Well, it is April first and it involves a fool, but this is no joke:
The Obama administration is considering easing financial restrictions that prohibit U.S. dollars from being used in transactions with Iran, U.S. officials said.
Iran says the limit on dollar usage undermines the advantages they thought they'd get from the nuclear deal!
So of course the administration is considering this move to help Iran. Having engineered a process that allows us to avoid seeing Iranian violations, the administration probably truly believes the nuclear deal is going well.
Because Iran has been so cooperative on not pushing toward nuclear-capable ballistic missile technology and behaving like a responsible regional power. we can totally expect Iran to refrain from cheating or otherwise getting around the nuclear deal's weak restrictions on their long-standing nuclear ambition.
Bizarrely, the administration defends the considered move because Iranian missile tests, support for terrorism, and destabilizing the region aren't part of the nuclear deal and other measures are intended for those issues.
If I may be so bold, limits on Iranian use of dollars are part of the measures intended for those other issues.
And they are related. A nuclear-armed nutball regime will be better able to support terror and destabilize the region.
Thank you John Kerry (and his boss) for the nuclear nonsense we've achieved.
Strategery.
UPDATE: More on this outreach to the mullahs:
To persuade the Republican-controlled Congress to refrain from rejecting the Iran deal, even under the shamefully indulgent Corker-Cardin process to which GOP leaders agreed, the Obama administration made two key promises. The first was that, if Congress went along with Obama on dismantling nuclear sanctions (for the purportedly greater good of winning the terror regime’s commitment not to build nuclear weapons), the administration would stand strong on other sanctions — sanctions that punish Iran for its terror promotion, ballistic-missile development, and related aggression. The second promise was that Iran would continue to be banned from the U.S. financial system.
Really, this episode reveals that the Obama administration expects Iran's mullahs to be more honest with America about their nuclear weapons ambitions than the administration has been with Congress about this truly horrible and dangerous deal.
UPDATE: The administration denies that the news about dollar transactions is anything but a rumor:
"The rumors and news that have appeared in the press ... are not true," Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Thomas Shannon told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Well, now the administration has no plans to do this.
But wait until attention is elsewhere.
