Both the president and vice president have thrown out the term “grand bargain” in recent days to describe their aspirations for a deal with the Iranian rump regime.
It’s a term fraught with past failures that screams Iranian deception, not the interests of America First.
Bill Clinton was the first to use the phrase toward the end of his second term to describe his aspiration to end a low-intensity conflict that had been simmering for 20 years.
He appointed David R. Andrews as “Special Negotiator” for the mostly secret talks. Just as today, among the top Iranian demands was for the US to lift economic sanctions, which at the time included a total US trade embargo, secondary sanctions on foreign oil and gas companies investing in Iran, and the release of Iranian funds held by the US Treasury.
Those Treasury funds were a carefully kept secret. At the time, I was engaged as a consultant to attorneys representing Stephen Flatow, whose daughter Elyssa had been murdered by Iranian-backed terrorists in Israel in 1996.
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