Freedom for Five Americans Doesn't End Flash Points with Iran

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

64% : Limbert added, "As long as the ultra-MIGA (Make Iran Great Again) faction there needs to show that it's in charge, it will continue to take actions -- like hostage-taking -- to discredit its political rivals, no matter the associated costs."
60% : Detaining foreigners is also an essential ploy in the gamesmanship among rival factions inside Iran.
53% : Only two wanted to return to Iran.
53% : According to Kelsey Davenport, the director for nonproliferation policy at the Arms Control Association, Tehran now has enriched uranium to more than sixty per cent and -- if it made the political decision to build a bomb -- could fuel up to three nuclear weapons.
51% : "All the political prisoners of Iran," he said, "deserve their liberty."
51% : (For years, Iran imported hundreds of thousands of dollars in bull semen from the United States to breed cows.)
51% : The Biden Administration hopes the swap will enable other diplomatic openings with Iran, notably on Iran's increasingly advanced nuclear program.
49% : Last October, Iran allowed Baquer Namazi to leave the country for urgent medical care.
46% : Two of the other Americans released by Iran on Monday were identified as Morad Tahbaz, an environmentalist who tracked rare Asiatic cheetahs and was sentenced, in 2019, to ten years for spying, and Emad Shargi, a businessman with a capital-investment fund who was sentenced in 2020 to ten years for espionage; two others released in the deal declined to be identified.
46% : Others charge that Iran will be able to free up the six billion dollars it would need for humanitarian purchases and use it for military or other nefarious ends.
45% : According to Belgian government officials, Iran currently holds at least twenty-two Europeans, including a European Union diplomat.
44% : "Hostage-taking keeps the zealots in power, even at the cost of Iran's remaining an international pariah/polecat whose passport is worthless, whose currency is worthless," John Limbert, one of the fifty-two Americans held for four hundred and forty-four days after Iranian students seized the U.S. Embassy in the aftermath of the 1979 revolution, told me.
43% : The Trump White House also imposed more than fifteen hundred new sanctions on Iran to squeeze its economy.
42% : The most contested element of the deal is the Biden Administration's agreement to issue a waiver so that South Korea could transfer six billion dollars in frozen assets that it owes Iran for past oil purchases.
41% : On Facebook, Senator John Thune, a South Dakota Republican, said he supported efforts to bring home Americans detained abroad, "but Iran will now count pallets of ransom money, putting its leaders in a better position to develop a nuclear weapon and fund terrorists.
40% : "If Iran tries to divert the funds or use them for anything other than a limited humanitarian purpose as authorized, we'll take action to lock up the funds."
39% : Both Republican and Democratic Presidents have engaged in prisoner or hostage swaps in the past, but Republicans have condemned the terms of the agreement with Iran.
37% : No money will ever go into Iran, a senior U.S. official told reporters on Sunday.
33% : The United States had less room to maneuver on these issues while Americans were imprisoned in Iran.
31% : He was detained, in 2015, while visiting his parents in Tehran and was charged with coöperating with an enemy state.
21% : Officials in Washington have also long wanted to deal with Iran on regional issues, such as Iran's proxy attacks on Americans in the Middle East and the war in Yemen between rival factions supported by Iran and Saudi Arabia.
12% : Joe Biden's embarrassing appeasement not only makes Iran stronger, it makes America less safe."

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