Bob's Blog

In PJ Media, P. David Hornik shares some ideas about what might be happening in Iran here.

In Neon Nettle, Jay Greenberg reports in part that U.S. Senator Ted Cruz

has called on the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Treasury Department to investigate Twitter over allegations the company breached U.S. sanctions against Iran. On Friday, Cruz wrote a letter to the Departments urging a criminal investigation into the social media giant for potential criminal activity related to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. According to Cruz, Twitter may have committed sanctionable actions prohibited by Executive Order 13876. Cruz wrote to Attorney General William Barr and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin regarding the allegations. The letter states that Cruz informed Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey early this year that:“Twitter and its principals face criminal liability and sanctions exposure for providing social media accounts to Iranian persons designated as Specially Designated Nationals (SDNs) by the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) pursuant to E.O. 13876.”

READ MORE: https://neonnettle.com/news/11478-ted-cruz-calls-on-doj-to-investigate-twitter-for-breaching-iran-sanctions
© Neon Nettle

In Tablet, Lee Smith writes in part,

...Obama saw Flynn as a signal threat to his legacy, which was rooted in his July 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran—the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Flynn had said long before he signed on with the Trump campaign that it was a catastrophe to realign American interests with those of a terror state. And now that the candidate he’d advised was the new president-elect, Flynn was in a position to help undo the deal. To stop Flynn, the outgoing White House ran the same offense it used to sell the Iran deal—they smeared Flynn through the press as an agent of a foreign power, spied on him, and leaked classified intercepts of his conversations to reliable echo chamber allies.

...for Obama the purpose of Russiagate was simple and direct: to protect the Iran deal, and secure his legacy.

...As former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s spy service, and a career intelligence officer, Flynn knew how and where to find the documentary evidence of the FBI’s illegal spying operation buried in the agency’s classified files—and the FBI had reason to be terrified of the new president’s anger.

...Flynn told friends and colleagues he was going to make the entire senior intelligence service hand in their resignations and then detail why their work was vital to national security. Flynn knew the USIC well enough to know that thousands of higher-level bureaucrats wouldn’t make the cut.

Flynn had enemies at the very top of the intelligence bureaucracy. In 2014, he’d been fired as DIA head. Under oath in February of that year, he told the truth to a Senate committee—ISIS was not, as the president had said, a “JV team.” They were a serious threat to American citizens and interests and were getting stronger. Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Michael Vickers then summoned Flynn to the Pentagon and told him he was done.

“Flynn’s warnings that extremists were regrouping and on the rise were inconvenient to an administration that didn’t want to hear any bad news,” says former DIA analyst Oubai Shahbandar. “Flynn’s prophetic warnings would play out exactly as he’d warned shortly after he was fired.”

...Evidence that Tehran was coordinating with a terror group that had slaughtered thousands in Manhattan and at the Pentagon would make it harder to convince American lawmakers of the wisdom in legitimizing Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

...“Al-Qaeda was working on chemical and biological weapons in Iran.”

...In return, Obama confronted Iran Deal skeptics in his own party with a hard choice—either support the deal, or you’re out. There would be no room in the Democratic Party for principled disagreement over the keystone of Obama’s foreign policy legacy. Opponents were portrayed in harsh, uncompromising terms: They had been bought off, or were warmongers, or Israel-firsters.

...In 2012, the administration began secret negotiations with Iran. At the same time, the administration called off a multi-agency task force targeting the billion-dollar criminal enterprise run by Iran’s Lebanese ally, Hezbollah. The administration told Congress that the nuclear deal would not grant Iran access to the U.S. financial system, but a 2018 Senate report showed how the Obama White House lied to the public and was secretly trying to grant Iran that access. The Obama administration had misled Congress about secret deals it made regarding verification procedures, and then secretly shipped $1.7 billion in cash for Iran to distribute to its terror proxies.

...Obama was simply bribing the Iranians with hundreds of billions of dollars in sanctions relief and hundreds of billions more in investment to refrain from building a bomb until he was safely gone from the White House, when the Iranian bomb would become someone else’s problem. The Obama team thought that even the Israelis wouldn’t dream of touching Iran’s nuclear program so long as Washington vouchsafed the deal. They called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “chickenshit.”

...In June 2015, a month before the deal was struck in Vienna, Michael Flynn was on Capitol Hill testifying about Iran and the deeply flawed deal on the table. He described Iran’s destabilizing actions throughout the region, how the regime killed American troops in Iraq and later Afghanistan. He warned about Iran’s ties to North Korea, China, and Russia. Flynn emphasized that Iran’s “stated desire to destroy Israel is very real.” He said Obama’s Iran policy was one of “willful ignorance.”

...The two hit it off and Flynn traveled with the candidate regularly. He was vetted for the vice presidency, but Trump decided instead on Mike Pence, a congressman from Indiana who could help win both the evangelical and the Midwestern vote. Still, outside of Trump’s own family, Flynn was his closest adviser. The foreign policy initiatives he articulated were the president-elect’s and when he spoke to foreign officials, he was speaking for Trump.

...Notably, Russia weighed in on the Obama team’s side. It would be “unforgivable,” according to the Russian Foreign Ministry, if the incoming Trump administration forfeited the JCPOA. The White House agreed to let Russia export more than 100 tons of uranium to Iran—enough to make more than 10 bombs, according to some estimates. “The point was to complicate any effort to tear up the deal,” says a senior U.S. official involved in the fight over the JCPOA. “It gave Iran an insurance policy against Trump.”

...Sure, John Kerry told the Iranians not to worry about sanctions, but what could the Obama team do to counter Trump if he was planning to restore them?

...Russiagate was not a hoax, as some conservative journalists call it. Rather, it was a purposeful extension of the Obama administration’s Iran Deal media campaign, and of the secret espionage operation targeting those opposed to Obama’s efforts to realign American interests with those of a terror state that embodies the most corrosive forms of anti-Semitism.

It’s not hard to see why the previous president went after Flynn: The retired general’s determination to undo the Iran Deal was grounded in his own experience in two Middle Eastern theaters of combat, where he saw how Iran murdered Americans and threatened American interests. But why Obama would choose the Islamic Republic as a partner and encourage tactics typically employed by third-world police states remain a mystery.

Read more here.

From the Daily Mail: President Donald Trump said on Wednesday he had instructed the U.S. Navy to fire on any Iranian ships that harass it at sea, a week after 11 vessels from Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy (IRGCN) came dangerously close to U.S. ships in the Gulf.

The tweet came amid a re-escalation of tension, with Iran's Revolutionary Guards saying hours earlier that they had launched the country's first military satellite, which the U.S. regards as a cover for missile development.
Read more here.

In News Thud, Paul Goldberg reports,

Per TheHill, U.S. airstrikes are underway against an Iran-backed militia group that hit a military base in Iraq, according to multiple media outlets.

On Wednesday Iranian-backed militia groups in Iraq killed two U.S. troops and one British soldier. Earlier Thursday top Pentagon officials said, “all options are on the table” for a response.

MPR News reports the U.S. launched airstrikes Thursday in Iraq, American officials said, targeting the Iranian-backed Shia militia members believed responsible for the rocket attack that killed and wounded American and British troops at a base north of Baghdad.

One U.S. official said multiple strikes targeted Kataib Hezbollah weapons facilities inside Iraq. The strikes were a partnered operation with the British, that official said. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because operations were still going on.

The strikes marked a rapid escalation in tensions with Tehran and its proxy groups in Iraq, just two months after Iran carried out a massive ballistic missile attack against American troops at a base in Iraq. They came just hours after top U.S. defense leaders threatened retaliation for the Wednesday rocket attack, making clear that they knew who did it and that the attackers would be held accountable.

Defense Secretary Mark Esper told reporters at the Pentagon earlier Thursday that President Trump had given him the authority to take whatever action he deemed necessary.

“We’re going to take this one step at a time, but we’ve got to hold the perpetrators accountable,” Esper said. “You don’t get to shoot at our bases and kill and wound Americans and get away with it.”

At the White House, Trump had also hinted that a U.S. counterpunch could be coming, telling reporters, “We’ll see what the response is.” And Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Pentagon reporters the U.S. knows ”with a high degree of certainty” who launched the attack.

On Capitol Hill earlier in the day, Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie, the top U.S. commander for the Middle East, told senators the deaths of U.S. and coalition troops created a “red line” for the U.S., but said he didn’t think Iran has “a good understanding of where our red line is.”

Asked if any counterattack could include a strike inside Iran, Esper said, “We are focused on the group that we believe perpetrated this in Iraq.”

Two U.S. troops and one British service member were killed and 14 other personnel were wounded when 18 rockets hit the base Wednesday. The U.S. military said the 107 mm Katyusha rockets were fired from a truck launcher that was found by Iraqi security forces near the base after the attack.

John Hayward reports in Breitbart,

Iran on Tuesday ordered the temporary release of more than 54,000 prisoners, representing about 20 percent of its imprisoned population, to slow the spread of the coronavirus in its notoriously overcrowded and unsanitary jails.

Read more here.

Is Iran close to a revolution? Michael Ledeen quotes some writers who believe that it is. Read more here.

A Facebook friend shared this article about protestors in Iran refusing to step on a replica of an American flag. Gulf Today reports in part,

In Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran, students declined to run over the American flag.

Those that went ahead to step on the flag were made fun of and taunted.

“They are lying that our enemy is America, our enemy is right here," a group of protesters outside a university in Tehran chanted, according to video clips posted on Twitter.

Read more and watch video here.

In the Free Beacon, Adam Kredo reports,

Multiple lawmakers and former administration officials, including one recently departed National Security Council member who worked on Iran issues, told the Washington Free Beacon that senior officials in the administration continue to undermine President Donald Trump's "maximum pressure" campaign on Iran.

At issue are sanctions exceptions that the State Department has now issued several times in recent years to the consternation of Iran hawks. The waivers permit foreign nations and businesses to partner with Iran on its nuclear work, including efforts to enrich uranium, the key component in a weapon. They also allow Iran to continue sensitive civil nuclear research at contested sites, including a covert military bunker that once housed the country's atomic weapons program.

Multiple lawmakers and former administration officials, including one recently departed National Security Council member who worked on Iran issues, told the Washington Free Beacon that senior officials in the administration continue to undermine President Donald Trump's "maximum pressure" campaign on Iran.

Read more here.

In FrontPage Magazine, Carolyn Glick gives us some history of American policies toward Iran and Israel.

...As far as Iran is concerned, as journalist Lee Smith explained in Tablet online magazine this week, when Iranian “students” seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in November 1979 and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days, they placed the Carter administration in a dilemma: If President Jimmy Carter acknowledged that the “students” weren’t students, but soldiers of Iran’s dictator Ayatollah Khomeini, the United States would be compelled to fight back. And Carter and his advisers didn’t want to do that.

So rather than admit the truth, Carter accepted the absurd fiction spun by the regime that Khomeini was an innocent bystander who, try as he might, couldn’t get a bunch of “students” in central Tehran to free the hostages.

At the base of their decision to prefer fantasy to reality with regard to Iran was the hope that Khomeini and his “students” would be satisfied with a pound or two of American flesh and wouldn’t cause Washington too many other problems.

...Khomeini and his “Death to America”-shouting followers got the message. They understood that Washington had given them a green light to attack Americans in moderate and, as Smith put it, “plausibly deniable” doses. it. For the next 40 years, Iran maintained its aggression against America. And from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama, every president since Carter accepted and kept faith with Carter’s decision not to hold the Iranian regime responsible for the acts of aggression and war it carried out against America through proxies.

During the Iraq War from 2003-2011, Iran’s aggression reached new heights. Iran organized the Shi’ite militias that waged war against the U.S. forces in Iraq. It also supported Al-Qaeda in Iraq, which organized in Iran and used Iran as its logistical base for operations.

More than six hundred American forces were killed and thousands were wounded in attacks carried out with Iranian-made improvised explosive devices, (IEDs). Yet rather than confront Iran and take action against it, the Bush administration tried to make a deal with the mullahs.

Under Obama, reaching an accord with Iran was the singular goal of U.S. foreign policy. Every other goal was subordinated to Obama’s burning desire to appease Iran at the expense of Israel and the United States’ Sunni Arab allies.

This then brings us to President Trump. Trump’s decision to kill Qassem Soleimani—who as commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force was the head of all of Iran’s regional and global terror apparatuses—destroyed the Carter administration’s Iran narrative.

Soleimani was killed in Baghdad along with Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the commander of one of the Soleimani-controlled Shi’ite militias in Iraq. Iraqi protesters, who have been demonstrating against Iran’s control over their government since last October, claim that Soleimani was the one who ordered al-Muhandis to kill the demonstrators. More than 500 demonstrators have been killed by those forces in Iraq over the past three months.

By killing the two together, the Americans exposed the big lie at the root of 40 years of deliberate American blindness to the reality of Iranian culpability and responsibility for the acts of terror and aggression its surrogates have carried out against America and its allies.

By killing Soleimani, Trump made clear that the blank check for aggression the previous six presidents gave Tehran is now canceled. From now on, the regime will be held responsible for its actions. From now on, U.S. policy towards Iran will be based on reality and not on escapism.

The second false narrative that has formed the basis of U.S. Middle East policy since Carter is that Israel and the so-called “occupation” are responsible for the absence of peace in the Middle East. Moved largely by Carter’s hostility towards the Jewish state, his administration was the first to call Israel’s control over Judea and Samaria an “occupation.” It determined, through a 1978 memo authored by Herbert Hansell, the State Department’s legal adviser, that the mere existence of Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria constituted a breach of international law.

Because the Hansell memo was based on a wholly specious interpretation of the Fourth Geneva Convention from 1949, and had no basis in actual international law, the Reagan administration refused to adopt it.

But that didn’t stop Ronald Reagan from adopting the anti-Israel substance of Carter’s policy narrative. Just as Reagan turned a blind eye to Iran’s responsibility for the terror attacks its proxies carried out against the United States—including the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in April 1983 and the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in November 1983—so he substantively accepted Carter’s anti-Israel narrative, which blamed Israel for the absence of Middle East peace.

Reagan appointed veteran diplomat Philip Habib to serve as his special envoy for Middle East peace. Habib put together a “peace plan” predicated on the notion of Israeli guilt.

The first Bush administration, the Clinton administration, the second Bush administration and of course the Obama administration all held to the Carter line that blamed Israel and its control over Judea and Samaria (and Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights, and—until 2005—Gaza), for the unrest and instability of the region. Obama, of course, went full circle. He adopted the Hansell memo as U.S. official policy and enabled the United Nations Security Council to pass a resolution criminalizing the existence of Jewish communities beyond the 1949 armistice lines.

The fact that the Carter narrative was self-evidently ridiculous and destabilizing made no impression on these successive administrations. PLO aggression and refusal to either disavow terrorism or accept Israel’s right to exist in any borders were brushed aside as irrelevant and unwelcome information.

Israel’s profound concessions for peace were pocketed, pooh-poohed and forgotten.

In November, the Trump administration put paid to the phony narrative of Israeli avarice with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s announcement that the administration was disavowing the Hansell memo and replacing it with the accurate, international law-based assessment that Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria are not inherently illegal.

Wednesday, while the world was awaiting Trump’s response to Iran’s failed missile attack against Iraqi bases housing U.S. forces, the Kohelet Policy Forum held a conference in Jerusalem on the legal and diplomatic significance of Pompeo’s announcement. In a pre-recorded message for the conference, Pompeo briefly explained why he decided to disavow the Hansell memo. His explanation could be equally applied to the Trump administration’s policy towards Iran.

In Pompeo’s words, “It is important that we speak the truth when the facts lead us to it. And that’s what we’ve done.”

For the American foreign policy establishment, Trump’s refusal to continue their 40-year marriage of policy to delusion is an unforgivable transgression, and a threat. Not only has he committed the crime of rejecting their collective “wisdom,” his reality-based policies might actually be working. The threat to them is obvious.

If Trump’s reality-based policies succeed, he will dismantle their foreign policy legacy. All their protestations of wisdom, all their fancy resumes and titles as former senior officials will lose their allure and market value.

Since Pompeo’s statement regarding the Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria related to an issue which, while critical, is less in the headlines today than it was under Obama, aside from a few peremptory condemnations the foreign-policy aristocrats ignored it. As they saw it, once they return to power and start working with an Israeli government led by someone other than Benjamin Netanyahu, the phony anti-Israel narrative will be restored to its rightful place as the foundation of U.S. policy.

The Iran story is different. Days before the drone strike that killed him, Soleimani tried to re-enact the 1979 “student” takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran with “protesters” in Baghdad. But this time it didn’t work. And Soleimani paid with his life for his failure. Iran’s half-hearted, failed missile attack against U.S. forces in Iraq showed that the Iranian regime is terrified of Trump and their reversal of fortune.

Trump’s policies expose the mendacity and rank insanity of his predecessors’ policies towards Iran and Israel. Since Obama’s policies were particularly radical, divorced from reality and devastating, Trump has reasonably singled them out for particular rebuke and condemnation. Among other things, reasonably, Trump said the missiles Iran shot at U.S. forces in Iraq were paid for by the $150 billion in sanctions relief and $1.8 billion in cash that flowed to the coffers of the IRGC through the 2015 nuclear agreement.

Rather than keep quiet as their signature policy was exposed as a strategic disaster, Obama administration officials and their supporters in Congress and the media went into very public paroxysms of rage. Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser and chief propagandist, who sold the nuclear deal to a credulous and eager media, said Trump’s move would lead to war. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that the U.S. strike against Soleimani was “disproportionate,” hinting it was a war crime to kill the terrorist who had just ordered the seizure of a U.S. Embassy. She scheduled a congressional session to curb Trump’s power to confront Iranian aggression and nuclear proliferation.

On cue, a group of psychiatrists wrote an open letter to Congress insisting that Trump is crazy and must be restrained. (The same group has written several nearly identical letters since Trump took office.)

To protect and preserve their 40-year-old delusion-based policy, Trump’s domestic opponents are effectively supporting the Iranian regime against the United States. And as they see it, they have no choice. They are in a race against time. The more successful Trump’s reality-based policies towards Iran on the one hand and Israel on the other are, the harder it will be for the foreign policy establishment to restore their delusion-based policies when he leaves power. Given the stakes, we can assume that their attempts to clip Trump’s wings and debase him will increase in intensity, churlishness and irrationality as time goes by and as his successes mount.

Read more here.

Spengler writes in part in Asia Times,

Iranians face desperate conditions, if not actual hunger, due to the effect of economic sanctions. Add to this the long-term effects of mismanagement of the country’s scarce water resources. Afshin Shahi wrote recently in the Journal of Asian Affairs: “Approximately 97% of the country is experiencing drought conditions. Due to gross water mismanagement and its damaging impact on the country, Iran faces the worst situation in the water resources of any industrialized nation. Tens of thousands of villages have been deserted and most of the major urban centers have passed their limits to absorb new rural migrants. Some officials predict that in less than 25 years, 50 million Iranians would be displaced from their current homes because of the pressing ecological conditions.”

Few countries have endured this level of deprivation outside of full war mobilization, and few have seen such a drastic decline in the number of births. The only modern comparison is Venezuela. Governments with a monopoly of economic resources and the willingness to kill significant numbers of their own citizens can stay in power for quite some time, but there seems no question that Iran’s regime is fragile and prone to destabilization.

Read more here.

Leon Sverdlov reports in the Jerusalem Post,

The Iranian Tansim news agency released images of the Islamic Republic's underground "missile cities," which hold hundreds of missiles and solid-fuel rockets ready-to-fire under five levels of concrete, Radio Farda reported on Tuesday.

According to Radio Farda, Tansim also reported that two out of the 15 missiles that were fired at Ain al-Assad airbase in Iraq and the Erbil airport in Iraqi Kurdistan targeting US troops fell on the republic's territory.

Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps Airspace Force Commander Ali Hajizadeh claimed that Iran's missile depots were scattered around various parts of the country and are held in bunkers hidden 500 meters (1640 feet) underground in the state's mountains.

Read more here.

Jeffrey Lord's staff posts photos here.

Courageous truth-teller Robert Spencer writes in PJ Media,

Nancy Pelosi doesn’t have the vaguest idea of what’s happening in Iran these days; all she knows is that Donald Trump is for it so therefore she is against it. A new series of extraordinary videos, however, pulls back the curtain on the immense anger that ordinary Iranians are now expressing for the Islamic regime. If Pelosi saw them, she would learn a great deal, but there is no chance of that, as she would never risk doing anything so pro-Trump as challenging the brutal and bloody Iranian mullahs.

The Iran Liberation Congress, headed by the Los Angeles-based Dr. Iman Foroutan, presents the videos here, as part of its ongoing efforts at “creating the building blocks of a democratic government to guide Iran following the fall of the regime of the Islamic Republic.” The Congress explains that its “members include dissidents within Iran and pro-democracy activists throughout the various communities of Iranian exiles. We are dedicated to the peaceful and complete removal of the Islamic Republic in Iran through nonviolent means (unless we must act in self-defense).”

The goal of the Iranian Liberation Congress appears to be to return Iran to the more secular days of the Shahs, as well as the end of the Islamic regime’s genocidal bellicosity and nuclear adventurism: “We are dedicated to the abolition of any and all programs involved with creating or using weapons of mass destruction, including biological or nuclear weapons. We are dedicated to the preservation of Iran’s territories and their independence. We are dedicated to the separation of religion and state, and freedom of religion for all people. We have chosen to adopt the UN Human Rights Declaration and all of its amendments. After the removal of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the people of Iran, through universal suffrage, will decide the nation’s future and political system through free and fair elections.”

The videos show that there is a great deal of support for these ideas within Iran itself. In one, protesters chant: “No honor! No honor! Soleimani is a murderer and his Supreme Leader is stupid!” In another, the chant is “We are ashamed of our stupid Supreme Leader!” And in a third, the protesters cry, “Death to the Dictator! Death to the Dictator! Sepah (Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps) does crimes! The Supreme Leader defends them! Khamenei is a murderer! His rule is void and invalid! Death to the liar! Death to the Liar!”

Iran Protesters Curse Soleimani, Chant 'Death to Khamenei!'
The forces of the regime, meanwhile, do not appear nearly as fearsome and formidable as they have in the recent past. In one video, the police plead with protesters, when not long ago they would have simply moved in and brutalized them. “This is the Police talking,” says an amplified voice to the protesters. “Please cooperate with the police. On behalf of myself and the Police Force, please accept our condolences. But this is not right that you’re blocking the roads. Please allow the cars to move. I beg you, those who hear my voice. This is the Police.”

I beg you. Can a regime that begs people who hate it to do its bidding be long for this world? Can a regime long survive when protesters against it cry out “We are the children of war. Want to war with us? Let’s do it!”

Meanwhile, demonstrating how extraordinarily out of touch she is, Pelosi downplayed the significance of the protests. On ABC’s This Week Sunday, George Stephanopoulos asked Pelosi: “We’re seeing now demonstrations in the streets of Iran against the regime. Do you support those protesters? And would it be a good thing if they brought the regime down?”

Pelosi’s response was typical of the barely coherent rambles she has been handing down to her hapless followers for some time now. “Well, the protesters are protesting, as I understand it, this brand of protesters, about the fact that that plane went down. And many students were on that plane. These are largely students in the street. I think the Iranians should have not had commercial flights going off there.”

Whatever all that meant, there was nothing in that muddle that could reasonably be interpreted as “Yes, I support these protesters, and yes, it would be a good thing if they brought the regime down.” The closest she came to that was a tepid tut-tutting of the Iranian regime for having “commercial flights going off there.”

Stephanopoulos broke out of his usual Democratic-Party-Publicist mode to persist with Pelosi, telling her: “They’re calling out the regime for lying. They’re saying ‘Death to Khamenei,’ as well.”

Pelosi waved that away. “Well whatever it is. But the fact is this: There were protesters in the street before against the regime. After the taking out of Soleimani, there were protesters in the street joined together, as you know, against us. It wasn’t good.”

The Iran Liberation Congress videos show otherwise. These protests aren’t against us. They’re against the Iranian Islamic regime that Barack Obama and John Kerry did so much to prop up. They’re getting support from Donald Trump. All that is more than enough for Nancy Pelosi to determine that she isn’t going to give them a syllable of support.

Don Surber reports in his blog,

The New York Post reported, "Students at Iran’s Islamic Azad University are being offered a novel new career choice — suicide terrorist.

"Leaflets are being distributed at the influential school urging students to sign up for Jihad missions against the United States and Israel to avenge the death of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani."

This is why President Trump shut down student visas from Iran in September.

Too bad we cannot ban some U.S. students.

Dov Fischer writes in part in Spectator,

...over time we lost more than 50,000 boys in jungles located precisely in the Middle of Nowhere, with limited benefits to show for it, except for a musical named Miss Saigon. In the end, South Vietnam fell anyway, and we helicoptered out, leaving behind memories that we shall call sad. Did we prevent dominoes from falling throughout Southeast Asia? You decide. Pol Pot took Cambodia and perpetrated his own genocide, the hallmark of socialism. Our necessary ally in World War II, Stalin, perpetrated his various genocides. Mao perpetrated his genocides.

...Vietnam humbled us for a long while. Meanwhile, a beautiful war was ablaze in the Middle East, with half a million Iranians fighting for Khomeini and Iraqis fighting for Saddam killing each other for eight years. Eventually, Saddam Hussein decided to expand his country’s borders into Kuwait, and we decided to form an international coalition to stop him. So we did. In return, he decided that one of these days he would kill George Bush, and he tried. Then came 9/11, with our own foolishness contributing by convincing ourselves into believing that Wahhabi Muslim Saudi Arabians are our friends, thus motivating us to allow thousands of Saudis into our schools, including those whom we taught air piloting without requiring them to attend the class on how to land a plane. As a result, 15 of the 19 murderers on 9/11 were Saudis. And then, with Bush’s son as our president, we not only had to respond to the Taliban who had provided Osama Bin Laden with his base and wherewithal but also to evaluate the role of Saddam Hussein, the guy who had just tried to kill the president’s dad.

Enter the neoconservatives and adventurists who believed that, while we are dealing with the Taliban and, OK, with Saddam also, let’s make both countries Western-style democracies like America, Canada, the UK, Australia, and Israel. Because, you know, there beats in the heart of every Arab Muslim in Iraq and Afghanistan the pulse of Patrick Henry, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. All they want is Western democracy: the First Amendment, habeas corpus, a penumbra of emanations of rights, eminent domain, the dormant commerce clause, Miranda rights, and nationwide judicial injunctions. So instead of just bombing the Taliban and Bin Laden’s strongholds à la Dresden, we decided to send our boys to help the locals implement regime change. The results, in terms of lives, limbs, and financial treasure, speak for themselves. You decide.

...The thing is, Iran is fixated on “Death to America,” and they are determined to create a nuclear bomb with intercontinental ballistic missiles to deliver them. In 1979, they took our embassy for 444 days into the 1981 Reagan inauguration, and they recently started up again. Yet, in the aftermath of the Qassem Soleimani elimination, something became unexpectedly more clear to many of us: They are trying at warp speed to get to the point that they can destroy us, but right now they actually are much weaker than many of us realized. Under the impact of the Trump administration’s economic sanctions, the mullahs are breaking financially. They cannot afford a war. The mullahs are running out of moolah. And they are encountering enormous trouble at home.

...But the Trump sanctions are forcing Iran to cut back on funding international terror, and they are leaving less money at home. Under the sanctions, Iran’s economy was estimated by the International Monetary Fund to have contracted by 9.5 percent in 2019, while unemployment rose to 16.8 percent. Iran’s Brent Crude exports have dropped precipitously. The rial, Iran’s currency, has lost more than half its value. Inflation has risen from 9 percent to 35.7 percent.

The Iranian people are hurting very intensely, and they are rising up against the mullahs. And that leads me to wonder: What if we were to prepare now, upon the next Iranian provocation, to bomb to smithereens Iran’s main oil refineries in Abadan, Esfahan, Bandar-e Abbas, Tehran, Rak, and Tabriz? No boots on the ground. No adventures, no regime change from outside. Just a boost to those inside Iran who want to overthrow a medieval theocracy that is prepared to bring the whole world — and especially us — to Armageddon if they are not stopped. Yes, the first footage from Tehran will show the usual “Death to America!,” demonstrations, as they did after Soleimani was eliminated. And then the impact will set in. There was a time when Hitler could have been stopped. Europe let it pass by appeasing him. A time right after World War II when Stalin could have been reined in. He was appeased with his Warsaw Bloc. When Mao could have been stopped. We passed.

The weakness of Iran’s response to Soleimani’s removal raises the question whether this is the time to raise the economic ante for Iranians to contemplate what half a century of the mullahs have wrought for them. And whether they would be happier with a government less intent on building nuclear weapons and exporting hundreds of millions to finance overseas terror, and more focused on feeding the citizenry at home.

Read more here.

Iran expert Michael Ledeen writes in part in FrontPage Magazine,

The Tehran regime organized big crowds to say goodbye to Soleimani, but the current demonstrations are explicitly against Khamenei and his cohorts, from calls for the resignation of the supreme leader to students on campus in Tehran refusing to walk on big painted images of the American and Israeli flags. The regime was shutting down Internet communications as rapidly as possible, attempting to divide the Iranian people from one another, a tactic that has proven effective in the past, while the leaders of the demonstrations used couriers to carry messages from city to city.

But perhaps the biggest news came from the White House, where President Trump spoke directly to the Iranian people in English and Farsi. He rehearsed the violence of the regime against the people, and said that he had supported the people from the outset, and would continue to do so. That was Saturday. Sunday he did it again. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has been at it for some time, stressed the same themes: the regime is the source of the violence, and the people deserve the active support of the free nations of the world.

I don’t believe it is possible to overestimate the power of the president’s words on both the regime and the seventy-or-so million Iranians who oppose it. This is the first such event in forty years, and it comes from an American leader who has tried very hard to make a deal with the regime of the Islamic Republic.

He gave it his all, and satisfied himself that the regime was not interested in a deal with the United States. Accordingly, he rejected the advice of the likes of Rand Paul, and ordered the troops to eliminate the regime’s prime killer Soleimani and the band of Mafiosi around him, in the event mostly from Iraq. Now Trump is talking directly to the Iranian people, and the demonstrations are bigger and more widespread than any earlier ones.

I don’t think that the Khamenei regime is long for this world, now that the American president has spoken directly to the masses of Iranians who had waited for the United States to do their dirty work for them. No American president -- not Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush fils, or Obama -- had understood the key to the Middle East: bring down the Islamic Republic. That, rather than the conquest of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam, should have been our goal in 2003, but we chose the wrong target.

Now, of all the unlikely people, Donald Trump figured it out and is pursuing it. Like his predecessors, Trump does not wish to invade Iran; unlike them, he has found that the regime is ready to fall, that America can inspire and lead a revolution against the world’s leading terror country.

Just look at the scenes coming out of Iran today.
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In Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds writes,

You know, Iran says they’ve bribed a lot of Western government officials. If the mullahs fall, a lot of people are going to be sweating bullets regarding the files that come out.

The Daily Mail has photos of the huge crowds protesting the Mullahs lying about shooting down the Ukrainian plane with 130 Iranian citizens aboard.

Read more here.

In the Conservative Treehouse, Sundance brings us news of Iran admitting they shot down the Ukrainian airplane because of human error. Read more here.