A series of Frankensteins

Compensating the late terrorist, Qasem Soliemeni, was part of the Iran nuclear deal. According to the Daily Beast:

Among the big winners in the agreement to curtail Iran’s nuclear program, count a notorious and shadowy Iranian general who helped Shiite militias in Iraq kill American soldiers and who has come to the rescue of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.

You’ll find his name, Qasem Soleimani, buried in an annex (PDF) of the unremittingly dense Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, along with some of his colleagues from the senior ranks of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, as well as its various divisions and corporate fronts. They’ll all be granted some sanctions relief as part of the U.S.-brokered deal to curtail Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon.

For those who don’t trust the Daily Beast, here’s AEI:

Buried on page 95 of the draft of the nuclear agreement released by the Russians is the fact that sanctions will be lifted on Qassem Soleimani, head of the Qods Force, the elite unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps charged with export of revolution. In short, Soleimani is responsible for the deaths of more Americans than any living terrorist, and perhaps any dead one as well. Lifting sanctions on Soleimani is like agreeing to do business with Osama Bin Laden on September 12, 2001.

Imagine we could dturn back the calendar to the Arab Spring. There’s an apparent opportunity to overthrow Assad by arming his enemies. The fallen Khadaffy’s arsenal is available. What could be more natural than using these to arm anti-Assad forces?

But things don’t go exactly to plan as it turns out that many of those armed go on to form the core of an emergent group called ISIS. At first it seems like a JV team. Then the Europeans get worried it could become a problem.

In fact it becomes a catastrophe.

The big US battalions have just been withdrawn from Iraq, the focus being shifted to Afghanistan and there’s nothing available to suppress the ISIS frankenstein. But wait! There’s Iran, a natural enemy of Sunni militants and pretty competent too. The problem with using them vs ISIS is all the legacy sanctions dating back to Carter and exacerbated by its killing of hundreds of Americans in Iraq.

Suddenly like a flash of genius comes the inspiration to reach a nuclear deal with Tehran. But it’s not really primarily about nukes but normalizing relations with Tehran. To sell the proposal the deal is cast as a UN agreement and never submitted for formal treaty ratification to the Senate.

The JCPOA is born. Even Soleimani gets a sanctions break. His proxy forces help stem ISIS but the results are inconclusive. Eventually America has to make other alliances, as with the Kurds, to finish ISIS off. With ISIS dead, the successor Frankenstein, Iran, becomes a problem.

It comes under scrutiny from a hostile administration. Things really start to go wrong when JCPOA unravels. Frankenstein goes off his meds and starts killing American troops again. It even threatens to seize the US embassy, like it did before. So America belts it one and it runs off into the night, headless for now with Soleimani dead. But it’ll be back.

The law of unintended consequences, of successive monsters, still haunts the region. Worse it haunts Washington. There are enough secret fiascos to sink a dozen careers. For the nth time the problem is: what now?