UNDO OBAMA’S GENEROSITY AND MAKE THE MULLAHS RUN OUT OF MOOLAH

What If America Were to Take Out Iran’s Main Oil Refineries?

By Dov Fischer

Today, the greatest threat to our long-term security comes from Iran. (Honorable mention: our American-based Corrupt Journalist Corps.) If Iran’s mullahs aimed solely at driving other Muslim countries crazy, in an effort to make Shiite Islam regnant over Sunni or Wahhabi Islam, that would be their religious problem, none of our business anywhere in America except in Ilhan Omar’s anti-Jewish Somali district. The thing is, Iran is fixated on “Death to America,” and they are determined to create a nuclear bomb with intercontinental ballistic missiles to deliver them. In 1979 they took our embassy for 444 days into the 1981 Reagan inauguration, and they recently started up again. Yet, in the aftermath of the Qassem Soleimani elimination, something became unexpectedly more clear to many of us: They are trying at warp speed to get to the point that they can destroy us, but right now they actually are much weaker than many of us realized. Under the impact of the Trump Administration’s economic sanctions, the mullahs are breaking financially. They cannot afford a war. The mullahs are running out of moolah. And they are encountering enormous trouble at home.

The Corrupt Journalist Corps do not cover in our media the anti-government riots that take place in Iran, but I also watch an hour every night of news out of Israel on their Hebrew-language Kan Channel 11. For obvious reasons, they devote less time to Nancy Pelosi, Sanctuary Homelessness in San Francisco, and weekend shootings in Chicago — and more time to their survival issues, including nightly footage out of Iran. There is an entire segment of the Iran population that wants to take down the mullahs. Many of them long for the pre-Khomeini years of prosperity and comparative freedom. The Shah did have a terrible internal police force, the SAVAK, which so many of us detested reading about, but many of us now understand forty years later what he was dealing with. The indigenous Iranian population that wants to take down the mullahs includes an amalgam of those whose values yearn for what was, and others who do not share those values but want their country to stop bankrolling international terror adventurism that is bankrupting them at home by sending hundreds of millions of dollars to foment terror via the mullahs’ surrogates throughout the Mideast from Afghanistan to Yemen to Lebanon to Syria to Gaza. They are feeling it really hard in Iran. The sanctions are taking their toll, despite the disaster of Joe Biden and Obama having sent the mullahs between $55 billion and $150 billion, including $1.7 billion in cash, highlighted by the $400 million that Biden and Obama flew to them. As reported by CNN in the days before Trump:

President Barack Obama approved the $400 million transfer, which he had announced in January as part of the Iran nuclear deal. The money was flown into Iran on wooden pallets stacked with Swiss francs, euros and other currencies as the first installment of a $1.7 billion settlement resolving claims at an international tribunal at The Hague over a failed arms deal under the time of the Shah.

That money that Joe Biden and Obama sent them went into funding the terror, the mayhem, the bombs, the nuclear development. It is a matter of semantics as to whether the cash was made payable to “Nuclear Weapons Account” or “Persian Rug Research and Development.” Money is fungible. Give me money to buy my kids Chanukah presents, and I have more money for groceries because otherwise I have to use some of the groceries money for presents. But the Trump sanctions are forcing Iran to cut back on funding international terror, and they are leaving less money at home. Under the sanctions, Iran’s economy was estimated by the International Monetary Fund to have contracted by 9.5 percent in 2019, while unemployment rose to 16.8 percent. Iran’s Brent Crude exports have dropped precipitously. The rial, Iran’s currency, has lost more than half its value. Inflation has risen from 9 percent to 35.7 percent.

The Iranian people are hurting very intensely, and they are rising up against the mullahs. And that leads me to wonder: What if we were to prepare now, upon the next Iranian provocation, to bomb to smithereens Iran’s main oil refineries in Abadan, Esfahan, Bandar-e Abbas, Tehran, Rak, and Tabriz? No boots on the ground. No adventures, no regime change from outside. Just a boost to those inside Iran who want to overthrow a medieval theocracy that is prepared to bring the whole world — and especially us — to Armageddon if they are not stopped. Yes, the first footage from Tehran will show the usual “Death to America!” demonstrations, as they did after Soleimani was eliminated. And then the impact will set in. There was a time when Hitler could have been stopped. Europe let it pass by appeasing him. A time right after World War II when Stalin could have been reined in. He was appeased with his Warsaw Bloc. When Mao could have been stopped. We passed.

The weakness of Iran’s response to Soleimani’s removal raises the question whether this is the time to raise the economic ante for Iranians to contemplate what half a century of the mullahs have wrought for them. And whether they would be happier with a government less intent on building nuclear weapons and exporting hundreds of millions to finance overseas terror, and more focused on feeding the citizenry at home.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is part of an article that appeared in The American Spectator on January 12.