Iranian forces have launched rockets from Syria at IDF positions in the Golan Heights. Israel has retaliated. They must have a death wish. This could get interesting.
I would love to see Israel just level Iran. They are certainly capable.
edit: I didn't provide a link because there are plenty of accounts. Choose your source. ------------------
[This message has been edited by williegoat (edited 05-09-2018).]
What has happened in the past before the deal is not relevant because the government of Iran is significantly different(it is far more moderate now).
*snerk*
I figured that the IDF knew that an attack was imminent when I heard news the day before yesterday that they had opened and provisioned all existing Golan bomb shelters.
Things are going to get very serious now.
2 days ago:
Israel threatens to 'liquidate' Assad if Iran launches attacks from Syria
How easy we forget. On November 19, 2015, the State Department sent a letter to then-Representative Mike Pompeo that severely undercuts the notion that the Iran deal represents any form of binding American commitment. It turns out that the Obama administration not only acknowledged that the deal wasn’t a treaty (obvious enough), but it also admitted that it wasn’t “an executive agreement” or even a “signed document.” Here are the key paragraphs:
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is not a treaty or an executive agreement, and is not a signed document. The JCPOA reflects political commitments between Iran, the P5+1 (the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, China), and the European Union. As you know, the United States has a long-standing practice of addressing sensitive problems in negotiations that culminate in political commitments.
The success of the JCPOA will depend not on whether it is legally binding or signed, but rather on the extensive verification measures we have put in place, as well as Iran’s understanding that we have the capacity to re-impose — and ramp up — our sanctions if Iran does not meet its commitments.
Back in 2015, there were loud calls — not least from senators — for President Barack Obama to ask the Senate to ratify the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran, calling it a “treaty.” Instead, he chose to enter into an executive agreement, which has become something of a trend: Treaties are a tiny fraction of international agreements overall. A 2007 study by political scientists Kiki Caruson and Victoria Farrar-Myers found that between 1977 and 1996 presidents negotiated nearly 4,000 executive agreements — but only 300 treaties.
Tuesday, though, many opponents of the agreement argued that Obama’s failure to seek ratification was what allowed President Trump to end it unilaterally. According to Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.): “Donald Trump isn’t ripping up a treaty. … President Obama made a bad deal with Iran without support from Congress, and today President Trump is pulling out of President Obama’s personal commitment, and he doesn’t need Congress’s support to do so.” Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) tweeted that “President Trump had every right to withdraw the U.S. from what was effectively an Obama executive agreement.”
Perhaps these lawmakers are fans of Thomas Jefferson’s 1801 manual on parliamentary practice, which reads, “Treaties being declared, equally with the laws of the United States, to be the supreme law of the land, it is understood that an act of the legislature alone can declare them infringed and rescinded.”
But presidents haven’t necessarily “understood” things the same way.
Of all the arguments for the Trump administration to honor the nuclear deal with Iran, none was more risible than the claim that we gave our word as a country to keep it.
“Our”?
The Obama administration refused to submit the deal to Congress as a treaty, knowing it would never get two-thirds of the Senate to go along. Just 21 percent of Americans approved of the deal at the time it went through, against 49 percent who did not, according to a Pew poll. The agreement “passed” on the strength of a 42-vote Democratic filibuster, against bipartisan, majority opposition.
“The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (J.C.P.O.A.) is not a treaty or an executive agreement, and it is not a signed document,” Julia Frifield, then the assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs, wrote then-Representative Mike Pompeo in November 2015, referring to the deal by its formal name. It’s questionable whether the deal has any legal force at all.
Build on political sand; get washed away by the next electoral wave. Such was the fate of the ill-judged and ill-founded J.C.P.O.A., which Donald Trump killed on Tuesday by refusing to again waive sanctions on the Islamic Republic. He was absolutely right to do so — assuming, that is, serious thought has been given to what comes next.
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