The “ransom” for hostages theme that emerged from a Wall Street Journal story last week will ultimately fade from the news. But the phony claims about a U.S.-Iran settlement will surely become another slice of conventional wisdom in the same circles that believe weapons of mass destruction are still hidden somewhere in Iraq or that somewhere in the Benghazi emails is proof that Hillary Clinton is personally responsible for the slaying of four U.S. diplomats and CIA contractors in Libya.
Over the weekend, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), who thinks he, not the president, should be conducting U.S. foreign policy and has made numerous attempts to undermine that policy, was one of several Republicans bellyaching on talk shows and op-ed pages about the January 2016 transfer of $400 million in cash to Iran. They charged that this payment was made to gain the release of four Americans imprisoned in Iran. In other words, “ransom” for “hostages.”
President Obama has flat-out denied the money was ransom, just as he denied it when the accusation was first made seven months ago. But on CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday:
“It doesn’t really matter what Barack Obama says,” Cotton said. “It matters what ayatollahs think and what every dictator, terrorist and gangster around the world think. ... And they all clearly believe in their own words that this was a ransom payment, and that means they are going to take more hostages, which is exactly what Iran has done since January.”
As was pointed out here at Daily Kos last Wednesday and subsequently in other venues, the payment to Iran was not, as critics claimed, secret and it wasn’t ransom. It was, in fact, an installment on a $1.7 billion settlement over a dispute dating back 37 years. And the Obama administration made this clear when the settlement was announced in January. This wasn’t a giveaway—it was a refund owed to Iran since 1979.
That was the year the Iran revolution toppled the U.S. puppet—Shah M. Reza Pahlavi, installed by a CIA-induced coup in 1953. Before the shah fled into exile, he had made a $400 million deal with the United States for new fighter jets. Because of the revolution and the Iranian seizure of hostages at the U.S. embassy, the jet delivery was never made. And the $400 million wound up in an “escrow” account for more than three decades. It, and other Iranian assets, were frozen in place.
Iran ultimately took the issue to the specially formed Iran-United States Claims Tribunal. The tribunal’s pace of settling the dispute was glacially slow. But a couple of years ago, it looked as if the U.S. would come out on the losing end of the tribunal’s judgment and have to pay as much as the $10 billion the Iranians were demanding—$400 million plus interest, inflation and penalties. Instead, a settlement of $1.7 billion was agreed to. The $400 million in cash—paid in euros, Swiss francs and other currency because most dollar transactions with Iran are still illegal—was the first installment of money that the tribunal ruled the U.S. owed Iran.
Now, as Zack Beauchamp at Vox has noted, coinciding as it did with the release of the four Americans, the cash transfer has bad optics. Indeed, the Department of Justice warned at the time that the possibility of the transfer being seen as ransom militated against it. Moreover, some Iranian defense officials involved in the settlement arrangements themselves described the payment as ransom. But that is exactly what one would expect them to say to the Iranian people to make themselves appear to be tough negotiators. But, writes Beauchamp:
[T]he basic logic of [this speculation] didn’t make any sense. Iran was going to get that money back no matter what through the arbitration process — probably more, if the Obama administration was right. Why would it release potentially valuable hostages in exchange for money it would have gotten otherwise? Iran would have to be the world’s dumbest hostage taker.
The complaints over the cash transfer are just another convenient spear with which to poke the administration over the real issue: the Iran nuclear deal.
While the deal appears to be working as intended, Republicans and some Democratic hawks continue to view it as weakness on the part of the Obama administration. Many of those critics are part of the crowd that has for years called for bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities and maybe taking out a few military bases and cities at the same time. Cotton himself remains a strong backer of Donald Trump, who has engaged in loose talk about dropping nukes against U.S. foes.
They view diplomacy as the province of wimps and weaklings, and they’ll happily wreck any agreement or settlement that calls their Rambo-Rumsfeld assessment into question. You will not, however, see them talking about the ransom their icon, Ronald Reagan, really did pay the Iranians for hostages.