The ominous hidden transactions behind the Obama Iran Deal

by Sumner Park

In his new book, The Choice: Trump vs Obama and Biden in US Foreign Policy, Dr. Walid Phares, who served twice as a foreign policy advisor to U.S. presidential candidates (Romney, 2012 and Trump, 2016), analyzed differences between the eight years of foreign policy under the Obama administration and the four years of Trump’s White House foreign policy.

The main differences he describes as “day and night,” Phares contends, are the Obama-built Iran Deal and the fight against the jihadists. In his book, the expert argues that Obama and Trump had total opposite goals in world politics in general, and in the Middle East in particular. Obama wanted to cut a deal with the rulers of Tehran and, eventually, with the Muslim Brotherhood rulers of North Africa, assuming that the two forces were pragmatic and could be drawn to power arrangements between them and the United States. There would be a price, and it would be enormous: empowering extremists across the region instead of the moderates, as demonstrated first in 2009 when President Obama abandoned Iranian protesters in the streets of Tehran to be slaughtered, and then years later when his administration abandoned Syrians rising against Assad. The question Phares raises is what did the United States get in exchange for all these deals with dictators?

Here is where Phares set off an analytical bomb: The Obama administration, or perhaps the Obama-Biden circle, was actually cutting a much larger deal with the Ayatollahs, beyond that which we know as the Iran Deal. Here are the contours of that super deal, as explained in The Choice:

1.    The Iran regime would obtain $150 billion in frozen assets from US and European partners in the JCPOA. (Tehran used that money to beef up its regime, not meet the needs of its population. It also used it to buy weapons.) 

2.    A partnership would be established between US financial circles and Iran regime financial circles creating a multitude of financial “deals” with, overall, a much larger financial volume and creating a cascading benefit for all parties involved (on both sides).

3.    This partnership was not about sublimating the nuclear ambitions of Iran. The Iran Deal empowered Tehran’s influence in its “vassal countries,” including Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen, while also providing access to all the riches in these countries, mainly oil and natural gas.

The Iran Deal hid a larger strategy by the Obama team. The Choice reveals, based on Middle Eastern sources, that this strategy planned on creating a regional bloc, ruled by the Ayatollahs of Iran and comprised of all militias ruling the land from Tehran to Baghdad, Damascus and Beirut. But the real deal was about control of the economic assets these militias had in their possession.

First, access to the dizzying volumes of petrol and gas stretching from Iran’s oil fields, Iraq’s north and south, as well as Syria’s accessible natural stores. Lebanon has no territorial oil, but its coast provides access to one of the largest underwater and untapped reserves of gas in the world. “The Iranian empire” not only has minerals and agriculture, but also central banks and financial structures that can facilitate transactions for radicals. Accordingly, the actual (and larger) deal is a massive transfer of money to the Iranian regime and its vassal states in the region, and a massive transfer from that empire to the financial entities that facilitated the official Iran deal in the US and Europe.

Hence, argues Phares, the number 150 Billion (dollars) was only the tip of the iceberg. The pro Iran deal lobby in the West would open the valves to the Ayatollahs and their business elites, and in return the latter would open their markets and pools of cash to the Iran deal enablers.

It was this larger flow of power, money and resources that was interrupted when Donald Trump pulled out from the JCPOA in 2018, notes Phares. This, the author argued on Fox News, explains the destructive tactics by the opposition toward the president from Day One in the Oval Office, nay, since months before.