Iran Lobby

Exposing the Activities of the lobbies and appeasers of the Mullah's Dictatorship ruling Iran

The Restocking of Iran Regime Bank Accounts and Weapons

by

The Restocking of Iran Regime Bank Accounts and WeaponsThe announcement of an agreement between the Iran regime and the P5+1 group of nations sets the stage for a protracted fight over the next 60 days in Congress where the deal must be approved and failing that, an override of a certain veto from President Obama has to occur in order to prevent the mullahs from cashing in on what looks to be one of the most generous paydays since Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in the year 410.

There will be an intensive amount of examination and dissection of the agreement’s provisions, but for today it’s worth looking at what some of the reaction has been and what it tells us about the real ambitions and aims of the Iranian regime.

“All Democrats, all Republicans should be looking at this deal very skeptically,” said Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz in an interview on Newsmax TV. “This should not break down into liberal, conservative, Republican, Democrat. It should be all Americans concerned about the possibility that Iran will develop a nuclear weapon in 10 years.”

“We have given Iran the path it has been seeking for almost 35 years. The other states in the region are not going to sit idly by, which is why in effect the nuclear arms race is already underway,” former U.N. Ambassador and Fox News contributor John Bolton said, adding that Iran and other nations have used civilian nuclear energy programs as cover for covert enrichment programs.

And from critics who know the intentions of the Iranian regime best came a strong statement from the National Council of Resistance of Iran’s leader, Mrs. Maryam Rajavi.

“There needs to be strict United Nations monitoring of the ‘cash poured into the regime’s pockets so that they would be spent on the Iranian people’s urgent needs,” said Iranian opposition leader Mrs. Rajavi. “Otherwise, Khamenei would continue to fund the IRGC (the Iranian regime’s Guards Corps) to export terrorism and fundamentalism to Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Lebanon.”

Ironically enough, Trita Parsi and Tyler Cullis of the National Iranian American Council, chief cheerleaders and lobbyists for Iran’s mullahs, offered an absurd argument in Foreign Policy describing a scenario where a lifting of the arms embargo against the regime would not alter the military balance in the region.

They cite the size of the military budget for Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states versus what the Islamic republic spends, but their arguments are not only incorrect, but deliberately false since Iran has not publicly reported its military spending since 2012 and does not include the vast expenditures it makes in military exports for proxies such as Hezbollah, Houthis and Shiite militias fighting in Syria, Yemen and Iraq.

They also ignore the centerpiece of Iranian military policy for the past five years which has been to rely heavily on paid mercenaries such as Afghan fighters, Shiite terror groups and paramilitaries to fight on behalf of the regime. In Syria’s case, Iran’s military dispatched 15,000 new fighters primarily made up of paid mercs alone.

When all of these other secret expenditures are taken into consideration, along with the size of the Iranian regime’s army, the mullahs’ firepower ranks 23rd in the world, exceeding the military capabilities of Saudi Arabia (ranked 28th), Mexico (31st), North Korea (36th), United Arab Emirates (50th) and Yemen (79th).

Which is why the arguments Parsi and Cullis posed strike at the heart of the needs of the Iranian regime; namely to get their hands on the $160 billion in frozen assets and foreign investment available to them, as well as the ability to sell two million barrels of oil on the open market each day again. The fact the Iran lobby has argued so passionately for lifting of the arms embargo shows the desperate need for the mullahs to restock their military hardware.

Over the next two months we will hear much debate over the specifics of the agreement, but what cannot be overlooked are the motivations of the mullahs in Tehran and the central flaw with this deal; which is it rests solely on the premise that the mullahs can be trusted.

It’s a deeply flawed premise given their actions over the past decade leading up to today which has never changed or deviated from the path of regional hegemony.

Congress would be well served to reject this deal because the choice is indeed between peace and war, unfortunately approving this deal will start a nuclear arms race, allow billions in new arms to flow to battlegrounds and spark a spiral into more wars.

By Michael Tomlinson

 

 

Iran Lobby Playing Blame Game

by

Iran Lobby Playing Blame GameJuly 9 has come and gone and yet another deadline has blown by in excruciating nuclear talks between the Iran regime and the P5+1 group of nations; totaling now six missed deadlines in the past two years.

But with talks collapsing again, a fresh round of finger pointing continues to break out as U.S. and Iranian negotiating teams took to competing news leaks to start the blame game as to which side was at fault for the impasse.

Regime foreign minister Javad Zarif took to Twitter to float the accusation that it was the other side that had changed demands in the middle of negotiations. It is an absurd claim since it has been the mullahs in Tehran who have dropped several verbal bombs that have blown up talks including an extraordinary demand to lift United Nations embargoes on the arms trade.

Given the fact that the regime is hip deep in supplying three major wars now in Syria, Iraq and Yemen, the prospect of the regime being flooded with new arms it could redirect to its forces in these conflicts has effectively killed talks.  With this last minute demand, Iran’s mullahs may have overreached as evidenced by the sudden stiffening in the U.S. position and the threat by Secretary of State John Kerry to walk away from talks.

Both Russia and China have supported a lifting of the embargo since they stand to be the biggest sellers of weapons to the regime. The behind the scenes rift amongst the P5+1 members may very well have been a calculated move by the mullahs in order to sow discord right at the deadline and apply maximum leverage in order to extract the best deal possible.

Some news media and analysts have speculated that significant concessions granted to the regime over the past two years may have emboldened the regime into thinking it was winning and encouraged the mullahs to overreach with their latest demands, only to see the golden opportunity to gain sanctions relief be dealt a setback with the missing of this week’s deadlines.

More broadly though, these sudden demands by Iran and finger pointing have laid bare the absurdity of the regime lobbying forces that have been deployed to help manage the media during talks. Chief among them have been the National Iranian American Council which has sent two of its staffers, Trita Parsi and Reza Marashi, to camp out in Vienna and offer soundbites to any journalist willing to listen.

Parsi especially has been active on his Twitter trying to shore up the regime position and jumped into the blame game as well once word came down from the Iranian delegation that the Americans had finally seemed to wise up to the regime’s games.

“Iranian view is that US withdrew today a proposal it had put forward yesterday, WANTING to pass the Corker deadline #IranTalksVienna,” Parsi said in a tweet.

Parsi has tried to put lipstick on a pig in tweeting out pithy little attacks on the U.S. as talks broke down, as well as supporting Russian foreign minister Lavrov’s tweets as he took exception to the stiffening in U.S. resolve.

All of which amounted to squat for Parsi and his lobbying partners as world financial markets took notice of the regime blunder and global oil prices stabilized as belief spread that the window for a nuclear had closed.

At the end of this week, the mullahs seriously miscalculated about demanding immediate sanctions relief so they could gain access to the estimated $140 billion in frozen assets as well as resume trade in arms and missiles to restock inventories drained dry through its proxy wars.

The demands came at such bad times so close to deadlines as to raise the specter of desperation on the part of Iran’s leadership. The past several months have seen mass protests and disruptions throughout Iran as ordinary citizens, teachers and young people have demanded improved economic conditions and relief from oppressing human rights restrictions.

The mullahs may have been feeling the pinch and made these demands not out of some strategic negotiating position, but simply out of desperation to save themselves, in which case the West would be well-served to walk away from these talks and call the regime’s bluff and find out just how bad off the mullahs really are.

At the end of the day, do we really need a nuclear deal if the only option is a bad one?

By Laura Carnahan

Iran Lobby Playing Blame Game

As Nuke Talks Fail, Trita Parsi Contributes to Global Warming With Hot Air

by

As Nuke Talks Fail, Trita Parsi Contributes to Global Warming With Hot Air

As Nuke Talks Fail, Trita Parsi Contributes to Global Warming With Hot Air

As yet another deadline slipped away in nuclear talks between the Iran regime and the P5+1 group of nations, the new trial balloon being floated was the idea of open-ended negotiations and keeping alive the November 2013 interim agreement which has already paid out to the Tehran’s mullahs a whopping $17 billion in cash.

But why did negotiators let a June 30 self-imposed deadline slip away, only to see another July 7 deadline fall by the wayside? It is because the Iran regime really has no interest in a deal that continues to deprive the mullahs of the $140 billion in frozen assets they need and restricts how they might spend all that cash.

Indeed, while regime supporters such as Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council, Jim Lobe of Lobelog and Atieh Khajehpour of Atieh International have all proclaimed loudly the mullahs commitment to a deal, Iran’s leaders have consistently sabotaged any progress in talks.

The latest example was that as Tuesday’s deadline came and went, Western news sources cited statements from a senior member of the Iranian negotiating team who disclosed the regime fully expects any agreement to also include a lifting of United Nation sanctions imposed on the sale of conventional weapons and ballistic missiles.

“This is one of the important issues we are discussing,” said the official, a negotiator who spoke to Western reporters on the condition of anonymity.

The demand was significant because the P5+1 had already conceded to the regime the idea of removing ballistic missile technology from discussions, but the regime’s insistence on lifting sanctions on all conventional weapons is telling because of the regime’s enormous level of support of three proxy wars with Hezbollah in Syria, Shiite militias in Iraq and Houthi rebels in Yemen.

The drain on Iranian regime’s military is significant as the mullahs ship guns, rockets, anti-tank weapons, missiles, ammunition and other equipment to their proxies in each of these wars. The fact the mullahs are demanding a lifting to sanctions to allow for the flow of cash and arms back into Iran is ample proof to anyone with a brain what Iranian regime’s future foreign policy direction is once a deal is completed; which makes what regime supporters such as Parsi say look foolish and ridiculous.

Parsi has repeatedly contended that a nuclear deal with Iran would aid moderates within the regime, boost America’s role in the region, improve security for American interests and help destroy ISIS.

But the evidence to the contrary has been as clear as crystal. Any political moderates remaining in Iran have been thrown in the regime’s notorious Evin prison or executed amongst the 1,800 sent to the gallows by Hassan Rouhani’s administration.

Americans have been taken hostage and remain as bargaining chips by the mullahs, while America’s traditional allies in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey have been faced with terror strikes in their borders, open warfare with Iranian proxies and have acted unilaterally to defend themselves.

The fact that the regime itself built the template by which ISIS has modeled itself is another rebuttal to what Parsi contends. Ironically while Parsi has been huffing and puffing claiming “moderate” aims of the mullahs, Jordanian security forces revealed the arrest of an Iranian agent working for the regime’s Quds Force who was caught with a sizable amount of explosives to be used in a strike against the U.S. ally.

But Parsi’s attempt at fooling the world is proving inept as the actions of the regime – almost all of which have contradicted everything Parsi has claimed – are finally being denounced on editorial pages everywhere.

“Now Iran’s negotiators are piling on more last-minute demands. They want the United Nations to lift restrictions on Iranian regime’s trade in missiles and other conventional arms. They act, at least publicly, as though they have all the leverage, that they know their adversary craves a deal more than they do,” said the Chicago Tribune in an editorial.

“Where would they get that idea? Probably from the U.S. and its allies, who reportedly have been backpedaling on key points to eke out a deal,” The Tribune added.

While Parsi and his colleague Reza Marashi enjoy the weather in Vienna and hob nob with journalists and fellow regime sympathizers who have gathered there like rock band groupies following the Iranian delegation, the world outside that bubble have already come to the conclusion that Iran’s mullahs have no interest in a deal, only in re-opening their bank accounts and restocking their military hardware for waging even more war.

By Michael Tomlinson

The Iran Regime’s Red Lines in Nuclear Talks

by

Khamenei's Redliens on Nuclear Talks-New deception tecnics

Khamenei’s Redliens on Nuclear Talks-New deception tecnics

With June 30 having arrived and no nuclear agreement being reached between the Iran regime and the P5+1 group of nations, one could call everything “business as usual” with yet another deadline preceded by frantic talks and then slipping away without a ripple of consequence.

Of course the “new” immediate deadline will be July 9, in which the Obama administration needs to deliver an agreement to Congress to trigger a 30 day review period, otherwise if they miss it, Congress will have 60 days to review as part of a compromise deal struck between the administration and Sens. Bob Corker (R-TN) and Robert Menendez (D-NJ).

But this new deadline is just as likely to slide by as the one today and the reason for it was put on display today in bright, bold red lines by the regime’s top mullah, Ali Khamenei, who wasted no time taking to Twitter and his official website to post his own version of “Major Red Lines in Nuclear Negotiations” for the regime.

Khamenei’s red lines, unlike those laid down by President Obama after Assad in Syria gassed his own people, are firmly set and unlikely to change since Khamenei is empowered by the mullahs’ constitution to hold the final approval of any foreign agreements, which makes his red lines worth examining.

Khamenei’s red lines essentially repudiates every pointed allegedly agreed upon condition in earlier interim, framework agreements and reasserts the regime’s opposition to virtually all the conditions the P5+1 have sought over the past three years; even after making significant and grave concessions to the regime.

They include:

  • No long-term restrictions on the regime’s nuclear program as opposed to the decade-long restriction sought by negotiators;
  • Continuation of the regime’s nuclear research and development program during the restriction period in spite of prior agreements to halt such research;
  • Immediate lifting of all economic, financial and banking sanctions with signing of an agreement, including all sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council, European Union and U.S. Congress and administration without requirements the regime was in compliance;
  • Lifting of sanctions must be conditioned on the start of the regime’s implementation of the agreement, not after international inspections have verified its compliance;
  • Verification by the UN’s inspectors at the International Atomic Energy Agency will not be accepted by the regime, nor will inspectors be granted unconditional access to any regime facility;
  • No inspection of military facilities will be allowed, nor will interviews of any regime scientist or technical personnel; and
  • The regime opposes any longer term period of review, inspection or compliance beyond the fixed term, which means no 15 or 25 year window to maintain compliance.

The fact that Khamenei repudiated almost every condition regime foreign minister Javad Zarif and its president, Hassan Rouhani touted as landmark agreements should come as no surprise really. Khamenei’s public tweets and statements following the interim agreement announced jointly by the regime and the P5+1 to much fanfare on April, 2015 clearly showed his displeasure and contention that the regime had not submitted to any of these conditions.

Not even regime cheerleader Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council could alter the inevitable outcome with his unsurprising appearance in Vienna, Austria, the site of these talks where he attempted to convince any reporter with a notebook, camera or microphone that the regime was indeed serious about these talks and on the verge of closing a deal.

But given the clear and unmistakable conditions laid out by Khamenei, the only real question is how willing is the Obama administration to concede even more and essentially give the regime a blank check or at least a $140 billion check, the amount in frozen assets the regime’s mullahs are lusting after to replenish their coffers drained by three proxy years in Syria, Iraq and Yemen.

William Kristol writing in The Weekly Standard warns the administration may have very well caved in on the all-important issue of inspection access by conceding that since the U.S. would not allow universal access to its own military sites, it could afford Iran the same consideration.

All of which sets the stage for the final act before July 9 of whether or not the P5+1 completely cave and adhere to all of Khamenei’s conditions or recognize in the final act that Iran’s mullahs really have no desire for an agreement and instead have been fooling the world for the past three years.

By Michael Tomlinson

What You Need to Know About the Iran Nuclear Talks

by

 

What You Need to Know About the Iran Nuclear Talks

With only a day left before the self-imposed deadline of June 30 for this third and latest round of talks between the Iran regime and the P5+1 group of nations over Iran’s nuclear development program, it is becoming increasingly clear with leaked news reports that the deadline will be missed as regime foreign minister Javad Zarif heads back to consult with his mullah masters in Tehran.

It really is not surprising this deadline will be missed as well. Remember, this session was allegedly set to work out the “details” of the so-called “framework agreement” from last April in which both sides had supposedly agreed on the broad outlines, but within 24 hours conflicting documents were produced on what the framework agreement actually contained.

That “agreement” followed a similar missed deadline the year before and yet another agreement in November of 2013. Remember the 2013 deal? It released $17 billion in cash and assets to the regime for its alleged compliance with reduction in the stockpiles of enriched uranium, but instead, during the past two years under that interim agreement, those stockpiles actually increased by a whopping 20 percent.

It’s worth mentioning that the Iran regime got those billions just as global oil prices slumped and it was shelling out $6 billion to support Assad in Syria with Hezbollah fighters, not to mention the additional billions it spent to support the Houthi revolt in Yemen and Shiite militias in Iraq.

In essence, we have been paying for Iran’s proxy wars for the last two years.

But given the past three years of negotiating, what has been the common thread of failure in each of the previous sessions? Two words: Ali Khamenei.

The regime’s top mullah is empowered by mullah’s constitution with dictatorial powers over virtually all aspects of Iranian life including the judiciary, culture, foreign policy, economy and military matters. Jay Solomon reports in the Wall Street Journal how Khamenei’s constantly shifting demands, almost schizophrenic public rants and hardline stances have doomed every prior negotiating session and has potentially derailed this one as well.

“Mr. Khamenei’s hardline positions, announced in a nationally televised speech, appeared to back away from commitments his negotiators made in April to restrain parts of Iran’s nuclear program and to allow international inspections of the country’s military sites,” Solomon writes. “

“But there is concern in Washington and Europe that Iran’s paramount political leader may be boxing in his own diplomats by establishing terms they can’t deliver on. The 75-year-old cleric is viewed by the White House as the final decision maker on all issues concerning Iran’s nuclear program and foreign policy,” he added.

Solomon also disclosed the existence of secret messages passed between the regime and President Obama in which the mullahs in Tehran demanded as a sign of U.S. good faith the release of certain prisoners in 2009. The regime also demanded the blacklisting of certain Iranian opposition resistance groups and an increase in U.S. visas for regime students to study at U.S. universities.

It is noteworthy that the regime specifically called for actions against Iranian resistance groups, which have helped marshal global opinion against the regime over the years – and in the case of the National Council of Resistance of Iran – have helped disclose once-secret Iranian nuclear facilities angering the mullahs.

But in a startling concession, the U.S. arranged for the release of four Iranians including two convicted arms smugglers and a prominent scientist convicted of illegal exports to Iran. That early example of American concessions set the stage for the regime and Khamenei to believe they could get whatever they wanted from the U.S. and led to two years of mind-numbing talks in which the P5+1 caved on a whole series of concessions designed to appease Khamenei and hardline mullahs.

Now with admission that the June 30 deadline is moot, Western diplomats are breaking their silence and raising the scenario that the Iran regime is now backing out of its earlier commitments.

“There are a number of different areas where we still have major differences of interpretation in detailing what was agreed in Lausanne,” said British Foreign Minister Philip Hammond in a Reuters report.

“There is going to have to be some give or take if we are to get this done in the next few days,” he added. “No deal is better than a bad deal.”

Other Western officials echoed Hammond’s remarks, saying some of the backtracking involved the mechanics of monitoring Iranian compliance with proposed limits on nuclear activities according to Reuters.

The final clues of how far away the regime is removed from reality came in a posting by Reza Marashi from the National Iranian American Council and a lead supporter of the mullahs who is in Geneva along with his colleague Trita Parsi hobnobbing with the Iranian delegation in hotel hallways and lobbies.

Since Marashi and Parsi enjoy such close access to the confidential nature of these talks through the Iranian delegation, it’s worth noting the issue areas they call “myths” as clues to what frightens the mullahs the most.

  • The appearance that the regime will receive a windfall from immediate lifting of all sanctions;
  • The lack of verified inspection measures to prevent Iranian regime from cheating;
  • The emboldening of Iran’s mullahs to act freely in the region now that a deal is in place;
  • The worsening of human rights in Iran now that there is no leverage to improve the situation;
  • The ability to secure a better deal with mounting pressure on the regime from wider protest within Iran and abroad.

Ironically, Marashi has laid out the case precisely posed by opponents of a bad nuclear deal in which Khamenei’s mouth has uttered all of these points in direct contradiction to Marashi over the past two years.

The kicker is the trial balloon floated by Parsi in which he basically delivers the regime’s position on Huffington Post of a three phase approval deal which includes the U.S. Congress approving the lifting of sanctions and the terms of a deal without it even being signed by the Iranians. He must have gotten the idea from Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) during the healthcare debate when she argued Congress had to pass the law to find out what was in it.

Parsi and Marashi seem to believe Congress and the American people will fall for the same trick twice.

By Michael Tomlinson

 

Whitewashing Iran’s human right’s records to lobby softer position on nuclear talks

by

Photo credit: The gulf and Middle East Association for civil society-August 2014

Photo credit: The gulf and Middle East Association for civil society-August 2014

The Ministry of Intelligence and Security of Iran had instructed its agents to try to advocate themselves as opposition by writing 80% against the regime and the violation of human rights in Iran, but they have to dedicate 20% to denying the opposition, namely the MEK (Mujahedin-e-Khalq), by spreading rumors discredit them. This seems to be the copy framework agreement with the Iranian regime’s lobby and appeasers with respect to the failed Iran talks in Vienna.

Recently, some advocates of Iranian origin who claim to be human rights activists are expressing concerns over the recent resolution of the House of Representatives against the human rights violation in Iran.

One of these “human rights activists” has written an article in The Hill today, expressing concerns that “seeking ways to achieve tangible human rights improvements inside Iran is also closely related to the outcome of the nuclear negotiations” and that including “separate issues – such as Iran’s rights record, or its support for terrorism – will make it more difficult to reach a nuclear deal”.

The author who by the way is a well-known advocate and affiliate of “NIAC” claims that “the Iranian human rights community strongly supports a successful diplomatic resolution of the nuclear crisis, particularly because many believe that without a deal, the human rights crisis in Iran will worsen”. He goes further in whitewashing the regime’s president Rouhani who is just another mullah within the hierarchy of the theocracy ruling Iran, saying: “the perpetuation of tensions over the nuclear file is likely to result in continued and even increased gross human rights violations. For example, throughout the past decade, Iranian hardliners, opposed to a deal, have thrived by capitalizing on the nuclear confrontation and using it to justify their repressive measures. Failure of the negotiations would embolden them. They would seek to weaken the government of relative moderate President Hassan Rouhani.”

This is while in Iran under the so called “moderate” Rouhani, over 1,100 people have been executed and thousands are on death row. Based on the number of executions that mainly appear on state newspapers in Iran, on average every 8 hours one person is being executed. Women are disgracefully attacked by regime-related thugs, either by acid or being stabbed under the pretext of disobeying the dress code. There is no free access to information, Iran is the biggest prison for journalists and the situation of religious minorities is outrageous, to name a few.

Last November, the United Nations General Assembly’s third committee adopted the UN’s 61st resolution condemning human rights abuses in Iran and urged the regime to stop the executions, in such conditions, overlooking the human rights in Iran and ignoring the fact that people and particularly women in Iran are living under despicable conditions is nothing but cruel, shameful and immoral. Asking the US politicians to be softer on the regime with such inhumane records of human rights, is even worse.

The author is also quoting some activists to strengthen his proposition and represent it as a request by the Iranian human rights community. He writes: “As Nasrin Sotoudeh , the prominent human rights lawyer and former political prisoner put it: ‘It is obvious that we welcome peaceful relations with all countries and as such support the negotiations’.”  This is while reading Nasrin Sotoudeh’s entire quote, you can see that she is actually demanding the human rights issues to be discussed during negotiations and not to be ignored, exactly the opposite of what the Iranian lobby is criticizing the congress for in the Hill article. Here is her quote from the same source:

“if the Iranian state wants to rehabilitate its relations with the international community, it must certainly address fundamental human rights concerns on issues such as juvenile executions and freedom of expression. The Iranian government should clearly state its position on these issues during the nuclear negotiations. In my opinion, keeping silent on such issues until the end of negotiations will make it more difficult. My understanding is the European countries say we cannot easily bring up human rights issues because it will potentially threaten the negotiations. We say at a minimum ask the Iranian negotiators to express their position on fundamental human rights concerns such as juvenile executions which are banned by all international conventions.”

The truth of the matter is that the Iranian regime has strategically invested in its nuclear program. It is doing everything to get more time to complete the program and will not shift from this unless faced with more pressure and more sanctions. After all it was the sanctions that finally forced the mullahs to go to the negotiation table and accept the Geneva accord, not the appeasement policy that has unfortunately been the dominant policy of the West towards Iran in the past two decades.

The Pretzel Logic of the Iranian Lobby on the Nuclear Deal

by

"Dedicated to Improving the Relationship Between the U.S. and Iranian Governments"

“The Pretzel Logic of the Iranian Lobby on the Nuclear Deal”

With the deadline of November 24th fast approaching for the P5+1 negotiators to reach a deal with Iran over its nuclear weapons program, the chorus of the PR machine working on behalf of the regime is reaching a crescendo.

The opening shot came from disclosures in the Washington Free Beacon that the Truman National Security Project issued a call to arms for writers and bloggers to join in the effort to comment, post and tweet U.S. media in favor of a nuclear deal.

This was followed by a virtual avalanche of editorials and commentary that sometimes borders on the ludicrous such Gary Sick’s piece in Politico where he argued that giving Iran a deal that preserves its ability to enrich uranium was preferable to letting Iran walk away. Sick’s piece attempts to make the leap of logic that failure to reach a deal would potentially place Iran’s president Hassan Rouhani at some crucial disadvantage with perceived hardliners in Iran and lead to his ouster.

It’s an argument that reminds me of MIT professor and Obamacare advisor Jonathan Gruber’s recently unearthed comments about the lack of intelligence amongst American voters. Sick must carry a similar opinion of Western negotiators.

This theme that letting Iran walk away from the negotiating table would be disastrous is being echoed on pro-Iranian blogs such as LobeLog.com and lobbyists such as the National Iranian-American Council. All have let loose shrill cries that almost any deal is preferable than letting Iran walk…even if the deal is viewed as an awful one by the West.

What all of these sympathizers ignore though is the biggest obstacle to closing a deal and it is not the West, it is Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei who previously sank negotiations with public comments against reaching a deal that would impede Iran’s ability to develop a weapon. His most recent comments reinforced that view. In fact, the mullah-in-chief  has doubled down with another series of speeches denouncing efforts to rein in Iran’s nuclear capacity.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and other negotiators were also stunned to hear even more denunciations by Iran’s religious leaders who decried any efforts to cave in to what they considered were excessive demands by the West. Iran has also raised the specter that any deal must first be predicated on the unconditional lifting of economic sanctions without a reciprocal rapid deconstruction of Iran’s nuclear program; a non-starter for almost every nation at the bargaining table.

The pathway now shaping up is a potential for yet another deadline extension without any agreement being reached. The impact of the Iranian lobby and PR machine is being severely undercut by Iran’s own leaders out of their own mouths and it seems the best they can hope for now is not a complete meltdown in talks.

There almost seems a calculation by Iran’s mullahs that President Obama needs a foreign policy triumph more than Iran’s economy needs help. It is a calculation seemingly destined to failure with the midterm election results and American voters expressing great alarm over the disintegrating nature of affairs in the Middle East with ISIS, Syria, Iraq, Nigeria, Gaza and Afghanistan.

This is one of those times where pretzel logic doesn’t trump the common sense of American voters.

By Michael Tomlinson