Amid revelations that the U.S. transferred $1.7 billion to Iran at the beginning of the year, the White House has insisted (a) that the payments were intended to settle a 30-year-old dispute between the two countries over an aborted arms deal and (b) that the money was transferred in cash rather than by wire “precisely because,” in the president’s own words, “we are so strict in maintaining sanctions [that] we could not wire the money.” Mark Dubowitz and Annie Fixler disprove the explanation and trace the consequences of the transfer:
U.S. regulations permit all transactions between the American and Iranian financial systems related to settlements [of the arms-deal dispute]. Moreover, Washington wired payments to Iran in July 2015 and again in April 2016, further disproving the president’s statement.
It is certainly possible that banks were unwilling to wire the $1.7 billion no matter what guarantees they got from the administration. Banks have a healthy fear of sanctions and their penalties. If so, it raises a troubling question: how did Tehran receive the billions of dollars in sanctions relief released under both the interim and final nuclear agreements?
During the nuclear negotiations, the clerical regime received access to about $700 million per month, totaling $11.9 billion between January 2014 and July 2015. . . . If no mechanism existed to transfer the funds through the formal financial system, what mechanism was used to transfer the $11.9 billion? A senior official admitted that “some” of this money was sent in cash, and that “we had to find all these strange ways of delivering the monthly allotment.” . . .
Of course, cash is useful for funding outlawed organizations likes Hamas and Hizballah, or Shiite militias in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, or subversive activities in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. In other words, write Dubowitz and Fixler, the “nuclear deal has already led the United States to fund terrorists, sectarian warfare, and chaos in the Middle East.”
Read more on Foreign Policy: http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/09/27/the-u-s-is-helping-iran-fund-chaos-in-the-middle-east/