Oh good grief:
“Iran so far has followed the letter of the agreement, but the spirit of the agreement involves Iran also sending signals to the world community and businesses that it is not going to be engaging in a range of provocative actions that are going to scare businesses off,” Obama said at a press conference.
“When they launch ballistic missiles with slogans calling for the destruction of Israel, that makes businesses nervous.”
Let me get this straight. The president negotiated a deal with Iran to block their nuclear weapons ambitions that he claimed--wrongly--has the most intrusive inspections provisions ever to make sure Iran will obey the agreement.
That is, the president assumed Iran would try to get around a deal, and so stringent measures to ensure Iran's compliance were necessary. We don't have the stringent methods, but the president's defense of the deal assumes that we needed exactly that.
Yet the president is shocked that Iran would ignore the spirit of any agreement that we think they made to us, but which was not part of the agreement?
In my world, I'm not shocked that Iran violated the spirit of the agreement because I have no doubts that Iran will violate the actual agreement.
Which is in fact made possible by provisions that make it hard for us to know if Iran is violating the letters of the nuclear agreement.
And I'm not comforted by the president's claim that Iran has followed the letter of the deal. Iran has demonstrated that they are pretty good about the "letters" part of agreements, too.
Nor should we count on our "partner" in the deal, Russia (we even thanked them for their role--even as Russia was preparing to intervene in Syria!), to do anything to rein in Iran.
And I'm sure that Israel has taken note of the deep concern our president has expressed about how businesses will be made nervous about Iranian slogans about destroying Israel.
Israel wouldn't want to be viewed by our president as a "free rider" on our defense umbrella, now would they? Best to think about attack options, eh?
Have a super sparkly day as you contemplate whether this administration actually slowed down Iran's nuclear weapons ambitions with their clown school diplomacy.
UPDATE: You want to see Iran's interpretation of the spirit of its diplomacy with America? Behold:
One thing you can say for the mullahs: they don’t make any secret of their intentions. No doubt, at this moment, Obama administration staffers are puzzling over this cryptic pronouncement–“For years, we have been building power on the presumption of a widespread war with the US and its allies, and have developed all our capacities and capabilities for decisive victories over such enemies”–and wondering what it really means.
I'm thinking even clown school diplomacy formulated by the buffoon Trump could be an improvement at this point. At least I'd have the comfort of knowing bad things aren't the result of deliberately foolish policies.
