‘Disaster’: Fox’s Andy McCarthy Goes Scorched Earth on ‘Neville Trump’ Over ‘Laughable’ Iran Deal

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Fox News contributor Andy McCarthy has spent the last 24 hours burning crops and salting earth over President Donald Trump’s Memorandum of Understanding with Iran.

In a series of pieces for National Review, McCarthy left no doubt as to his view of the deal. In an initial post published on Monday evening under the headline, “Trump’s Iran Deal: Billions Up Front for Leading State Sponsor of Terrorism,” the former federal prosecutor argued that “It is laughable, of course, to speak of an agreement (or ‘understanding’) with Iran, which has a long, undeniable history of breaking agreements, in particular about its nuclear weapons ambitions. And while President Trump either doesn’t grasp or can’t be bothered to address the regime’s ideology, a core principle of sharia supremacism, including Iran’s Shiite version, is that lying to the enemy is a key part of warfare (‘War is deception,’ said Islam’s prophet in an oft-quoted hadith).”

“Since the administration is trying to dizzy us with spin about the MOU rather than just showing us the MOU, it’s important to understand: There is not an agreement. The MOU is an agreement to talk about an eventual agreement (and talk, and talk, and talk, as the Iranians have mastered doing) rather than to make binding commitments on matters of vital American interest,” he continued. “The only thing that seems clear is that the world’s leading state sponsor of anti-American terrorism is going to get lots of money — we might even analogize it to ‘pallets of cash’ — for nothing more than opening the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran had not closed until Trump decided to launch a war he had no intention of fighting to victory and to wave off advisers who warned him that Iran could close the strait. The figure under discussion is $24 billion up front — that’s before we get to astronomical sums down the line.”

“On this score, the Washington Free Beacon’s Adam Kredo reports the Trump White House’s emphasis that Iran is merely getting ‘its own money back,’ not American taxpayer funds,” added McCarthy. “How stupid do they think we are?”

His next post, by the way, is titled “The Trump Administration Thinks We’re Imbeciles.”

“To repeat what I contended yesterday, they think we’re idiots. Let’s take it down to the simple basics. Trump’s agreement with Iran is not an agreement, it’s a memorandum of understanding (MOU), reportedly stating that the parties will talk about making an agreement, for infinitely extendable 60-day limits. That is, other than the billions to which the Trump administration has agreed to give the implacably anti-American jihadist regime, the MOU is a nothing that Neville Trump is peddling as peace in our time,” submitted McCarthy in it. “But to the extent the MOU is something, it is something very bad because if it were something good, we’d be reading it, not being spun about it.”

“The most ridiculous nonsense (admittedly, there’s a lot of competition here) is that Iran has foresworn nuclear weapons. Iran has always publicly foresworn nuclear weapons and emphasized that it is a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). That is what NPT members that aspire to nuclear weapons do. And as I recounted yesterday, just to make bigger fools out of us, Iran has also maintained that Ayatollah Khamenei even issued a fatwa against nukes (Khamenei was not qualified to issue fatwas, there wasn’t one in any event, and the regime zealously went about its nuclear weapons program even as it publicly claimed it neither wanted nor needed them). To see the president beating his chest that ‘Iran has agreed to never have a Nuclear Weapon!’ is really quite something,” wrote McCarthy. “A close second on the ridiculous meter is the insistence by Trump and Vice President Vance that Iran will not be getting a dime of U.S. taxpayer money. That’s a straw man. The point is that Iran gets access to funds — through sanctions relief and whatever cockamamie ‘investment fund’ the administration is conjuring. That the funds are not coming directly out of the U.S. treasury is beside the point.”

“Am I wrong that this MOU is a disaster? Am I wrong that the administration is insulting our intelligence? There’s a sure way to find out: Publish the MOU,” he concluded.

Finally, McCarthy took issue with a purported clause of the agreement requiring Israel cease fighting Hezbollah in Lebanon.

“I’ve assumed one of Iran’s main objectives was to drive a wedge between its two main enemies, the United States and Israel, by nudging the Trump administration into shielding Hezbollah from attacks by the Israel Defense Forces. To my mind, any written MOU would almost certainly be ambiguous on this point; after all, (a) Israel is not a party to the negotiations between the U.S. and Iran, (b) the U.S. cannot legally bind Israel, and (c) Hezbollah, which came into being murdering Americans, has been a formally designated terrorist organization under American law for nearly 30 years (among the first when such designations began),” he noted. “…if the Trump administration, with Vance on the point, has agreed that the United States will protect Iran’s Hezbollah jihadists from the IDF, we would truly have hit a historic new low.”

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