Joe Biden’s deputy secretary of state excoriates Israel’s prime minister, accusing him of genocide in the Gaza Strip and destabilizing the Middle East.

By David Rosenberg, World Israel News

A senior Biden administration official excoriated Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week, accusing him of committing genocide in the Gaza Strip and destabilizing the Middle East.

On Friday’s episode of “The Mishal Husain Show” podcast, hosted by Bloomberg, former US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman criticized both Republicans and Democrats, arguing that both parties’ policies have failed to “create stability and peace” in the Middle East.

She took aim at President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, while blaming the United States and Britain for the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran.

Sherman repeatedly chided Trump over his Iran policies, accusing the president of trying to “bully” the Islamic Republic.

“Every time President Trump tries to bully Iran — Iran has immense pride and dignity. They’re a terrible regime that slaughtered protesters in the street, but it is who they are.”

Regarding Israel, Sherman said that while she is a supporter of the Jewish state and that the United States should “try to protect their security,” she voiced support for Palestinian statehood and accused the Netanyahu government of instigating genocide in the Gaza Strip.

“It is critical that Israel remains an ally of the US and we protect the right of a Jewish state,” Sherman said.

“I also believe that Prime Minister has led us down a road — and we have been part of it — that has, in essence, created a genocide in Gaza that has destabilized the Middle East.”

Sherman later added that she could not say whether Israel’s actions in Gaza met the legal threshold of genocide but said that “there is no doubt that Gaza was demolished.”

“Palestinians deserve a home, dignity and peace. Israel absolutely deserves security and peace. I’m a strong supporter of Israel and the right of a Jewish state, but I am not a supporter of destroying any civilization, or any people — that goes for the Palestinians or the Iranian people, as much as I might find the regime odious.”

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“The desperate rush to sign this flawed nuclear agreement with Iran is not only absurd, it’s downright dangerous.”

By World Israel News Staff

Opposition leader and former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu slammed European and American officials for continuing nuclear negotiations with Iran after the Islamic Republic launched a missile attack that struck the U.S. consulate in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq.

“The desperate rush to sign this flawed nuclear agreement with Iran is not only absurd, it’s downright dangerous,” Netanyahu said in an English-language video posted to his official Facebook and Twitter pages.

“Yesterday, Iran fired missiles in the vicinity of the American consulate in Iraq, and the US continues to charge ahead, along with the other powers, to sign a nuclear agreement that will give the ayatollahs a nuclear arsenal,” he continued.

Every American family should watch this video. pic.twitter.com/BVo5ZFJwKk

— Benjamin Netanyahu (@netanyahu) March 13, 2022

While initial reports indicated that the American consulate was the intended target of a barrage of Iranian-launched missiles, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman said Sunday that she believed the Iranians had not actually aimed to hit the consulate.

An Iranian government statement said that the missiles had struck “secret Israeli bases” in Iraq, though it provided no evidence to support that claim.

Netanyahu charged that the deal would “relieve sanctions and give [Iran] hundreds of billions of dollars in order to continue the terror that they waged yesterday and wage every day throughout the Middle East and the world.”

He added that “this agreement is even worse than its predecessor, because in three years’ time, under this agreement, Iran will be a threshold nuclear state. It will have enough enriched uranium to create dozens and dozens of nuclear bombs, and it will have the ICBMs [intercontinental ballistic missiles] to deliver them to any place in the United States.”

Addressing Americans and beseeching them to hold their leaders accountable, Netanyahu said that “we cannot allow a rogue terrorist regime like Iran to have nuclear weapons. Have we learned nothing?”

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“Indeed, we do not believe that the consulate was actually the target of this missile attack,” Deputy Secretary Wendy Sherman said, adding that a nuclear deal is “close.”

By World Israel News Staff

Washington does not believe the U.S. consulate in Iraq was the target of the 12 Iranian missiles that hit the building.

In an interview Sunday with Bret Baier of Fox News, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman denied that the 12 Iranian missiles that struck the U.S. consulate in Iraq hours earlier were actually fired at the building.

“This was a very concerning attack, as General [Janck] Keane pointed out,” Sherman conceded.

“Indeed, we do not believe that the consulate was actually the target of this missile attack. We are very glad that our facilities are secure, that everybody’s accounted for, that no one has been hurt or killed.

“But all of that said, this is great concern. There will indeed be a statement, I’m sure, coming out shortly, as well as calls in.

“This was an attack on Iraq’s sovereignty, among other things, and of great concern to all of us,” she said.

Iranian state media agency IRNA reported that the strike was targeting “secret Israeli bases belonging to the Mossad, Israel’s national intelligence agency, although it did not provide any evidence to support that claim.

Baier then asked Sherman if it’s true that the U.S. is closing in on the nuclear deal with Iran.

“Well, I think it’s close, and we would like all of the parties – including Russia, which has indicated it’s got some concerns – to bring this to a close,” Sherman said.

“We are very concerned about what Iran is doing, but imagine these Iranians with a nuclear weapon. We need to get that off the table so we can address their malign behavior in the Middle East, and we will do all of the above, but first we’ve got to get this deal. And it is not yet closed.

Regarding the missile attack on Sunday, Baier noted “the disconnect for the average American watching this happening. As we’re sitting at a table not only with the Iranians but the Russians in Vienna, we are getting fired upon by Iran. You’re saying the target wasn’t the U.S. consulate, but that’s where it ended up.

“Help people get – square this circle, because it doesn’t seem like a lot of people think that we should be doing that [closing the deal],” Baier said.

“It’s hard to understand, I appreciate that,” Sherman replied, “but here’s the deal:

“If Iran has a nuclear weapon, its ability to project power into the Middle East and to deter us, our allies and partners, is enormous. So, President Biden believes very strongly, as does Secretary Blinken, as do I, that we need to make sure that Iran never obtains a nuclear weapon, and then we also need to deal with their malign behavior in the region. But first we’ve got to make sure that they cannot obtain a nuclear weapon.”

The secretary could not say how the deal being negotiated compares with the 2015 agreement, from which former President Donald Trump withdrew three years later.

“I think we don’t know yet. It is not closed; it is not finished. We are urging all parties to do what they need to, and there’s a lot of onus on Iran to decide whether in fact it wants to move forward or not, come into compliance and ensure that Iran never has a nuclear weapon,” she repeated

Sherman continued to speak in general terms when asked how the U.S. will protect Americans threatened by Iran. For example, Baier noted, two Iranians belonging to the Qods Force have been plotting to assassinate former National Security Advisor John Bolton according to the Justice Department.

“And this is The Washington Examiner reporting that the department possess indictable evidence against the Iranians, but the Biden administration resisting publicly indicting the men for fear that it could derail their drive for the nuclear deal with Iran currently nearing completion in Vienna. Do you know that to be true?”

Sherman’s response: “What I know to be true is that we have a responsibility to protect American citizens from harm. We do that every single day, and that is true of all present and past American officials, and that is our highest priority…

“Nothing is being held back. We are going to protect Americans wherever they are however we can.”

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Biden’s foreign-policy team is a veritable Obama era reunion party.

By Jonathan S. Tobin, JNS

Albert Einstein didn’t say it. Neither did Benjamin Franklin. Whoever it was who was the first to observe that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity may not have been as smart as either of those two acclaimed geniuses, but they were nonetheless correct.

Yet unfortunately no one seems to have informed either President-elect Joe Biden or Wendy Sherman about this.

Sherman, who was officially named as Biden’s choice to be Deputy Secretary of State over the weekend, is yet another familiar name among those slated to lead the new administration.

Biden’s foreign-policy team is a veritable Obama era reunion party with virtually every leading figure having been part of the same group that led the nation from 2009 to 2017, including incoming Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sherman.

The new president has chosen people with whom he is already comfortable and who know the ropes. After four years of the circus that was the Trump administration, that sounds good to a lot of people. But while Americans will welcome calm and discretion from those in power, that is not necessarily the same thing as being smart or effective.

And while experience is usually an asset in most facets of life, there are exceptions to that rule. When people continually fail at their jobs — and then not only don’t learn from their mistakes, but are so self-deluded that they believe they’ve been right all along — that’s where that line about insanity may prove relevant.

Sherman has already served at the State Department in a few different capacities. During the Clinton administration, she was an Assistant Secretary of State and then served as Counselor to Secretary Madeleine Albright.

So-called ‘expert’

Under Obama, she was Deputy Secretary of State for Political Affairs, which made fourth in the pecking order at the department. Now, after spending the Trump years raking in cash working for Albright’s consulting group and enjoying a comfortable sinecure as a professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, she’ll be the No. 2 at State.

But Sherman’s claim to fame is not her glittering résumé and connections. She is what passes for an “expert” in negotiating nuclear agreements with rogue regimes. That makes her a living, breathing example of how overrated diplomatic experience can be. No one else can claim credit for playing the principal role in two of the worst negotiations ever conducted by an American diplomat.

In 1994, Clinton gave her the job of negotiating an agreement with North Korea with a goal to obligate that mad Communist government to freeze and then dismantle its nuclear program.

Clinton had given her a fool’s errand. North Korea was then led by Kim Jong-il, the father of Kim Jong-un, the current head of that criminal regime. There was no possible inducement that the United States could offer to get him to give up his bid for nuclear weapons.

A wiser diplomat than Sherman would have told her superiors that any effort to appease him was doomed to failure, and that the goodies the United States were offering would strengthen him while worsening the plight of North Korea’s people and further destabilizing the region.

But Sherman was not in possession of that kind of wisdom. Instead, she went ahead offering various cash prizes and diplomatic concessions in order to get the North Koreans to sign an agreement that could be presented to the world as a foreign-policy triumph. She continued in that vein until Clinton left office, in spite of the fact that the other side simply pocketed every gift she brought while not actually doing anything they were asked to do.

On her watch, the North Korean nuclear problem was not only not solved, but grew worse as rather than “freeze and dismantle,” Kim Jong-il continued to accumulate nukes and missiles.

One would think that after this abysmal failure, Sherman would have lost any credibility as a diplomat. But if you are a member in good standing of the foreign-policy establishment, there’s no such thing as having your work judged by arbitrary standards like success or failure.

In that world, the only assets worth having are experience and connections — and Sherman had both. So the next time a Democrat arrived in the White House, she was back in business at the State Department with an even more important title and an even bigger task: negotiating an agreement with Iran that would fulfill President Barack Obama’s campaign promise to eliminate Iran’s nuclear program.

In the talks with Iran, Sherman had an advantage that she hadn’t had when faced with Kim Jong-Il. Unlike the North Koreans, Iran had a large economy that was connected to the rest of the world. It was dependent on the sale of oil to keep its government and the vast terrorist enterprise run by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps afloat.

Congress had forced Obama to go along with tough international sanctions on Iran and the pain they inflicted forced Iran to the negotiating table.

But while Iran’s position was weak, its chief negotiator, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif had one card to play, and he did so expertly. He knew that Sherman’s primary goal — and that of Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry — was a deal at any price.

Sherman rolled over

So when Zarif said “no” to each of the West’s demands, Sherman conceded each point. Like all appeasers, Sherman claimed that the only alternatives were a false choice between appeasement and war. In the agreement that Obama heralded as a triumph for diplomacy, sanctions would be lifted, yet there would be no dismantling of Iran’s nuclear program. While it would temporarily halt nuclear enrichment, it would keep its advanced technology.

Nor did the deal place any curbs on Iran’s support of terrorism, its illegal missile production or its foreign adventures in pursuit of regional hegemony. Worst of all, Sherman agreed to sunset clauses that would mean that each of the limited restrictions on Iran’s program would eventually expire. The last of them will end in 2030, at which point Iran can race to build a bomb with Western approval.

By any objective standard, Sherman’s handiwork was a disaster. A government that was a merciless tyranny at home, a threat to the stability of neighboring Arab states and pledged to Israel’s destruction had been enriched and empowered.

Sherman was one of those who greatly benefited from Obama’s decision to make support for the deal a partisan litmus test for Democrats. Since something so closely identified with a popular president against whom criticism was often falsely attributed to racism, Sherman’s handiwork escaped the sort of close analysis from journalists who had become — in the words of Obama staffer Ben Rhodes — a “media echo chamber” for the administration.

The deal left future presidents with the unenviable task of having to clean up Sherman’s mess. Sooner or later, the United States was going to have to scrap the pact and start the work of pressuring Iran to renegotiate and get a deal that would foreclose, rather than postpone the nuclear threat, in addition to dealing with its terrorism and missiles.

President Donald Trump chose to do so sooner, and his “maximum pressure” strategy returned the West to the position of strength it held in 2013, when Sherman started giving away the store to Zarif. But rather than negotiate, Iran listened to the advice of Kerry and simply waited for a Democrat to win in 2020.

With Biden’s victory, he now has a chance to fulfill his pledge to revive the nuclear deal with Iran. Still, he understands that’s not enough and is therefore also promising to strengthen the agreement to correct Sherman’s mistakes.

But who has he chosen to accomplish that difficult task? None other than Wendy Sherman.

While choosing someone with such a dismal record of failure is a terrible idea under any circumstances, it might be somewhat defensible had Sherman publicly held herself accountable for her errors and pledged not to repeat them in the future. But she has not done so.

Terrible at what she does

While Sherman is clearly an appalling negotiator and a terrible diplomat, she is something of a genius when it comes to gaining favor with Democratic presidents. Indeed, if capitalizing on your mistakes as opposed to learning from them is an art, then she is the Michelangelo of failing upward.

Her ascent in spite of her colossal incompetence is a cautionary tale of the perils of prioritizing political loyalty and familiarity in making appointments. But as comic as the prospect of her returning to the task of appeasing Iran might seem to the theocrats of Tehran, it’s a tragedy for the United States and its allies.

Like allowing someone with a record of drunk-driving arrests at the wheel of a car with your children in the backseat, putting Wendy Sherman in charge of dealing with the Iranian nuclear threat is an act of criminal negligence. While all patriotic Americans wish the new administration success, Biden is already setting himself — and the world that looks to him for leadership — up to fail on one of the most important foreign-policy challenges facing him.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS—Jewish News Syndicate.

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Sherman played a key role in the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Another sign the Biden administration intends to return to the JCPOA.

By Paul Shindman, World Israel News

President-elect Joe Biden on Saturday announced that Wendy Sherman, one of the key negotiators of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, will become deputy secretary of state – another indication that the Biden Administration is putting an emphasis on reversing President Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the controversial agreement.

Sherman served in the Obama administration under then Secretary of State John Kerry as the under secretary for political affairs, and was the lead American negotiator in the talks leading to the nuclear deal that was vigorously opposed at the time by Israel.

Sherman opposed the Trump administration’s May 2018 exit of the agreement. She said withdrawing made things worse. In May 2019, in an interview with PBS NewsHour, she appeared to side with Iran against the U.S., saying that “I wish the Trump administration were as measured in its approach” as Iranian President Hassan Rouhani.

After leaving politics when Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016, she became the director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government. Sherman is also a senior counselor at the Albright Stonebridge Group, a Washington-based private firm run by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright that according to its website advises “the world’s leading commercial and financial organizations.”

While her boss Kerry was pursuing his failed attempt at speed-brokering a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, Sherman was assigned to be the chief negotiator in the bid to get Iran to stop what was widely perceived to be their program to build nuclear weapons.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fiercely opposed the Iran Nuclear Deal, citing its many shortcomings and the fact that when the deal expired in 2030 it left Iran free to enrich uranium to weapons grade material with no restrictions.

One of the larger holes in the agreement dealt with inspections of Iran’s nuclear sites by the UN’s watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which Iran had repeatedly blocked from accessing suspected nuclear sites to confirm the Iranians were not violating international laws.

Obama national security advisor Ben Rhodes claimed the agreement had “an incredibly intrusive inspections regime,” but Sherman’s negotiating team agreed to an Iranian demand that the Islamic Republic be given a 24-day heads up to prepare for any “surprise” inspections.

Charles Duelfer, former special advisor to the Director of the CIA for weapons of mass destruction called the concession on surprise inspections one of the “fatal flaws” in the Iran nuclear deal. Given Iran’s long history of stonewalling IAEA inspectors, Israel was outraged by the concession while Sherman told reporters in July, 2015 that 24-days was for her a “very, very short time.”

Sherman may also have a credibility problem in dealing with the Israeli government if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wins the upcoming March elections. In September of 2019 Sherman tweeted that the “Israel PM [is] out for himself.”

It’s not known yet if Sherman will have any input on the Israel-Palestinian issue, but last September she offered qualified congratulations on the Abraham Accords, which saw Israel sign breakthrough peace agreements with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. (It later inked deals with Sudan and Morocco.)

Sherman tweeted she was “glad for the agreements between Israel and the UAE and Israel and Bahrain but neither @realDonaldTrump nor @IsraeliPM mentioned the Palestinians…”

However, on the same day as Sherman’s tweet Trump said he expected the Palestinians “will come to the table, 100 percent,” while Netanyahu praised Trump’s “realistic vision for peace between Israel and the Palestinians.”

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