Biden may remove Iran's Revolutionary Guard from terrorist list
Some of you may be old enough to remember when Iran’s Revolutionary Guard fired missiles into the American consulate in Iraq. That was way back… last week. With that bit of history as a backdrop, you might find yourself surprised to learn that President Joe Biden is consideringremoving the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) from the Foreign Terrorist Organization watchlist. That idea is apparently one of the items being put on the table as part of Biden’s desperate scrambling to get the Iranians to sign on to any sort of agreement to enter back into the “Iran deal” regarding their nuclear weapons program. And just in case you missed all of the recent headlines coming from those negotiations, it’s the Russians who are brokering the agreement. You know… the country that’s currently blowing up theaters and hospitals in Ukraine. It’s really getting hard to differentiate between satire and reality these days. (Daily Wire)
Democrat President Joe Biden’s administration is reportedly considering lifting the Foreign Terrorist Organization designation on Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in exchange for a public commitment from Iran that they will play nice in the region.
The move comes as Biden desperately tries to get Iran to reenter a nuclear deal. Russian diplomat Mikhail Ulyanov praised Iranian negotiators earlier this month, saying that Iran “got much more than it could expect.”
“An agreement to restore the 2015 nuclear deal is nearly complete, but Iran’s demand that President Biden reverse Donald Trump’s decision to designate the IRGC as a Foreign Terrorist Organization is a key remaining sticking point,” Axios reported.
Yes, it was Donald Trump who placed the IRGC on the terror watchlist. That was a move that was pretty much a no-brainer and it’s a wonder that it hadn’t been done before then. But that makes the idea all the sweeter for Biden because he loves undoing anything and everything that Trump did during his four years in office.
Just to be clear, this proposal has a lot to do with sanctions. Anyone who does any sort of business with the IRGC is subject to sanctions because of the group’s terrorist designation. So if the IRGC is removed from the watchlist, we will find ourselves in a situation where Russia, a nation currently being hit with some of the biggest international sanctions ever seen, will have negotiated its way into removing sanctions from one of the worst terrorist groups in the world while securing for itself some sanction relief in its dealings with Iran. And it’s all being done in the name of getting Iran to sign on to a deal that likely won’t be enforceable in any meaningful fashion.
Are you feeling dizzy yet? You might want to sit down for a bit. I’m almost at a loss for words in terms of describing how bizarre this entire process has become. Last month we looked at the story of how one member of Biden’s negotiating team walked away from his job and later left government service entirely because he was so disgusted with the way the talks were going. Robert Malley is the person heading up the negotiating team for Biden and he’s been described as someone who initially offered the Iranians so much right out of the gate that they couldn’t believe their good fortune. And yet we still haven’t closed the deal.
How in the world would anyone not consider the IRGC to be a terror group. That’s pretty much all they do. They have been orchestrating terror attacks in Iraq and Syria for years, all while plotting ways to undermine and damage Israel. They’re pretty much the definition of what Islamic terrorism looks like. But in the interest of getting the Iranians to sign off on an agreement that they will never live up to, Joe Biden is willing to normalize them?
There must be a lot of people smiling in Iran right now, and likely Russia as well. Everyone is always happy when a sucker shows up for a card game.