Dear America,
In the never-ending quest for a scandal they can build into something, the Republicans have now seized upon the $400 million that we paid to Iran just after that country released a few Americans whom they were holding, which are not being characterized as hostages. No one ever talks about what the Americans in question were allegedly doing in Iran, but that may well be beside the point. The fact is that they were there, under arrest, and we got them sent home in some fashion. Of course, the Republicans original complaint about the Iran nuclear deal was that we got nothing from it...not even release of the Americans that Iran was holding. Now we've gotten some of them back, as they insisted we should during the course of the Iran nuclear negotiations, so they have to find some other way to complain about them. The complaint on which they have settled is that the United States doesn't pay ransom, and that's what the $400 million was. It was ransom in exchange for hostages. And in reality, there were hostages involved: 400 million of them. But we didn't pay the ransom. Iran did.
We have owed Iran nearly $1.4 billion since the Shah was ousted by the first Ayatolla Khomeini. The Shah had made a deal with the United States for arms...jets, I believe...but the planes were never delivered because we certainly weren't going to arm an anti-American reactionary republic in the middle east. So we've been holding that money since the early 70's waiting for the international court in The Hague to rule on whether we had to pay it, which apparently it was expected to do any time now. But as is often the case with litigation, negotiations continued in private, and eventually it was agreed between the parties that the United States would pay the $400 million, even though as yet, no judgment has been entered. And in consequence of the voluntary nature of the repayment, it was agreed that we wouldn't have to pay any interest on the debt, which had been calculated hypothetically at $1.3 billion. So, in reality, we were holding 400 million hostages that Iran wanted desperately enough that they agreed not to wait for the international court to enter a judgment in their favor and levy punitive interest in the bargain. Put another way, we used Iran's money for three decades or so, and not only never paid interest on it, we got three American prisoners out of Iran in the bargain: a pretty good deal...about which the Republicans are now complaining...because they didn't do it.
Republican efforts to turn little ones into big ones aren't new. They tried for two years to make something out of the fact that Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State when our consulate in Benghazi, Libya was overrun and our ambassador was killed. But in spite of five commission investigations, one of them lasting over two years, they found no link between Clinton's conduct of her office and the deaths of American diplomatic and security personnel, which the chairman of the committee, Trey Gowdy, admitted only grudgingly and with bogus qualifications when he publicly announced the dissolution of the committee. He even looked like a bulldog with a bone when he did it, but no matter how he tried, he couldn't find any meat on it. These former prosecutors all think they're the Tasmanian Devil and then they turn out to be Goofy instead. And that they all seem to be Republicans is somehow fitting.
Of course, there is still the infamous email server and the claim that Hillary Clinton risked revelation of secret information by using it, but so far, there hasn't been any disclosure of information that was marked classified at the time of its arrival or departure from the server. I have said it before and I'll say it again...as if everyone else, including Clinton hasn't said it ten times already...that private server was a foolish mistake. It does reflect badly on her, but not because there was really any risk of classified information being spilled. It reflects a tendency toward bad judgment in certain areas of her activities, and we have had enough bad judgments by presidents in the past fifty years. That's an argument that would give Republicans some credibility, but they insist on emphasizing issues that just make them look like scheming politicians. I don't think that's going to work out for them this November.
Still, with all the mud they throw against the wall, many people will seize on it as a reason to vote against Clinton even though none of it has stuck so far. The Republicans seem to be thinking that volume will result in credence among voters. But we're not that stupid...are we?
Your friend,
Mike
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