by John Perazzo
The long disturbing record of Biden’s Special Envoy for Iran.
During his first few days as President, Joe Biden named Robert Malley as his U.S. Special Envoy for Iran.
Malley has a long history of antipathy toward Israel, as well as a
profoundly deep reserve of patience with Iran and other enemies of the
Jewish state. Most notably, he helped negotiate the Iran nuclear deal of 2015 — known officially as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — and he subsequently opposed the
Trump Administration’s “maximum pressure” sanctions against Tehran.
From the start of his tenure with the Biden Administration, Malley called for
the U.S. to return to the JCPOA as swiftly as possible, and to fully
dismantle the sanctions that Trump had reimposed on Iran.
Talks between the Biden Administration and Iran began formally in
Vienna in April 2021, but were paused shortly before Iran’s presidential
elections in June. Then, in late November, Tehran dispatched to Vienna a
new negotiating team whose diplomats made more demands and offered
fewer concessions than had their predecessors. By December 3, the talks
had stalled. Six days later, Malley, conveying the Biden Administration’s desperate desire to strike some sort of agreement, stated
that U.S. negotiators would be willing to sit down with their Iranian
counterparts “at any time and any place” – preferably “face-to-face.”
America, said Malley, was “prepared to get back into the deal as soon as
possible – as soon as Iran is.” “Then,” he added, “we would lift all of
the sanctions that are inconsistent with the JCPOA.”
But as of today, no deal with Iran seems to be on the horizon. As recently as March 27, Malley admitted
to having little faith that the JCPOA could be revived anytime soon. “I
can't be confident it is imminent,” he lamented, noting how hard it is
to bridge the gap.”
Americans can only hope and pray that Malley and his cohorts are not
successful at reviving the JCPOA – or anything even remotely resembling
it. Consider some of the highly troubling elements of the original
agreement:
- Iran was permitted to keep and operate more than 5,000 nuclear centrifuges, the machines necessary for enriching uranium to the degree necessary for the production of nuclear weapons.
- Iran received $150 billion in revenue from sanctions relief, even though Obama-Biden acknowledged that Iran would likely use some portion of that money to fund its military and terrorist activities.
- Iran was prohibited from purchasing weapons from other countries for five years, and from buying missile technology for eight years. But there were two enormously significant exceptions: Russia and China could continue to make weapons deals with Iran.
- Iran was given the discretion to block international inspectors from its military installations.
- Only inspectors from countries that had diplomatic relations with Iran would be given access to Iranian nuclear sites. Thus, there would be no American inspectors.
- Sanctions were lifted on critical parts of Iran’s military, including a previously existing travel ban against Qasem Suleimani, leader of the terrorist Quds force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
- Iran would not be required to renounce terrorism against the United States, as the Obama-Biden Administration deemed such an expectation “unrealistic.”
- Iran would not be required to affirm its “clear and unambiguous … recognition of Israel’s right to exist” — a requirement that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had pleaded for.
- Whatever restrictions were placed on Iran’s nuclear program, would expire — due to so-called “sunset clauses” — at various times over the ensuing 5 to 11 years.
In light of the fact that the man who helped negotiate the JCPOA
monstrosity is today a key official in the Biden Administration, it is
well worth exploring more deeply who this man actually is.
Malley was born in 1963 and lived in
France from 1969-1980. His mother—a native New Yorker—worked for
the United Nations delegation of the National Liberation Front, the
leftist, anti-American political party that led the independence
movement in Algeria in the 1950s and early ’60s. His father, the late Simon Malley, was a key figure in the Egyptian Communist Party. The elder Malley was bitterly anti-Israel; a confidante of PLO leader Yasser Arafat;
an inveterate critic of “Western imperialism”; a supporter of various
leftist revolutionary “liberation movements,” particularly the
Palestinian cause; and a beneficiary of Soviet funding. He also
published a radical magazine about Africa, titled Afrique-Asie, which supported a variety of leftist “liberation movements” as well as the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Robert Malley earned a J.D. at Harvard Law School, which he attended at the same time as Barack Obama. Malley subsequently served as: a Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations; a member of the U.S. National Security Council from 1994-96; National Security Advisor Sandy Berger’s executive assistant from 1996-98; and President Bill Clinton’s Special Assistant for Arab-Israeli Affairs from 1998-2001. In July 2000, Malley was a member of the U.S. peace team that participated in the Camp David Summit between Bill Clinton (who brokered the talks), Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat. The talks ended without an agreement.
Malley has written numerous controversial articles—some of which were co-authored with Hussein Agha, a former advisor to Arafat—blaming Israel and exonerating Arafat for the failure at Camp David. For instance, in a July 2001 op-ed (titled “Fictions About the Failure at Camp David”) which was published in the The New York Times, Malley alleged that Israeli—not Palestinian—inflexibility had caused the previous year’s peace talks to fail.
Malley’s account of the Camp David negotiations is entirely
inconsistent with the recollections of the key figures who participated
in those talks, most notably then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak,
U.S. President Bill Clinton, and U.S. Ambassador Dennis Ross (Clinton’s
Middle East envoy). According to Ross, the peace efforts failed for one
reason only: because Arafat wanted them to fail. “[F]undamentally,” said Ross,
“I do not believe he [Arafat] can end the conflict. We had one critical
clause in this agreement, and that clause was, this is the end of the
conflict. Arafat’s whole life has been governed by struggle and a cause …
[F]or him to end the conflict is to end himself…. Barak was able to
reposition Israel internationally. Israel was seen as having
demonstrated unmistakably it wanted peace, and the reason it [peace]
wasn’t … achievable was because Arafat wouldn’t accept.”
In 2007, Malley became a foreign policy advisor to Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama.
In January 2008, one U.S. security official, speaking on condition of anonymity, stated that Malley “has expressed sympathy to Hamas and Hezbollah and [has] offered accounts of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations that don’t jibe with the facts.”
At that time, Malley was the Middle East and North Africa Program Director for the International Crisis Group (ICG), which has received extensive funding from the Open Society Foundations (whose founder, George Soros,
has served on both the ICG Board and Executive Committee). Covering
events from Iran to Morocco, Malley’s team of analysts focused most
heavily on the Arab-Israeli conflict, the political and military
developments in Iraq, and Islamist movements across the Middle East.
On May 9, 2008, the Barack Obama presidential campaign was forced to sever its ties with Malley after the latter told the Times of London that he had been in regular contact with the genocidal terrorist group Hamas as part of his work for ICG.
On November 5, 2008, Middle East Newsline reported
that Obama had “sent senior foreign-policy advisor Robert Malley to
Egypt and Syria over the last few weeks to outline the Democratic
candidate’s policy on the Middle East.” The report added that Malley had
“relayed a pledge from Obama that the United States would seek to
enhance relations with Cairo as well as reconcile with Damascus.” “The
tenor of the messages was that the Obama administration would take into
greater account Egyptian and Syrian interests,” said an aide to Malley.
At a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in 2010, Malley called for the U.S. “to unveil a
set of parameters” that included the creation of a Palestinian state
along the “1967 borders,” which would have been a suicidal move for
Israel. He also advocated the deployment of third-party armed forces in
Judea-Samaria, and the forced relocation of hundreds of thousands of
Jews from their homes in that region. And he said that Israel should
relinquish control of the Golan Heights to Syria, on the premise that
Syria was “unlikely to sponsor militant groups … [or] destabilize the region … once an agreement has been reached.”
After President Obama’s 2012 reelection, he appointed Malley to serve as his Senior Director for
the Gulf Region and Syria. Obama pledged, however, that Malley would
have no involvement in issues related to Israel and the Palestinians.
In February 2014, it was announced that Malley would become the next senior director of
the National Security Council (NSC), where he would be in charge of
managing relations between the United States and its allies in the
Persian Gulf. In March 2015, Obama appointed Malley to direct the NSC’s policy in relation to the entire Middle East, including Israel. In November 2015, Malley was named as President Obama’s senior advisor for America’s counter-ISIL campaign in Iraq and Syria.
After President Obama left office in 2017, Malley returned to the
International Crisis Group, serving as its Vice President for Policy. He
subsequently became the organization’s President and CEO, positions he
held until January 2021.
According to a report in The Washington Examiner,
Malley in July 2019 met secretly with Iranian foreign minister Mohammad
Javad Zarif in an effort to: (a) undermine and sabotage the Trump
Administration’s efforts to defuse tensions between the U.S. and Iran,
and (b) lay the groundwork for a future relationship between Tehran and
a Democratic American
President. That Malley-Zarif meeting likely contributed to the failure,
two months later, of a Trump attempt to open a back channel of
communication with leading Iranian officials during the U.N. General
Assembly meeting in New York City. Says the Examiner:
“The attempt at counter-diplomacy offers a window into the deep relationships Mr. Zarif forged with influential U.S. liberals over the past decade. These relationships blossomed into what high-level national security and intelligence sources say allowed the Iranian regime to bypass Mr. Trump and work directly with Obama administration veterans that Tehran hoped would soon return to power in Washington.”
In January 2020, Malley condemned the
Trump Administration’s targeted killing of Islamic Revolutionary Guard
Corps (IRGC) terrorist leader Qassem Soleimani, who was actively planning additional
attacks against U.S. interests in the Middle East. Malley claimed that
the killing of Soleimani made it “more likely” that global tensions
would eventually “drag the country into another Middle East war.” He was
wrong.
In November 2020, Malley condemned the
Trump Administration’s targeted killing of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a
designated Iranian terrorist and a leading IRGC nuclear scientist, on
grounds that his assassination would “make it all the more difficult for
[President Trump’s] successor to resume diplomacy with Iran.”
Surely the Iranian government today is deliriously happy to be dealing,
in its negotiations with the United States, with America’s appeaser
extraordinaire, Robert Malley.
John Perazzo
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/robert-malley-appeaser-extraordinaire-john-perazzo/
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