Monday, April 30, 2018

Exposing the Shame of the Iran Deal

It isn't newsworthy that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu detailed Iran's lying about past nuclear programs. We knew that. But shamefully the Obama administration did the 2015 deal, anyway.

Although many here denied it or believed the lie irrelevant. And to their everlasting shame, participated in the Ben Rhodes echo chamber snow job to praise the awful deal.

And that cast of characters continues to mislead.

The fact that Israel managed to get so much information out of Iran has got to rattle the mullahs in Iran and is surely newsworthy.

It seemed like this revelation was about past work. Let's hope Israel got more than that on current projects suitable for targeting, but didn't want to reveal that publicly right now.

Regardless, how could America not cancel the deal and treat Iran's mullah rulers like the lying, dangerous enemy they are?

So the expectation is that America will pull out of the deal. That's good for the Iran problem.

That withdrawal will also have a good effect on North Korea which will know it can't negotiate a deal that it can cheat on and get away with it.

UPDATE: Documenting the lies that Iran has made is more than "just" confirming what we all knew.

As I said early in the process years ago, my fear was that the basic form of the deal would be that Iran would pretend not to have a nuclear program; and that America would then pretend to believe Iran.

Obviously, Iran's failure to come clean on their past nuclear weapons programs is a problem just at the level of trusting the Iranians.

But less obvious is that by letting Iran get away with lying about never having a nuclear weapons program, we lose the ability to compare what Iran does now or in the future in the nuclear area with past nuclear weapons program activities.

If they match, we can call Iran on the resumption of nuclear weapons programs in violation of the (really awful) deal.

But without a record of past nuclear weapons programs admitted, anything we discover Iran is doing related to weapons allows Iran to claim is really a new thing unrelated to weapons programs.

Also, saying of course Iran would save past nuclear work, so this is no big deal, ignores that the deal does expire allowing Iran to resume nuclear weapons work without foreign scrutiny. The assumption in the Obama administration is that by the time the deal expired, Iran would be such a normal, "reset" country that it wouldn't want nuclear weapons.

So by keeping that information, Iran doesn't seem like it expects to not want nuclear weapons when the deal expires.