“President’s Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Iranian nuclear deal…”
“And imposing touch new sanctions on Iran instead…”
“The President gives some companies up to six months to wind down involvement with Iran…”
When the United States violated the Iran nuclear deal it didn’t happen in a vacuum.
It was actually the result of a lobbying campaign backed by some of the richest people in the U.S.
These are people that have really extreme views when it comes to Iran.
And there’s ample evidence that they are willing to use their money to further their anti-Iran views.
When President Trump withdrew the U.S. from the historic Iran nuclear deal in May 2018,
he undid years of diplomatic efforts that reset the U.S. - Iran relationship,
which - prior to that - had been non-existent since Iran’s 1979 Revolution.
It also unraveled one of the Obama administration’s signature foreign policy achievements
and went against the U.S.’s European allies.
The collapse of the Iran deal is a catastrophic missed opportunity for diplomacy.
I think that this decision is going to be viewed similar to the decision to invade Iraq in 2003.
So exactly how did this happen?
Hi guys, I’m Omar, and this Sunday we’re talking about how major lobbying efforts
orchestrated by corporate billionaires led to U.S.’s violation of the Iran nuclear deal.
Ok, before we get into the why, where, and how,
let’s make sure we got the basics down.
In 2015, Iran reached an agreement on its nuclear program with the P5+1
otherwise known as the U.S., Russia, France, the U.K., China, and Germany.
The agreement severely restricted Iran’s ability to enrich uranium.
It also ensured for the first time that Iran would not seek a nuclear weapon -
something it had already once pledged to do.
It's a historic agreement involving the US, Iran, and other world powers
in which sanctions were exchanged for caps on Iran's nuclear program and strict inspections
to verify that Iran was not moving towards a nuclear weapons capability.
But, behind the scenes there was a furious dash of lobbying involving nearly a 150 million dollars,
and a large group of organizations working nonstop to kill the deal in Congress.
But who exactly were these groups?
We spoke to Eli Clifton who’s reported extensively on them and their activities.
A unifying message that seemed to be coming out of groups opposing the Iran deal
was a series of talking points
talking about Iran's hegemonic ambitions in the region
and threat to U.S. regional allies like Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Israel.
At the forefront of the fight was AIPAC,
or the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee.
It aggressively advocated that the deal was a bad idea that would hurt Israel and U.S. interests.
AIPAC spent approximately $30 million on their campaign through a subsidiary group
known as Citizens for a Nuclear Free Iran.
This included political ads on TV, flying in AIPAC members to DC to lobby members of Congress,
and organizing demonstrations.
Check out this ad by the Citizens for a Nuclear Free Iran:
Iran has violated 20 international agreements
and is the leading state sponsor of terrorism.
AIPAC, incidentally, didn't originally want to be involved in this policy battle
but was pushed into it by their backers and funders
and ended up very much giving voice to Israeli concerns,
possibly at the expense of a discussion about American interests in the region.
But AIPAC wasn’t alone.
The Republican Jewish Coalition, Foundation for the Defense of Democracies,
United Against Nuclear Iran, and The Israeli American Council all opposed the agreement.
Altogether, opposition groups were five times better-funded than their opponents supporting the deal.
The groups opposing the nuclear deal
went into this with an enormous financial advantage.
All of them were preexisting in Washington,
all of them were well-funded by Republican – in case of AIPAC - Republican and Democrat donors.
Back in 2015, Jamal Abdi was working with the National Iranian American Council
to make the Iran deal a reality.
As we were advocating for this, we knew, the other side was pushing back hard and they weren't going anywhere.
You know, they lost because the White House was able to pull this off
and we were able to help put enough pressure on Congress that they didn't kill the deal.
If you’re wondering where this windfall of anti-deal money and support for anti-deal groups came from,
the answer is billionaires.
And Sheldon Adelson’s name tops the list of names funding these groups.
Adelson has been at the forefront of financially supporting Republican causes
and pro-Israel initiatives for decades.
Sheldon Adelson and his wife Miriam are the Republican party's biggest donors.
They were also Donald Trump's single largest backers in his campaign efforts in 2016.
That's something we often forget.
The Las Vegas billionaire even said that an “atomic weapon” should be fired at Iran.
So, there’s an atomic weapon and ballistic missile in the middle of the desert
that doesn’t hurt a soul. Maybe a couple of rattlesnakes, scorpions, or whatever.
And then you say “See, the next one is in the middle of Tehran.”
Adelson has contributed millions of dollars to groups lobbying against the Iran deal.
This includes half a million dollars to United Against Nuclear Iran,
one and a half million dollars to the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies,
and ten million dollars to the Israeli American Council.
He also happens to be a board member of the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC)
and likely its largest financier.
According to Eli Clifton, the RJC's 2012 contributions showed one large donation
of over five million dollars from an unnamed donor.
Beyond Adelson, there’s also Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus
who’s also donated millions to anti-Iran groups.
Listen to what he says about Iran in this 2015 interview:
When you do business with the devil, you’re in deep trouble.
And I think that Iran is the devil.
Marcus gave more than ten million dollars to the hawkish Foundation for Defense of Democracies, or FDD,
between 2008 and 2011 and over three million dollars in 2015.
And AIPAC, which we told you about earlier -- he’s given millions to them as well.
There’s one more donor you should know about.
Paul Singer is a hedge fund billionaire who donated over three and a half million dollars to the FDD in 2011
and one and a half million to AIPAC between 2010 and 2011.
But despite the best efforts and deep pockets of the anti-Iran deal lobbyists,
they were unable to defeat the Iran deal in Congress in 2015.
So, in 2016 the coalition and their billionaire backers tried a different approach:
Donald J. Trump.
Never, ever, ever, ever in my life
have I seen any transaction so incompetently negotiated
as our deal with Iran.
We knew that once a new president came in, once the circumstances change,
there was going to be all this money sort of on the table in place to try to kill the deal.
And if not, kill the deal, at least contain it.
Adelson, Marcus, and Singer spent a lot of money to help elect Donald Trump.
Combined, they donated 40 million dollars to pro-Trump political groups.
They also worked to ensure he’d have a strong congress to back him by spending
65 million dollars backing Republican candidates in the House and Senate.
So, when you have three billionaires who prioritize -
based off of their public, private, as well as their philanthropic efforts and comments
- opposing the nuclear deal
and the United States pursuing a hawkish policy a series of policies in the Middle East,
it's hard to imagine that any Republican candidate -
doesn't listen very carefully to what these individuals have to say.
Fast-forward to early 2018:
Trump is president and he hasn’t yet reneged on the Iran Deal as he’d pledged during his campaign.
He’s actually renewed it more than once.
But John Bolton -Trump’s National Security Advisor - would change that.
John Bolton had been George W. Bush’s Ambassador to the UN.
He was known as a vocal proponent of the Iraq War, an open advocate of war with Iran,
and a long-time critic of the Iran nuclear deal.
There’s a lot we can do and we should do it. Our goal should be regime change in Iran.
And according to Politico, Trump’s Chief of Staff, John Kelly, had cut the president’s interactions
with Bolton prior to him joining the administration because of his fringe views.
Enter Sheldon Adelson.
By multiple accounts Sheldon Adelson is a big fan of John Bolton.
Adelson made sure to get Trump to listen to Bolton.
And with Bolton back in Trump’s ear, his influence on the president was felt almost instantly.
Just four weeks after Bolton assumed the role of National Security Advisor,
the U.S. violated the terms of the Iran deal.
This was a horrible one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made.
It didn’t bring calm, it didn’t bring peace, and it never will.
So, money was a key factor in the campaign against a diplomatic breakthrough between two countries
that hadn’t managed to agree on anything for decades.
All these groups with all these vested interests
kept busy and their, you know, moneyed interests and constituencies
stayed active and they ended up winning in the end
But where do Iran and the United States go from here?
Well, Iran is seeking to keep the deal alive between itself and European powers without the United States.
And if that were to fail, can we expect the huge influence of anti-Iran groups in the U.S. to lead us to war?
There's a real opportunity for the United States and Iran to wind up in direct heated conflict with one another.
We're going to need to have a to have more hearings and more public awareness
of the risk of that war and create legal and political barriers to an eventual war
and the means to escalate to that war.
So, what’d you guys think?
Were you guys aware that corporate billionaires had basically demolished the Iran deal?
Let us know in the comments about other stories that you’d like us to report on.
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