Obama “nearly two weeks to utter any support for the pro-democracy demonstrators and condemn the violence against them — for the sake of a higher cause: his dream of a nuclear deal,” Gerecht wrote. “In Obama’s view, this was the vehicle for overcoming the long-standing animosity between the United States and the Islamic Republic and, more so, an exit for America from the Middle East.”
As the protests raged in Iran, the Biden State Department put its spin machine into overdrive.
“Both are a national interest of ours. These are core to our interests and to our values. So of course, we are committed, President Biden is committed, to seeing to it that Iran is never in possession of a nuclear weapon,” State Department spokesperson Ned Price said referring to Biden’s stated policy of not allowing Iran to obtain nuclear weapons and supporting the demands of protesting Iranians.
The administration insists that reviving the nuclear deal, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA ),is part of not allowing Iran to obtain nuclear weapons. But the deal’s sunset clauses will run out in less than a decade and Iran would be free to expand its nuclear program, while earning money free of sanctions thanks to Team Biden.
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