Rand Paul One of the Only Republicans Standing with Trump On Iran Peace Deal
Republicans Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton agree with Democrats Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer that it's a bad deal, while the Kentucky senator agrees with the president. #59
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Donald Trump wants to end the U.S. war with Iran and has already signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) peace deal to wind it down.
Many Republicans oppose this.
Sen. Ted Cruz said of the deal, “I think the president is receiving some very poor advice on this deal.” Sen. Tom Cotton agreed with Cruz, saying “I do have concerns that certain aspects of this deal are stepping in the wrong direction.”
Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy went even further and called Trump’s deal the “worst foreign policy blunder in decades.”
Democrat Chuck Schumer agrees with GOP member Cassidy, with the Senate Minority Leader calling the Trump deal “one of the worst foreign policy disasters that has ever happened in America.”
Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren agrees with Sen. Schumer, Cassidy, Cotton and Cruz, saying of the deal “What an embarrassment.”
If top leaders in both major parties are opposing Trump on this, is he getting any support?
Sen. Rand Paul said almost immediately after Trump’s Iran deal was announced last Wednesday:
Neocons in Both Parties Don’t Want the War to End
Not only did Paul have the president’s back on this deal, he was right to note that the neoconservative wing of his party that Cruz, Cotton and so many others belong to have been in favor of almost every failed U.S. intervention this century.
Similarly, many Democrats who voted for the Iraq war who are also - with Chuck Schumer topping that list - want the war to continue but haven’t said so because they don’t want to look like they’re supporting Trump.
Independent journalist Glenn Greenwald broke this down recently on The Jimmy Dore Show:
After four months, it has become clear and the president obviously agrees that the only way to end the U.S. war with Iran is through diplomacy, which Republicans like Cruz, Cotton, their fellow GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham and neocon talk host Mark Levin vehemently oppose.
Neocons want forever war and they mean it.
There could be other Republicans who support the MOU deal, just as there likely are Democrats who would like to see the war come to a close but can’t be perceived as supporting Trump.
Then there’s almost ALL of Congress who receive billions annually from the powerful Israel-lobbying group AIPAC. They don’t want to do anything to risk that money flow.
There’s no incentive for most members of Congress to speak out even if they happened to agree with the Trump deal.
That leaves, again, Sen. Paul (from Thursday).
Israel Opposes Trump Deal
In addition to the Republicans and Democrats who hate the Trump deal, Israeli officials are also very much against ending U.S. involvement in this conflict.
Last week, JD Vance issued a stern warning to those leaders “I will say, and this does bother me, is that you’ve seen people within Bibi’s cabinet who have come out and attacked the deal and in some ways very personally attacked the President of the United States.”
“Number one, Donald J. Trump is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment in time, and he happens to be the head of state of the world’s superpower,” Vance said. “If I was in the cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world.”
Fox News’ Mark Levin lost his mind over this, telling Vance to “Stop trashing, smearing, bullying the little state of Israel!”
Rand Stands Alone with Trump
Rabid neocon talk hosts aside, it was good advice from the vice president. Israel is so unpopular with the rest of the globe at the moment, leaving the U.S. as their last true ally.
If the Israelis don’t get that, that will be on them and at their own risk, as Vance warned. Vance actually spent much of last week putting Israel in its place.
If President Trump wants to end his country’s participation in what is ultimately a war that is more in the interest of Israel than the U.S., that is the commander-in-chief’s primary decision. Not Israel’s. Not Ted Cruz’s. Not Tom Cotton’s. Not Chuck Schumer’s. Not Elizabeth Warren’s.
But it would be nice if the president had more support in Congress on this front.
He does have at least one MOU deal supporter (from Friday).
Some of the members of the same Congress that refuses to declare wars anymore as the Constitution demands will continue to wail or even insist that they can stop Donald Trump’s Iran peace deal. How convienent.
Rand Paul was an ardent opponent of the Iran war since it began in late February predicting it would go badly, it has, and now that President Trump has decided to end it, the senator is obviously more than willing to back him.
Credit is also due to the president in this moment. The Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi framed this well recently, writing, “That is the curse of endless war. The refusal to accept an unfavorable reality today merely guarantees a higher bill tomorrow.”
“Some credit must be given to Trump for breaking this pattern, even as he should be blamed for having started this war in the first place,” Parsi noted. “Political leaders should be judged not only for the mistakes they make, but also for whether they have the courage to correct them.”
How many years did American presidents and leaders lie us through all those years in Iraq and two decades in Afghanistan?
Donald Trump made a mistake in launching this war. Now he intends to correct it. The president should be lauded for this.
He should also have more support. Especially from his own party.
Mistake in launching this war? Absolutely not. Trump didn’t launch this 47 year forever war. He just stepped in to do what should have been done years ago. The Iranian people deserve freedom. God sees their plight. That regime is evil and their proxies around the globe serve up nothing but terror. Looking ahead to help keep our children and grandchildren safe is a worthy cause.
We should have gone to war with Iran years ago. They have been at war with America ever since Jimmy Carter thought it would be a good idea to bring the Ayatollah back from France to balance out his "Leftist Students" against what he saw as the Evil Shah. The Ayatollah was literally considered a mascot. An afterthought to both Jimmy and the naive students. Andrew Young called the Ayatollah a Saint. The Ayatollah told Jimmy he liked America and would keep the oil flowing. Jimmy got played.
American leadership, as well as the Red Green Alliance of its day in Iran had no clue what was in store. A new Robespierre had arrived. A Mascot who was beyond evil. The hapless Jimmy Carter never understood what hit him.
Phase 1: The Firing Squads for the Shah’s Loyalists (February 1979)Within days of his return, Khomeini established the Islamic Revolutionary Courts, entirely bypassing the existing legal framework. He appointed his close disciple, Sadegh Khalkhali, who quickly earned the moniker "The Hanging Judge." The Roof of the Headquarters: On February 15, 1979—just four days after the imperial government officially collapsed—the first senior military commanders (including the head of the security service, SAVAK) were executed by firing squad right on the roof of Khomeini’s makeshift headquarters in Tehran. The High-Level Purge: Over the next few weeks, former Prime Minister Amir-Abbas Hoveyda, the chief of the air force, former cabinet ministers, and hundreds of military officers were subjected to summary "trials" lasting only minutes. There were no defense attorneys and no appeals. By the end of 1979, over 700 prominent military and political figures from the Shah's era had been executed. Phase 2: The Bait-and-Switch on the Leftist Students (1979–1981)While the Shah's loyalists were being lined up against the wall, Khomeini played a masterful political game with the leftist and Marxist student groups (like the Mujahedin-e Khalq [MEK] and the Fedayeen). He needed them temporarily to maintain control of the streets and secure his position.The Hostage Crisis as Bait: When radical students seized the U.S. Embassy in November 1979, Khomeini publicly praised them. He used their anti-American fervor to whip the public into a nationalist frenzy. But this was a trap.
By backing the embassy takeover, Khomeini forced the secular liberals in his own government to resign, leaving the fundamentalists in total control of the state apparatus. The Consolidation: Once the secular moderates were out of the way, Khomeini no longer needed the leftist students. In 1980, he launched the "Cultural Revolution," closing universities—the hotbeds of leftist student organization—for years to purge them of Western and Marxist influences.The Final Slaughter (1981): When the student factions finally realized they had been duped and attempted to protest or resist, the regime labeled them Monafeqin (hypocrites) and "warriors against God." The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps rounded them up by the thousands.By the early 1980s, the mass executions moved from the Shah’s generals to the very students who had marched for the revolution. In prison complexes like Evin, hundreds of youth were executed daily. Estimates by human rights organizations indicate that between 1981 and 1985, thousands of political prisoners—mostly young leftists and student activists—were executed or tortured to death.
Every student in America should be taught this. They are not. The Red Green Alliance that is the Democratic Party and some right wing Republicans again have their heads in the sand.
The Ayatollah executed whole families and killed Judges and if they did not carry out his orders. He proclaimed Death to America. Anyone who wanted to live fell in line. This is the same Ayatollah that Zohran Mamdani is associated as a Twelver Shia Muslim. Think about that.
Along with the Ayatollah in Iraq, Supreme Leader of Iran Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, was the preeminent spiritual authority of this Shia sect. He became the Thermidorian Leader of Iran, an afterthought, murderous, violent, Islamic. No one thought he was a player nor a threat. He was the wolf in Islamic clothing. Taqiyyah at its finest. He was not a radical, he was fundamental, intolerant, supremacist and violent and followed the Islamic scripture as laid out in the Koran and the Hadiths to the T. The West, and progressive's in particular, are blind to this threat to this day. In fact, they have been taken in by it.
The Regime has been at war with America and the West since his return. The Ayatollah filled the vacuum. Violence was his currency as it has been for Islamism since 624 when Muhammad migrated from Mecca to Medina (Hijrah). As much as Rand Paul and Tucker want to be Isolationists it takes two to play. To be America First is to defend our nation anywhere against real threats. Ballistic missiles and nuclear bombs are real. Iran has been at war and a threat that "head in the sand" Western leaders have ignored until now.
Is it a good deal? Probably not. That said, we have decapitated their military, and for now destroyed their nuclear capability. As Churchill once said, "Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." I get it Rand, it would be great to pretend the Regime would leave us alone. They never have, and they will not.
Ebrahim Azizi, a former Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander who currently serves as the head of Tehran's foreign policy and national security committee is quoted last weekend commenting on the talks in Switzerland. "We have said many times that we accept a negotiation as a continuation of the battlefield.”“America is a hostile infidel enemy, and jihad against it with all one's strength is obligatory for every free and faithful believer who adheres to the rulings of Islam.” JD doesn't get it, DT and Marco do. To be continued.