Click here: to donate by Credit Card
Or here: to donate by PayPal
Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794
Thank you very much and God bless you.
Posted on 06/24/2026 5:39:37 AM PDT by Tom Tetroxide
The 14-point text is unambiguous on the point the White House is most eager to fog. It commits the United States, "with regional partners," to develop a "plan with at least USD 300 billion for the reconstruction and economic development of the Islamic Republic of Iran" -- $3 billion of which has, according to the unsurpassed journalist, Lee Smith, already been sent to Iran through by way of the United Arab Emirates. The president has called reports of that figure "fake news" and insisted nobody is putting up "ten cents." The clause nevertheless sits prominently in the document he signed.
Only one question really matters: what does the agreement, if honored by Iran, deliver? It leaves enriched uranium inside Iran, concedes a right to enrichment that was recently a red line, permits the Iranian ballistic-missile program Trump now defends supposedly because other countries have missiles too, and pours reconstruction money into an economy whose ruling institution is the brutal Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
An interim framework can easily be a device for extracting one concrete concession -- opening the shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz -- while the other clauses quietly expire.
Trump has repeated that if the deal collapses he will return to force – but who will do that after he is no longer president?
Each Israeli reprisal can trigger an Iranian walkout, and each walkout hands Washington a legal pretext to resume the war it paused. If Trump, however, is reluctant to use force against Iran again now, why should anyone think that he would be more inclined to use it later?
Without a united opposition to inherit power and without an army to seize Tehran, talk of liberation is a consolation, not a strategy. The war degraded the regime; it did not remove it -- and nothing in this agreement will. In fact, the MOU promises to enrich the IRGC again so that it can tighten its hold on the Iranian people even more viciously.
So the memorandum sits there, looking like the clumsiest concession an American administration has made to a sworn enemy in a generation...
The regime in Tehran, which has waited out many American presidents and means to wait out another, is betting they are bluffing about everything except the check.
After a war launched in February to end the Iranian nuclear threat, the United States has agreed to a 60-day ceasefire, the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, the lifting of its naval blockade, the unfreezing of Iranian assets, and an immense $300 billion reconstruction fund for the very regime the U.S. Air Force spent weeks degrading. The triumph turns out to be a recipe for everything Iran wanted and could not win on the battlefield.
The 14-point text is unambiguous on the point the White House is most eager to fog. It commits the United States, "with regional partners," to develop a "plan with at least USD 300 billion for the reconstruction and economic development of the Islamic Republic of Iran" -- $3 billion of which has, according to the unsurpassed journalist, Lee Smith, already been sent to Iran through by way of the United Arab Emirates. The president has called reports of that figure "fake news" and insisted nobody is putting up "ten cents." The clause nevertheless sits prominently in the document he signed.
To disclaim the funding by arranging for someone else to pay for it is a familiar maneuver. US Vice President J.D. Vance confirmed the transfer on CBS News and described a Gulf coalition that would finance Iran's recovery if Tehran behaved. Trump then turned and blamed Vance for the wording, saying that the statement "could have been a little more accurate." A vice president publicly scolded for telling the truth about his administration's own deal hardly projects strength or that the president is being straight with his public.
Vance answered not by reassuring the ally most threatened by the agreement, Israel, but by attacking it. In remarks aimed at Israel's government, he lashed out at members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's cabinet as ungrateful, declared that Israel had only one leader in the world who was a friend -- which is far from true -- and claimed the Israel's weapons were paid for by American taxpayers, while omitting that much of the intelligence shared with America comes from Israel, as does much of the military know-how.
His condescension carried the rest of what one needs to know about him. This is the same Vance who told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, "You are wrong" during a televised meeting at the White House, when Zelensky gently suggested that Ukraine needs stronger US support in battling the devastating invasion by Russia, an understatement if there ever was one. Russia continues to violate the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which it had guaranteed not to invade Ukraine if it gave up all its nuclear weapons – as it sadly did.
Here is the second-highest official in the United States telling Israel, which has just fought alongside America, to be quiet, be grateful, and that its survival is a favor it has not sufficiently repaid. American leaders have disagreed with Jerusalem for as long as the alliance has existed. Lecturing Israel about gratitude while handing its enemy $300 billion, and an agreement that all but guarantees its enemies the means to continue trying to destroy it, is a tack that is newer and nastier.
The arrogant tone might be tolerable if it were only distasteful. It rests, regrettably, on a falsehood about who won the war. The US campaign against Iran, dubbed Operation Epic Fury, was sold to the public as a feat of American airpower – which was real, spectacular and welcome. The targeting that made those strikes so precise did not come from satellites alone. It came from years of intelligence collected by Israel from inside Iran, which let the bombs find their marks. The men now telling Israel to be grateful are standing on the shoulders of the intelligence Israel handed them, without which the US could have gotten bogged down. That is the problem with the boast: Washington is presenting as its own a result it could not have accomplished by itself, and basing its diplomacy on the assumption that it could have done.
Only one question really matters: what does the agreement, if honored by Iran, deliver? It leaves enriched uranium inside Iran, concedes a right to enrichment that was recently a red line, permits the Iranian ballistic-missile program Trump now defends supposedly because other countries have missiles too, and pours reconstruction money into an economy whose ruling institution is the brutal Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
The scale is another factor that resists comprehension. The promised $300 billion fund is large enough to rebuild not only the economy of Iran but the apparatus of terrorist proxies controlled by it. Gulf analysts quoted in the Israeli media warn that the funds would free resources for Iran's proxy militias in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen. A regime that emerged from the war with the IRGC strengthened and its pragmatists dead is now to be financed back to dominance.
Probably no one actually believes that the agreement was ever meant to function as written. Washington has done this before. The three-phase plan for Gaza, announced with great solemnity, did accomplish the return of the remaining Israeli hostages in its opening stage, but then stalled, never advancing to the later phases meant to remake the territory. Phase one became the entire play. An interim framework can easily be a device for extracting one concrete concession -- opening the shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz -- while the other clauses quietly expire.
There is a more generous reading: If Trump signed in order to appear to give Iran everything, draw it to the table, and get the oil flowing before the midterms, all while knowing the structure would never hold, then the concessions are bait rather than surrender. The problem is that it seems from the memorandum of understanding (MOU) that most of the benefits to Iran are given up front, so the weak bargaining position that remains for the US can easily be dragged out by Iran past Trump's term in office.
Israel has stated plainly that it does not consider itself bound by the MOU so long as Hezbollah fires on its forces; it has kept striking Hezbollah strongholds in Lebanon.
Trump has repeated that if the deal collapses he will return to force – but who will do that after he is no longer president? If anyone imagines that a coalition of anyone will actually enforce anything after the first shot is fired by the IRGC, they are probably on some high-grade cannabis. We have already seen how that arrangement worked out in south Lebanon. It did not. That is why Israel is having to fight for its survival again there now.
Each Israeli reprisal can trigger an Iranian walkout, and each walkout hands Washington a legal pretext to resume the war it paused. If Trump, however, is reluctant to use force against Iran again now, why should anyone think that he would be more inclined to use it later? The weakness of it is that it depends on enemies who have spent 47 years learning to read American intentions better than Washington appears able to.
The optimistic reading is not the consensus even in Washington, and the unease inside the administration shows it. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, an Iran hawk of long standing and the official who ran the negotiations until the final week, vanished from public view the minute the deal was signed, then surfacing only as a glum figure behind the president at a press conference. A secretary of state who believes in this agreement would be trying to sell it. On Capitol Hill the reproaches were open: Senator Ted Cruz warned against handing billions to a regime that wants Americans dead. Senator Roger Wicker said the MOU negotiated away the victories of the war. The evangelical base that delivered Trump's coalition, and that regards the defense of Israel as scriptural obligation rather than policy preference, watched the administration, in the same week, scold Jerusalem and finance Iran.
Through all of this, one fantasy deserves to be retired. Regime change in Tehran has been wished for in every Western capital for nearly 50 years, but it was not the stated aim of this war -- apart from falsely promising the Iranians, who have been trying for years to remove their brutal regime, that "HELP IS ON ITS WAY." Instead, they seem to have decided to leave that dirty work to unarmed civilians with no weapons.
A regime falls when an organized force is ready to take power and when soldiers are willing to change sides -- and neither condition is yet in place in Iran. The Iranian opposition had been slaughtered, fractured and surveilled, and is leaderless, and the regime has spent decades locking every door. The United States will not deploy ground troops on Iranian soil. Without a united opposition to inherit power and without an army to seize Tehran, talk of liberation is a consolation, not a strategy. The war degraded the regime; it did not remove it -- and nothing in this agreement will. In fact, the MOU promises to enrich the IRGC again so that it can tighten its hold on the Iranian people even more viciously.
So the memorandum sits there, looking like the clumsiest concession an American administration has made to a sworn enemy in a generation, possibly exceeded only by having surrendered to the Taliban in Afghanistan. The danger is that this reading is the one being made in Beijing and Moscow: one where a superpower that bombs a country for weeks, then grants it $300 billion dollars and the right to nuclear weapons.
The US looks less like a chess player setting a trap than like a tired hegemon buying its way out of a war before an election. If China and Russia conclude that American threats expire on a domestic political calendar, the lesson will be applied again in Iran, as well as the Taiwan Strait and along the borders of Ukraine. Vance insulted an ally to defend the deal. Rubio disappeared. Trump denied what his own signature had endorsed. All three have staked their credibility on choosing not to finish what they had so brilliantly begun.
The regime in Tehran, which has waited out many American presidents and means to wait out another, is betting they are bluffing about everything except the check.
|
|
Click here: to donate by Credit Card Or here: to donate by PayPal Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794 Thank you very much and God bless you. |
I just tried to pee but all I could do is ‘Pierre’
None of this has been agreed to and most likely will never be. The Strait is open and oil is flowing, they have a cardboard leader and no army, navy, or air force, win!
I don't think that means it comes from us, just that the dollar is the medium and the measure, not the Euro, or the Yen.
Neither Russia nor China are that stupid. They understand what Trump is doing. But this journalist isn't smart enough to see it.
Taliban; no army, navy or air force——————— because they didn’t need one. Does the faction that has invaded and defeated France, Sweden, Germany and England have an army, navy or air force?
Those forces cannot be defeated by conventional means, because they don’t need conventional forces. Hamas, hezbollah, ISIS. We are being defeated by forces that don’t frankly CARE how powerful our armed forces are-— because they never intend to engage them, they choose to attack the heart of their enemies.
Bkmk
FTA—VP Vance lashed out at Netanyahu’s cabinet as “ungrateful,” declaring
that Israel had only one nation in the world who was a friend.
REALITY CHECK: Israel’s “friends” are utilitarian trading partners.
The US is the ONLY nation that blanketed Israel with $300 billion tax dollars.
REALITY CHECK: This is so much propaganda.
A. The infamous 911 in which 3400 Americans died was plotted in Israel’s backyard.
B. Israel’s foreign aid is conditioned on sharing intel with the US.
C. But Israel went incommunicado wrt 911.
America bore the brunt of 911 without a scintilla of warning from its “greatest ally.”
This “deal” is never going to happen. The Iranians will never agree to it. Trump is using this as a recess until the midterms are over.
Bingo! Nor smart enough to understand the MOU is just that, a memo in which the parties state they will discuss several specific points and not a fully executed enforceable contact.
On the other hand, the journalist may indeed be a brilliant individual who is simply deeply committed to an agenda.
That $300b investment number is vaporware, just like Saudi Arabia’s commitment to invest $1T in the US. What is real is the reopening of Iranian oil sales, which will flood the world with oil just in time for the elections. At $70 per barrel, with no Chinese discount, Iran earns a net profit of under $20b. The money doesn’t show up instantly, and even if it were able to buy new weapons, they won’t teleport to Iran. And a huge number of trained technicians are dead, along with whatever Chinese techs were in-country.
This is a maybe $20b hudna. Hostilities will resume after November. Trump has been ragging on Iran at regular intervals unprompted since the 80s, long before politics. Until he whacks the regime, his family will never be safe. His final term is his best and only chance to kill the regime stone dead, and GOP majorities will be needed so he gets the funding he needs. This is the pause that refreshes.
YEP!
That is a critical bottom line.
In this context, see also the recent Socialist gains in our domestic elections.
The threats are quite real with the same goal. The issue is whether we will recognize it in time to effectively deal with it.
That is a critical bottom line.
In this context, see also the recent Socialist gains in our domestic elections.
The threats are quite real with the same goal. The issue is whether we will recognize it in time to effectively deal with it.
Schumer:
The U.S. is worse off because of Trump’s incompetence, his ego, and his inability to listen to facts. Iran took Trump to the cleaners with this so-called “understanding.” Iran doesn’t have to cut off support for its terrorist proxies. Iran doesn’t have to give up ballistic missile production. Iran doesn’t have to make any hard commitments on its nuclear program now, and there’s no guarantee they make any in sixty days. But Iran does get to rake in billions of dollars in oil sales, hundreds of billions of dollars in reconstruction aid, and God knows how much more in potential fees Trump may let it impose on ships in the Strait of Hormuz. Not to mention the benefits Iran will get from the sanctions relief that Trump has promised with no idea of what he’ll get in return.
“If Trump wants to send hundreds of billions of dollars to Iran – then he’ll need to do so with Republican votes, because I’ll tell you, Democrats certainly won’t be helping Trump send $300 billion to Iran. Are my colleagues on the other side of the aisle prepared to send Iran $300 billion when economic needs are so severe here at home? That’s what Trump wants them to do.”
Schumer
VP Vance claimed correctly that Israel’s vast catalogue of weapons were paid for by American taxpayers.
US taxpayers are Israel’s largest supplier of military arms and defense equipment.
The US actually stores weapons designed to protect
American families IN ISRAEL.......for Israel’s use.
Key facts about the US arms stockpile in Israel:
War Reserves: The U.S. maintains the War Reserve Stockpile Allies-Israel (WRSA-I), a vast network of pre-positioned munitions and equipment inside Israel.
This stockpile is designed for U.S. troops in regional conflicts, but the US gives Israel quick emergency access.
Arms Imports: The United States supplies nearly 70% of all conventional arms imported by Israel.
Financial Backing: The U.S. and Israel have a 10-year Memorandum of Understanding (2019-2028) providing $38 billion in military aid, even though the US Congress passed a law which gives Israel as gifts American-made fighter jets, missiles, and defense systems.
There’s also Israel’s US tax dollar-financed billion dollar “Iron Dome” defense system.
This is information Israel does not want you to know
about. Ergo, the anti-semitism charges begin shortly.
cont
cont
The US is running out of weaponry to defend American families but a
foreign country-—Israel-—has tons of US weaponry....all financed by US taxpayers.
As of January 2026, the obedient US Congress finalized $6.67 billion tax
dollars in gifts of US arms for Israel to enhance ITS defense capabilities:
<><>new gifts of US Apache helicopters,
<><>gifts of US armored vehicles,
<><>and US tax-dollars for vehicle power packs
These 2026 gifts are additions
<><>to significant ongoing, long-term US tax dollar military assistance
<><>“emergency” US tax dollars Israel tells the Congress it “needs”
<><>tax dollar billions for killings in Gaza
<><>and Israel’s predictable need for “security.”
Key Components of recent 2026 “US tax dollar gifts” to Israel:
<><>$3.8 billion tax dollars for 30 AH-64E Apache attack helicopters
<><>related US arms equipment
<><>$1.98 billion US tax dollars for Joint Light Tactical Assault Vehicles (JLTAVs).
<><>$740 million tax dollars for Namer armored personnel carrier power packs.
<><>tax-dollar subsidized utility helicopters
<><>plus unnamed other US tax-subsidized equipment.
The bought and paid for Congress earlier approved over $14 billion in tax dollars
for defense replenishment w/ US arms, and unnamed Israeli “security” needs.
<><>a 10-year Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was drafted
<><>covers $38 Billion US tax dollars in military aid 2019–2028
<><>$33B tax dollars in weaponry “gifts”
<><>$5 billion tax dollars in missile defense gifts.
<><>including precision-guided munitions and bunker busters.
The US tax-paid weapons are “gifts to Israel:”
<><>to defend its borders
<><>to protect its population against current and future threats,
<><>for further forays into Iran to achieve secret Israeli goals
<><>and for Israel’s continued bombardment of Lebanon.
To me, this looks like dishonest reporting.
President Trump did not sign an "agreement" to be "honored", he signed a memorandum of understanding laying out the subjects to be discussed in future negotiations.
It is not a final agreement of any sort.
To answer the author's question, I posted this back on April 7:
There are several mutually exclusive factions remaining within Iran that are competing for control: 1) the IRGC is the fanatical wing, who are seeking an apocalypse to usher in the return of the 12th Imam; 2) the Ayatollah and the mullahs, who want Islamic law to rule the world; 3) the Artesh, or regular army made up of conscripts, that is secular and intended to defend against invasion; 4) what remains of a diplomatic corp, probably aligned with the religious leadership; 5) the Basij, the "shock troops" of the IRGC whose purpose is to terrorize the Iranian people into submission.
President Trump's escalating rhetoric is psychological, intended to drive the Artesh to lay down their arms and rebel against the IRGC. Trump wants these ordinary citizens to believe that the IRGC is using them as fodder for their goal of annihilation as the precursor of the return of the 12th Imam.
Someone on FR a few days ago asked the question, how do you negotiate away from mutually assured destruction when one side wants that destruction? That's the situation that President Trump is faced with.
The answer is that you can't. The only thing left is to collapse their society before they can attain their goal. If Iran would collapse anyway if the IRGC is successful in attaining their armageddon, then the goal must be to collapse it first under our conditions to prevent them from having the means to finish the job.
Then we can go in and root out the remnants of the IRGC, and then rebuild the power plants, rebuild the oil infrastructure, and rebuild the Persian state as a secular nation that is ready to join the community of nations. The Iranian people must do their part to come back from the collapse to make the country what they want it to be. Currently, it's the IRGC + Basij that is preventing that from happening.
A series of regionally funded reconstruction projects managed by the major engineering companies in the Middle East will be the foot in the door to opening up Iran. It will provide jobs to the Iranian people, it will naturally import secular exposure into Iran that will affect everything from workplace attire during construction, as well as establishing personal relationships with others from "free" countries.
Hopefully, it will create enough conflict between the region's financial power-players and the Iranian militant hard-liners that the people will finally get to choose a side: the extreme religious subjegation that used the people as human shields against the IRGC, or the secular way of life of those who are in the country to rebuild it.
-PJ
I do not support any US funds going to Iran and all funds should stop going to the Taliban
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.