Iranian Ransom Payment

You all know that the US paid $400M in cash to Iran in what was clearly a ransom payment for the release of the two captured boat crews, recently.  It now comes to light that an additional $1.3 billion (billion with a “b”) was also paid in cash to bring the total recent payments to $1.7B. (1)

The administration has come up with all kinds of stories about these payments in an attempt to portray them as normal business dealings (with Iran??) and whatnot.  Since they could have been paid at any time over the last decade or so, the timing pretty cleary demonstrates that they were ransom payments for the release of the boat crews.

The funds came from a Treasury Department slush fund known as the Judgment Fund.  Use of these funds allowed the President to bypass Congressional approval.

On a seemingly unrelated note, the Navy is reporting on a near daily basis that Iranian vessels are harassing US warships on an increasingly aggressive basis.  A recent example is the report that three US ships were harassed in a single day.

“Three more U.S. ships were harassed by Iranian patrol boats over three incidents on Wednesday, U.S. 5th Fleet spokesman Cmdr. Bill Urban told USNI News on Thursday.” (2)

So, setting aside geopolitical questions about dealings with Iran, my question to all those advocates of a policy of restraint out there is, how’s that appeasement working out?

We’re not getting much for our ransom payment are we?  Appeasement is not working any better for us than it did for Neville Chamberlain.  History is pretty clear about the outcome of appeasement.

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(1)http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/08/24/us-paid-iran-1-3b-two-days-after-400m-cash-transfer.html

(2)USNI News website, “Three More U.S. Navy Ships Harassed By Iranian Patrol Boats”, Sam LaGrone, 25-Aug-2016,

https://news.usni.org/2016/08/25/three-u-s-navy-ships-harassed-iranians-patrol-boats

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