Why didn’t President Donald Trump initially want to share the full text of the framework agreement between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran?
The first reason is obvious: the memorandum of understanding is a capitulation to the clerics of the regime.
The second reason is also a scandal.
“I don’t, frankly, fully understand it, but there are sensitivities that exist in the Arab and Muslim world that we’re trying to be responsive to,” a coy JD Vance told podcaster Megyn Kelly this week.
But the vice president, who helped negotiate the framework, added that the “Iranians, Pakistanis and Qataris asked us to sequence this in the right way.”
It’s disgraceful that the administration was taking direction from the radical clerics of Iran and the Pakistani military dictatorship on the “right way” to share a “peace agreement” with the American people.
When it comes to Europeans, Vance always gets a thrill out of playing the tough guy, lecturing them on free speech and their cultural decline.
No worries about the “sensitives” of the Germans or French, I guess. Bravo.
In every way imaginable, however, Western Europeans are still freer and more moral than the Islamic Republics of Iran and Pakistan.
Yet Vance doesn’t want to tweak the delicate feelings of Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei.
Indeed, Vance was also far tougher on American conservatives who oppose capitulation than the Iranian mullahs.
The vice president told Kelly that “hawks” “don’t have an alternative” and “they’re proposing an endless conflict” and they “want this to go on until every bomb has been dropped or until every Iranian is dead.”
This is a vile, Tucker Carlson-esque mischaracterization of the views of those who oppose piddling away a resounding American military victory against a terrorist regime.
Not since Barack Obama has a politician been this adept at destroying strawmen.
Most “hawks,” as far as I can tell, want the Iranians to be alive and free rather than under the boot of the Islamist regime.
Maybe that’s not possible — but capitulation to the regime is what creates “endless” conflict.
Moreover, it was Vance’s boss who opened the war against Iran, something he’d been advocating for decades.
It was Trump who urged protesters in Iran to keep going, promising that “help is on its way.”
Until about a week ago, Trump was the “hawk.”
It must be fun for Vance, whose tendencies run isolationist, to unload on reviled “neocons” — but it’s difficult for normal people to keep up with the president’s mercurial zigs and zags.
Considering what’s happened thus far in negotiations, you’d never know that the United States had recently decimated the Iranian ballistic missile infrastructure, annihilated most of its navy and destroyed most of its military.
“We’re seeing even people that I would have assumed are hard-liners who are kind of saying, ‘You know what? Maybe it was a mistake for us to do the things that we’ve done over the last 40 years,’” Vance claimed of the Iranian regime.
“You see people saying, ‘Our relationship with the United States over the past 47 years has been a mistake. Let’s turn over a new leaf.’”
Oh, is that what leaders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and apocalyptic Islamic Twelver clerics who executed tens of thousands of protesters a few months ago are saying?
Vance’s unctuous and naïve attitude toward a terrorist regime that’s been exporting violence, murdering and kidnapping Americans, and lying to the world about its nuclear ambitions for nearly 50 years has an uncanny resemblance to the rhetoric we heard from Obama, John Kerry and Ben Rhodes.
It’s also worth noting that while the American public hadn’t seen the framework agreement, neither had Israel, which fought side by side with us.
On the other hand Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who wouldn’t even help the United States open the Strait of Hormuz, told CNN Wednesday that he had reviewed it, calling it “a game changer.”
Makes you wonder how many other nations got to see the MOU before the American public did.
David Harsanyi is a senior writer at the Washington Examiner. X: @davidharsanyi
