The War against Michael Flynn

Yesterday, the Abu Dhabi national airline made its first direct flight to Tel Aviv. At a time when the leader of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas was throwing a tantrum over Israel’s plans to annex settlements on the West Bank. One recalls that annexation was a part of the Trump peace plan, plan that was announced in the presence of Gulf Arab foreign ministers, including a representative from Abu Dhabi. 

The Commissioner of Foreign Affairs of the European Union, not willing to miss a chance to fall back into Third Reich mode, again supported the Palestinian cause, which involves destroying what Israel built and killing as many Jews as possible. Only Austria and Hungary opposed the proclamation. Presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden also opposed annexation. By his dim wits annexation would make it more difficult to find peace.

At the same time Iran issued a poster calling for the Final Solution of the Jewish problem. Of course, this is the same regime that the Obama-Biden foreign policy team wanted to empower, with cash and with nuclear weapons. And, we recall that the Obama-Biden team alienated, not just Israel, but Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Arab states with its unseemly lust to bed down with the ayatollahs.

If I may repeat a remark I made several years ago, the war between the Israelis and the Palestiinians is over. The Palestinians lost. Their only task now is to negotiate the terms of surrender. Unfortunately, the Palestinians cling to their lost cause because they are supported by left thinking Western Europeans and American Democrats. Didn’t the Iran nuclear deal include a large cash payment to Iran, one that was obviously sent to support Hamas and Hezbollah.

Anyone who traffics in the claptrap about new peace deals, deals that will grant the Palestinians respect, is supporting anti-Semitism. Palestinians have sacrificed any claim to having any rights at all. Terrorists forfeit their rights.They need to surrender. They are living in an illusion, one that is being funded by Western leftists. Making terrorism a legitimate tool of politics encourages terrorism.

Which brings us to Gen. Michael Flynn. As of now, a manifestly biased judge in Washington has refused to dismiss the charges against Flynn, charges that the Justice Department has said it will not prosecute. Flynn’s lawyers filed a writ with a higher court. Said higher court told the judge to explain his appalling actions.

But, Lee Smith, writing in Tablet confirms a suspicion that I have long held. (via Maggie's Farm) The attacks against Flynn were largely designed to destroy someone who rejected the Iran Nuclear Deal. Destroying a decorated general was necessary to preserve a deal that would have allowed Iran to have a nuclear weapon, one that they promised to drop on Tel Aviv.

For the record, the recent impeachment hoax seemed to me to be less about the Ukraine-- who really cares about the Ukraine?-- and more about overturning Trump’s Israel policy.

Anyway, Smith explains:

The answer is that 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.

Among the problems the Obama administration faced was  this: Iran had been in close and collusive contact with al-Qaida. Being the leading state sponsor of terrorism it had worked with the leading Sunni terrorist organization:

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.

What was the information about al-Qaida’s ties to Iran that Flynn wanted his CENTCOM team to get out? According to published news reports, the bin Laden database included “letters about Iran’s role, influence, and acknowledgment of enabling al-Qaida operatives to pass through Iran as long as al-Qaida did its dirty work against the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan.” One of those letters showed that “Al-Qaeda was working on chemical and biological weapons in Iran.”

One understands that the bin Laden database contained the intelligence that Navy Seals gathered when they murdered bin Laden.

And, Obama threatened Jewish leaders with a barrage of anti-Semitism if they did not back the deal:

Obama’s talk of the pro-Israel lobby only got louder as his negotiators came closer to striking the deal. He was talking about the Jews, and to them. If they didn’t back the deal, the sewers would spill over with traditional anti-Semitic conceits about Jewish money and influence, dual loyalties, Jews leveraging their home country on behalf of their co-religionists, and fomenting war. This wasn’t a fringe White nationalist figure, but a popular two-term Democrat. John Kerry said it outright: If Congress failed to pass the deal, it would put Israel at risk of being “more isolated and more blamed.” There was no alternative to the deal, said Kerry, except war.

The Obama administration directed domestic espionage operations against Jews:

Any use of NSA intercepts to target Jewish organizations and anti-Iran Deal legislators would not be an innocent mistake. Obama aides would know they were abusing surveillance programs ostensibly pointed at Israeli officials if they used them to know which US lawmakers and pro-Israel activists were planning to oppose the deal, what they were saying, and who they were talking to. Indeed, it appears that to get in front of the possibility that their domestic spying operation would be exposed, Obama officials leaked it to friendly reporters in order to shape the story to their advantage: OK, yes, we heard, but only by accident. And in any case, it was the NSA that passed it on to us.

And who was it who testified before Congress in 2015 about the flaws in the Iran Nuclear deal? Why, it was none other than Michael Flynn:

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 possibility that Flynn would become the National Security Advisor in a Trump administration caused the Obama team to panic:

Flynn not only made it clear that he wanted to undo the Iran Deal, he also broadcast his determination to find the documents detailing the secret deals between Obama and Iran, and to publicize them. With Flynn on the march, the outgoing administration was keen to shield the JCPOA. Obama diplomats consulted with their European counterparts and gave the clerical regime more sanctions relief, even after the Senate agreed with a 99 to 0 vote to renew the Iran Sanctions Act. Kerry called his Iranian counterpart to tell him not to worry.

Of course, Vladimir Putin’s Russia sided with the Obama administration:

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.”

The story is intricate and detailed. Smith does an excellent job of laying out the case. Among the incidents he relates is this, from a time when Flynn was the National Security Advisor:

After Iran conducted a ballistic missile test and its Yemeni proxies attacked a Saudi naval ship, he announced in the White House press room: “As of today, we are officially putting Iran on notice.” Former Obama aides fumed: The Trump administration had no choice but to stay in the JCPOA. Then they flipped through the dog-eared pages of the Iran Deal playbook and pushed into the press rumors regarding the loyalties of a combat veteran who served his country in uniform for more than three decades. Had Michael Flynn sold out his country to Russia?

In fact, the Obama administration had sold out the country to support and sustain the regime in Tehran. Smith concludes:

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.

Frankly, it isn't that much of a mystery. Coming from Jeremiah Wright's protege, the reason is only too obvious.