Not a ransom though:
So, according to State Department spokesman John Kirby, the money was given contingent upon the release of the prisoners. But it wasn’t a ransom.
This looks horrid.
Slee
Nothing new in that story. Yeah the optics/timing look bad, but it’s what politics/diplomacy is. It’s like making sausage.
You borrow my hedge clippers.
Months go by, I keep asking, you have excuses why you can’t return them yet.
Finally, you need to ask a favor of me, maybe helping you move.
I say okay, I’ll help you, but I want my damn hedge clippers back.
So, my offer to help you move was contingent on me getting back something that was mine anyway. Is that ransom?
It’s not the deal, it’s the entity doing the deal with. “You” isn’t Iran. It think that’s what people get upset about.
That being said, I’m pretty much OK with it. This is how things get done in the real world, and I don’t think Iran is the Great Satan when you consider we readily deal with Saudi Arabia.
I cannot make myself care too much about this. Sure, we don’t deal with terrorists, blah blah blah, but nobody’s saying we need to offer our boys back to them for the $400 million. Its a tough situation, if it were your son, your father, or brother, you say to hell with is, America has plenty of money, and I’d trade it all to get my son/brother/father back. So even knowing that this may help Iran do more terrorism, I cannot summon the emotion to care about it. And I’d feel the same way if it was Bush doing it, or some other Republican.
The $400M was money we already owed them. As long as we’re going to be paying it anyway, it makes sense to add contingencies.
What do you think the response would have been if we had repaid it without securing release of the prisoners? The Republicans would be clamoring for hearings about how we gave up our best leverage.
If Iran had $400 million of the US government’s money in its banks for decades as a political bargaining chip I wonder if the usual suspects of this outrage would mind?
It’s rhetorical. Of course they would mind. Iran would be holding our property ‘hostage’.
BTW, this thread on the exact same topic has been active for at least a week.
Better that this comes out now than in late October. Much stink about very little. If it was US money, then the critics would be right to howl. Iranian money, not so much. Trump will wail and wave those tiny fingers about, but he’ll just spend more time preaching to his choir about it.
^This
Empty criticism is a beast that cannot be fed. There’s literally nothing Obama could do to win Republican support.
I am actually not that angry about the deal, in fact it was anti-ransom. We held their money hostage in exchange for them giving us our prisoners back.
What I would be angry about if he was still relevant is yet another example of Obama NOT representing a change from the old way of doing politics. He didn’t even have to spin this thing the way he did, but he did it anyway. Typical politician, spins even when he could have been direct.
They should have been clear from the beginning. Own goal. Boo!
Well, shame on the media for reporting this.
The job of the media is to make a profit from advertisers as it informs the public, not recklessly present half truths to aid stirring contraversy for the click bait sound bite oblivious.
Yes, shame on them. They are responsible for the shoddy content they produce, the uninformed public and the demise of their very occupation.
It’s money we owed them anyway. More accurately, it was their money. If anything, we placed conditions on them getting their own money back; they were the ones paying a ransom. It’s a stupid, non-story.
Yeah, if there is a story here, that’s it. It’s not the “crime”, its the cover-up.
Agreed.
I don’t even think it was a cover up, the administration denied at one point that the money was ransom, and basically–it wasn’t. It’s not ransom to repay a legal debt.
Plus lets be honest, Iran has put several Americans in prison over the past 10-15 years…they always release them, and without the government paying them anything. I think this only came up because we happened to have a few people in Iranian prisons at the same time we had agreed to pay this money we’ve owed since the Carter administration.
If anything, we actually were acting improperly since the release of Iran’s funds was actually a condition of the nuclear deal, so by us holding it to force the release of the prisoners we actually were reneging, technically, on our deal with Iran.
So if anything Obama got us more than we were actually entitled to in this situation.
In the grand scheme of things, I applaud efforts to improve relations with Iran. I have no illusions about Iran being a “good guy” or anything, but on the spectrum of good guys <-----> bad guys, they’re closer to the good side than Saudi Arabia is. I don’t see that we need to be so intensely antagonistic towards each other.
I totally agree with this. The Iranian people are in general pretty favorable towards us.
One of the things I do like about Obama is his willingness to discard the counterproductive US policy of not talking to certain countries. It really makes no sense except as a “we’ll show you!” attitude. During the entire Cold War, we were always in constant talks with the USSR. Nixon went to China, and the world didn’t end. So we can talk to Iran and Cuba in this day and age. We don’t have to agree with them, but there is nothing to lose by just talking. And especially with Iran, we do have quite a few areas of mutual interest.