You got to feel sorry for this guy Elliot Abrams. He has not just a fire in the belly, but a constantly erupting volcano that spews as much love for Israel as it does hate for those whom Israel chooses to be its enemies for the day. And when Abrams tries to propagandize for Israel, he shoots himself in the foot, not with a gun, but with a bazooka.
His
problem is that he knows what he wants to talk about but doesn’t know what he
is talking about. And so, he seems to rely on people who feed him false information
that’s based, not on reality but on other considerations, such as political requirements,
for example. And like a useful idiot, Elliott Abrams regurgitates the false
information while mistakenly believing that he has done a great service for Israel
by doing a great disservice to its enemies, when in fact, he would be doing the
opposite.
You
can see that much in the article he wrote under the tile: “Did the ‘Maximum
Pressure’ Campaign against Iran Fail?” and the subtitle: “Iran's reserves fell in 2020 to a startlingly low
$4 billion, suggesting that the "maximum pressure" campaign was
succeeding.” The article was published on July 12, 2021 on the website of the
Council on Foreign Relations.
This
time Abrams fell into the trap that Iran and the International Monetary Fund
(IMF) set up inadvertently. This is not to suggest that Iran and the IMF
conspired to pull a trick on Abrams or anyone else––they did not––but the idea
is to show that there are times when events converge and produce unexpected
results. To understand what happened here, we need to know what each of Elliott
Abrams, the Central Bank of Iran (CBI), and the IMF seek to achieve in general.
We
already know what Abrams wants because it was discussed above. What the CBI
wants is for the Iran nuclear talks in Vienna to end successfully, and end
soon. As to the IMF, its role is to make sure that no country falters because
when this happens, it drags other countries down with it. Thus, even if the IMF
is not supposed to play politics, it will play if it must to turn around a bad
situation and save the day.
Since
the imposition of the sanctions on Iran, that country’s Central Bank thought it
wise never to give accurate figures concerning its reserves in foreign currencies.
It has been giving false figures, at times even contradictory figures. Knowing
what Abrams and those like him will do if it played along, the IMF came up with
what it calls: Regional Economic Outlook: Arising from the Pandemic. In it, the
IMF says that official figures from Iran suggest that the country has only $4
billion dollars in foreign currency. It did not say how it came up with this
“official” figure, since officially, Iran said it had $40 billion in reserve.
Some
people did forensic analysis on everything that was said and shown, and came up
with a plausible explanation for the discrepancy between the two figures. They
said that yes, the CBI has $40 billion but is holding in its vaults only $4
billion because $36 billion are invested in foreign countries where they are
frozen in compliance with the sanctions that had not yet been lifted. Perhaps.
In any case, this forces us to take a second look at the Abrams article to see
how such information in the hands of a useful idiot would help Iran rather than
Israel.
The
first thing we notice is the title of Abrams’s article that went like this: “Did
the Maximum Pressure Campaign Against Iran Fail?” Well, this could not be since
the IMF attributed the drop in Iranian reserves to the pandemic and not the
sanctions. What comes to mind next, is that whereas people like Abrams will
feel like running to dance in the street upon seeing a scary story like that,
the negotiators in Vienna will feel pressured to come to an agreement as soon
as possible to save what they will perceive as a faltering economy that has the
potential to drag other economies down with it.
But
why would it be necessary for the CBI to give confusing signals about its
holdings in foreign currency reserves? And why would it be necessary for the
IMF to play along, knowing that there exist useful idiots out there who will
catch the booby-trapped ball and run with it? These are good questions, and we
can find answers to them by going over the Abrams article one more time. The
following is a condensed version of the relevant passages:
“What explains the collapse in Iran’s reserves? The
maximum pressure campaign did. The argument that faced with a continuation of
that campaign, Iran would have had to negotiate seems reasonable. Instead,
the Biden approach is to give Iran sanctions relief and tens of billions of
dollars if it agrees to go back to the 2015 nuclear deal. By lifting most
sanctions and allowing Iran access to all that cash, this policy would largely
eliminate Iran’s incentives to negotiate a new deal”.
If
it did not collapse the Iranian economy and drag others down with it, the
effect of continuing the sanctions would have been to prolong the agony that
serves no one but the cannibalistic savages who rejoice seeing other people
live in pain and misery.
We should be thankful that the teams in Vienna who are negotiating the nuclear deal, have nothing in common with these savages.