President Joe Biden approved the release of $6 billion to Iran as part of a hostage ransom and prisoner swap. It follows a similar $1.5 billion hostage deal his same aides arranged during the Obama administration.
Five illegally detained Americans will come home, though it appears that Biden has agreed to leave behind Jamshid “Jimmy” Sharmahd , much as Obama agreed to abandon Bob Levinson , whom the regime eventually murdered.
How will Iran spend its windfall? What everybody is thinking is that Iran will use the money for Tzdaka and chesed. They will help orphans, widows, the elderly and infirm. They will build hospitals and schools and soup kitchens. Iran will be gradually transformed into a physical and spiritual utopia. So much GOOD can be done with six billion dollars!!!!
It will begin with Iran and gradually transform all of the Middle East, making it a haven for peace lovers.
That is one scenario. It would take a LOT of drugs and alcohol in one's system to believe that. Here is a more rational perspective:
In 2016, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps took the money for itself as a return on the investment of the operations to seize Americans in the first place. Money is fungible [replacable], and the ransom increased the guards’ off-book operations, potentially supporting everything from efforts to finance the Houthi rebellion in Yemen to Iranian-backed militias in Iraq to advancing Tehran’s drone program to expanding the missile program that then-Secretary of State John Kerry had legalized in order to win Iran’s acquiescence to temporary enrichment restrictions .
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi has already declared the regime will spend the funds however it sees fit. Certain items are high on the Iranian agenda. First, the regime will buy an off-the-shelf air force . While Iran’s military capabilities are advanced, especially with regard to drones and missiles, its air power has long been its Achilles’ heel. Most of Iran’s jet fighters predate the 1979 Islamic Revolution; some of its planes are models that flew in the Korean War. The jet fighters at Iran’s disposal dwindle due to natural attrition and crashes.
Iran has long sought high-end Russian-built Sukhoi-35s. An Iranian drone for the Russian jet-fighter trade is not even, but if Iran throws in a few billion dollars, the purchase becomes more possible. Biden and negotiator Brett McGurk may celebrate a photo-op with returning hostages, many of whom were in the Islamic Republic to make money before they ran afoul of the Revolutionary Guards’ own business interests, but the question they should answer is what the Iranian leadership might do with an arsenal of advanced jet fighters.
A more dangerous prospect is that the Iranian regime, which, according to the State Department, is still the world’s greatest state-sponsor of terrorism, might fund various terrorist proxy groups. The numbers involved should weigh on the White House’s conscience. Forensic analysis shows that Hamas’ Hebrew University cafeteria bombing that killed five Americans cost the group $50,000 to plan and execute. An ordinary suicide bomb belt, meanwhile, only costs $1,500. Six billion dollars flowing into Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps coffers, therefore, is enough to finance 120,000 restaurant bombings or four million suicide bomber belts.
Those numbers may seem high. There are, after all, only 40,000 McDonald’s locations in the world, but the simple fact only highlights how extreme the ransom is. Biden’s partisans argue the money is Iran’s anyway, and so does not represent a ransom. Meanwhile, the provision of such funds to Iran’s security and intelligence apparatus saturates the forces with so much cash that they can undertake any operation they desire and have money left over for new ballistic missiles or suicide speedboats.
Or, perhaps, the Iranian government might take inspiration from the Sept. 11 closing of the deal to divert the cash to the al Qaeda camps Iran now hosts.
Spin cannot erase the damage Biden has done. Americans will come home in body bags, their murders financed by the bankers Biden empowered. Those kidnapped, not only in Iran (or, like Sharmahd, in the United Arab Emirates) but also by terrorist groups and criminal cartels the world over, now face multi-billion ransoms. No group is going to ask for $20,000 when they see Biden, McGurk, and national security adviser Jake Sullivan signing off on amounts three or four orders of magnitude higher. It is now open season on Americans. [American Enterprise]
-------
All this with American taxpayer dollars.
