How do we know that the U.S. “deal” with Iran asking Iran to pretty please not develop nuclear weapons is a bad deal?
Let us count the ways, beginning with the Daily Signal:
Although the administration entered the negotiations pledging to cut off all pathways to a nuclear weapon, the agreement amounts to little more than a diplomatic speed bump that will delay, but not permanently halt, Iran’s drive for a nuclear weapons capability.
The agreement in effect legitimizes Iran as a nuclear threshold state.
Once key restrictions on uranium enrichment expire in 10 to 15 years, Iran will have the option to develop an industrial scale enrichment program that will make it easier for it to sprint cross that threshold.
Iran used red lines and deadlines to wear down the administration, which played a strong hand weakly.
The administration undermined its own bargaining position by making it clear that it wanted a nuclear agreement more than Tehran seems to have wanted one, despite the fact that Tehran needed an agreement more for economic reasons.
The administration’s downplaying of the military option and front-loading of sanctions relief early in the negotiations reduced Iranian incentives to make concessions.
This gave the Iranians bargaining leverage they have used shrewdly.
Iran dug in its heels on key red lines proclaimed by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, while the administration’s red lines gradually became blurred pink lines.
Iran’s nuclear infrastructure is left largely intact. Centrifuges will be mothballed but not dismantled.
Iran’s illicit nuclear facilities Natanz and Fordow, whose operations were supposed to be shut down under multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions, have now been legitimized, despite the fact that they were built covertly in violation of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.
Iran is essentially rewarded for cheating under the agreement.
It gained a better deal on uranium enrichment than Washington has offered to its own allies.
Taiwan, South Korea and the United Arab Emirates were denied enrichment arrangements that Iran now has pocketed.
Instead of dismantling Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, the agreement dismantles the sanctions that brought Tehran to the negotiating table in the first place.
This fact is not lost on our allies, friends and “frenemies” in the region.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who understandably sees Iran’s potential nuclear threat as an existential issue, denounced the deal as “a historic mistake.”
Sunni Arab states threatened by Iran are likely to hedge their bets and take out insurance by working to expand their own nuclear options.
Saudi Arabia already has let it be known that it will demand the same concessions on uranium enrichment that Iran received.
The Saudis have begun negotiations to buy French nuclear reactors and this civilian program could become the foundation for a weapons program down the line.
Other Arab states and Turkey are likely to tee up their own nuclear programs as a prudent counterweight to offset to Iran’s expanding nuclear potential, after some of the restrictions on its uranium enrichment program automatically sunset.
The end result could be accelerated nuclear proliferation and a possible nuclear arms race in the most volatile region in the world.
Another major problem is verification of Iranian compliance.
The administration’s initial insistence on “anytime/anywhere” inspections was downgraded to “sometimes/some places.”
Iran has up to 14 days to weigh the requests of International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors. If it decides to object, its objections would be relayed to an arbitration committee that would have 7 days to rule. If it rules against Iran, Tehran would have another 3 days to arrange an inspection.
This gives Iran up to 24 days to move, hide or destroy materials sought by inspectors. This is far from a foolproof system, particularly in light of Iran’s long history of cheating.
Sanctions relief is another potential headache. Tehran would benefit by the release of about $150 billion of its money frozen in overseas accounts.
Ultimately the Iranian economy would be boosted by tens of billions of dollars more through a surge of oil revenues as oil sanctions are lifted.
This could help Iran reshape the regional balance of power and establish hegemony over Iraq, Yemen, important oil resources and oil supply routes.
Much of this money will go to fund the Assad regime, Hezbollah, Yemeni Houthi rebels, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other terrorist groups funded by Iran.
This would rapidly lead to escalation of the wars, shadow wars and civil wars already taking place around the Middle East.
That part about Obama’s wanting a deal more than Iran is key. Recall SALT II, Jimmy Carter’s nuclear-arms surrender to the Soviet Union in the late 1970s? The only reason that didn’t take place is because even the Democrats who controlled the U.S. Senate saw it was a bad deal and rejected it. Ronald Reagan replaced Carter, tried to negotiate a nuclear arms reduction deal with the Soviets, and walked away from a bad deal. A few years later, the Soviet Union died.
David French points out what Iran is:
Yesterday, in the immediate aftermath of the Iran deal announcement, I posted a short comment noting that Iran is responsible for more than 1,000 American military deaths since 9/11. That’s just a number, but for many of us those numbers have names — the names of men we knew. I will never forget the horrible days in March and April 2008, when Iranian-made IEDs periodically closed even the main supply route into our small forward operating base. I’ll never forget the hero flights, standing at attention as brothers carried the still bodies of their fallen comrades to waiting Blackhawk helicopters. And I won’t forget about the people who are even now learning to walk, and eat, and live again — recovering from horrific wounds. Yesterday, I got an angry message from a friend from my Iraq deployment, a man whose vehicle was destroyed by an Iranian-made IED. Some of the blood on Iran’s hands is his own.
The American people need to clearly understand what their president has done. He’s granting billions of dollars in sanctions relief to a nation that put bounties on the heads of American soldiers. Iran isn’t ending its war against America. It’s still working — every day — to kill Americans, including the Americans Barack Obama leads as commander-in-chief of our armed forces. There is no honor in this agreement. Moreover, there is no honor in leaving innocent Americans behind — to rot in Iranian prisons — so that President Obama can declare peace in his time. Compared to rewarding killers and turning its back on innocent American prisoners, the Obama administration’s lies about the negotiations are a small thing indeed. After all, dishonorable people do dishonorable things.
Every member of Congress should be made to answer this question: Do you believe in rewarding regimes that place bounties on the heads of American soldiers? If so, then tell the American people. But don’t tell them that this agreement brings peace, because no reasonable definition of the term includes Iran’s deadly, 36-year-long terror campaign against America and its allies.
Fred Fleitz adds that Obama is a liar as proven by his own statements:
In 2007, when he was beginning his run for president, Senator Obama told a conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) that “the world must work to stop Iran’s uranium-enrichment program.”
On October 22, 2012, during a presidential debate with Mitt Romney, Mr. Obama said: “Our goal is to get Iran to recognize it needs to give up its nuclear program and abide by the U.N. resolutions that have been in place. … But the deal we’ll accept is — they end their nuclear program. It’s very straightforward.”
In December 2013 at a Brookings Institution forum, President Obama said: “They don’t need to have an underground, fortified facility like Fordow in order to have a peaceful nuclear program. They certainly don’t need a heavy-water reactor at Arak in order to have a peaceful nuclear program. They don’t need some of the advanced centrifuges that they currently possess.”
This is what the president said about the Iran nuclear program to get elected. This is what the president told the American people to reassure them about the Iran talks. The agreement announced today does not come close to meeting these statements and promises. …
Some of the worst U.S. concessions concern Iran’s eleventh-hour demand to lift embargoes on conventional arms and ballistic missiles. The conventional-arms embargo will stay in place for five years, and the ballistic-missile embargo will be in place for eight years but will be lifted sooner if the IAEA definitively clears Iran of any current work on nuclear weapons. The IAEA is very unlikely to find evidence of current nuclear-weapons work, as it won’t be allowed to inspect non-declared nuclear sites where this activity is taking place. This means these embargoes could be lifted much sooner.
To defend an agreement that legitimizes Iran’s nuclear program, President Obama could possibly claim that Iran can be trusted because it has begun to act like a responsible member of the international community. However, we know it hasn’t. A State Department report from last June found that Iran’s sponsorship of worldwide terrorism has continued and did not decline in 2014 during the nuclear talks. Iran also is stepping up its efforts to destabilize the Middle East and continues to back the Assad regime and an insurgency in Yemen.
Here’s another sign, reported by the Globe and Mail:
Canada will keep its sanctions in place – at least for now – despite the nuclear agreement Iran has reached with major world powers.
Foreign Affairs Minister Rob Nicholson issued a statement saying that Canada “will continue to judge Iran by its actions not its words,” and that the government in Ottawa will examine the agreement carefully before making any policy changes.
“We will examine this deal further before taking any specific Canadian action,” Mr. Nicholson said in the statement.
That means Canada is refusing to follow the course set by its major allies, including not only the Obama Administration in the U.S., but Britain, France, and the European Union. They negotiated the deal with Iran as part of the “P5+1” group that also included China and Russia, and have agreed to lift economic sanctions in return for Tehran’s nuclear concessions.
But Prime Minister Stephen Harper was caught between two allies on this deal. While Washington pushed for a deal, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has warned against it. So far, Mr. Harper is sticking with Mr. Netanyahu’s doubts – though Mr. Nicholson said that Canada appreciates the “efforts of the P5+1” to negotiate an agreement.
Iran apparently thinks it’s a great deal, as London’s Daily Mail reports:
Just eight minutes after President Barack Obama wrapped up a White House press conference he called on Wednesday to defend a day-old nuclear deal with Iran, the Islamic republic’s supreme leader used Twitter to tweak him.
In a short letter to Obama that he posted on Twitter, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei wrote that it’s partner nations like China and Russia who should be watched carefully – not Iran – to make sure they honor the terms of the landmark bargain.‘You are well aware that some of the six states participating in negotiations are not trustworthy at all,’ Khamenei wrote in a stunning rhetorical act of jiu-jitsu.
The agreement, signed by Iran, the U.S., Russia, China, France, the United Kingdom, Germany and the European Union, seeks to limit Tehran’s aggressive nuclear program in exchange for dropping a series of crippling economic sanctions. …
Khamenei and his social media pranksters may have been responding to Obama’s observation during his East Room presser that distrust of Tehran is the only legitimate basis on which his opponents might disagree with the deal’s outcome.
‘Really the only argument you can make against the verification and inspection mechanism that we’ve put forward is that Iran is so intent on obtaining a nuclear weapon that no inspection regime and no verification mechanism would be sufficient,’ the president told reporters, ‘because they’d find some way to get around it, because they’re untrustworthy.’
‘And if that’s your view, then … that means, presumably, that you can’t negotiate,’ he continued.
‘And what you’re really saying is, is that you’ve got to apply military force to guarantee that they don’t have a nuclear program.’
Still, outraged Republicans and cautious Democrats protested after the deal was announced on Tuesday, saying Iran suffers from a trust deficit – making Khamenei’s pronouncement a day later drip with irony.
Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn said in a statement that ‘Iran has done nothing to demonstrate to the American people that we should trust them.’
He was joined by Maryland Democratic Sen. Ben Cardin, whose bottom line was that ‘there is no trust when it comes to Iran.’
About that news conference, the Gateway Pundit demonstrates that Obama’s motivations do not include his own country:
Barack Obama told reporters today that 99% of the world community agreed with him on his historic nuclear agreement with Iran.
I’m hearing a lot of talking points being repeated that this is a bad deal. That this is a historically bad deal. This will threaten Israel and threaten the world and threaten the United States. There’s been a lot of that. What I haven’t heard is what is your alternative. If 99% of the world community and the majority of nuclear experts look at this and say ‘This will prevent Iran from getting the bomb,” and you are arguing either that it does not, or even if it does it’s temporary, or because they are going to get a windfall of their accounts being unfrozen they’ll cause more problems, then you should have some alternative to present.
Here’s another highlight from the news conference, reported by BizPac Review:
With Obama all but making a victory lap in the wake of this week’s announced nuclear deal with Iran, CBS News’ Major Garrett rained on the president’s parade when he asked why four Americans being held by the Persian Gulf country were not part of the deal.
“As you well know, there are four Americans in Iran, three held on trumped-up charges according to your administration and one, whereabouts unknown,” the CBS White House correspondent said at an extended news conference on Wednesday.
“Can you tell the country, sir, why you are content with all the fanfare around this deal to leave the conscience of this nation, the strength of this nation unaccounted for in relation to these four Americans?”
The president was not pleased, scolding Garrett for how he crafted the question.
“Major, that’s nonsense, and you should know better,” Obama added, after a long, dramatic pause.
And apparently a few of Garret’s media colleagues felt the same way.
“There’s a fine line between asking a tough question and maybe crossing that line a little bit and being disrespectful, and I think that happened here,” said CNN’s Dana Bash, adding that it was an “embarrassment to journalism.”
And she was not the only one at CNN who felt that way. Don Lemon and Gloria Borger agreed that Garrett went too far with his question — Lemon said it “was a little out of school.”
Garret did find one ally at the network in White House correspondent Jim Acosta.
“Well, [Obama] can get testy at times, and clearly this question got under his skin,” Acosta said of the exchange. “And I don’t think slamming reporters will solve any problems for the president.”
Former Marine Montel Williams, a fierce defender of fellow veterans, posted this remark on Twitter:
So because Major Garrett asked a question many of us have been frustrated about for months he’s “disrespectful?” Let’s not patronize POTUS.
— Montel Williams (@Montel_Williams) July 15, 2015
Can you imagine any Republican presidential candidate not named Donald Trump acting like that at a presidential news conference? Remember when the media aggressively questioned politicians? Apparently that only takes place when the politician has an R after his or her last name.
Daniel Greenfield gets the last word about whether Obama is a coward or a traitor, as if that’s an either/or choice:
The last time a feeble leader of a fading nation came bearing “Peace in our time,” a pugnacious controversial right-winger retorted, “You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor, and you will have war.” That right-winger went on to lead the United Kingdom against Hitler.
The latest worthless agreement with a murderous dictatorship is being brandished by John Kerry, a man who instinctively seeks out dishonor the way a pig roots for truffles.
John Kerry betrayed his uniform and his nation so many times that it became his career. He illegally met with the representatives of the North Vietnamese enemy in Paris and then next year headed to Washington, D.C. where he blasted the American soldiers being murdered by his new friends as rapists and murderers “reminiscent of Genghis Khan.”
Even before being elected, Kerry was already spewing Communist propaganda in the Senate.
Once in the Senate, Kerry flew to support the Sandinista Marxist killers in Nicaragua. Just as Iran’s leader calling for “Death to America” didn’t slow down Kerry, neither did the Sandinista cries of “Here or There, Yankees Will Die Everywhere.”
Kerry revolted even liberals with his gushing over Syria’s Assad. Now he’s playing the useful idiot for Assad’s bosses in Tehran.
For almost fifty years, John Kerry has been selling out American interests to the enemy. Iran is his biggest success. The dirty Iran nuke deal is the culmination of his life’s many treasons.
It turns America from an opponent of Iran’s expansionism, terrorism and nuclear weapons program into a key supporter. The international coalition built to stop Iran’s nukes will instead protect its program.
And none of this would have happened without Obama.
Obama began his rise by pandering to radical leftists on removing Saddam. He urged them to take on Egypt instead, and that’s what he did once in office, orchestrating the takeover of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and across the region. The Muslim Brotherhood was overthrown by popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, but Obama had preserved the Iranian regime when it was faced with the Green Revolution. Now Iran is his last best Islamist hope for stopping America in the Middle East.
Obama and Kerry had both voted against designating Iran’s IRGC terrorist ringleaders who were organizing the murder of American soldiers as a terrorist organization while in the Senate. Today they have turned our planes into the Air Force of the IRGC’s Shiite Islamist militias in Iraq.
Throughout the process they chanted, “No deal is better than a bad deal.” But their deal isn’t just bad. It’s treason.
Obama isn’t Chamberlain. He doesn’t mean well. Kerry isn’t making honest mistakes. They negotiated ineptly with Iran because they are throwing the game. They meant for America to lose all along.
When Obama negotiates with Republicans, he extracts maximum concessions for the barest minimum. Kerry did the same thing with Israel during the failed attempt at restarting peace negotiations with the PLO. That’s how they treat those they consider their enemies. This is how they treat their friends.
A bad deal wasn’t just better than no deal, it was better than a good deal.
Obama did not go into this to stop Iran from going nuclear. He did it to turn Iran into the axis of the Middle East. After his failures in the rest of the region, this is his final act of spite. With the fall of the Muslim Brotherhood and the decline of Islamists in Turkey, supporting Iran is his way of blocking the power of his successors in the White House to pursue a more pro-American foreign policy.
Obama made this deal to cripple American power in the Middle East. …
Obama and Kerry have not made this deal as representatives of the United States, but as representatives of a toxic ideology that views America as the cause of all that is wrong in the world. This is not an agreement that strengthens us and keeps us safe, but an agreement that weakens us and endangers us negotiated by men who believe that a strong Iran is better than a strong America.
Their ideology is that of the screaming anti-war protester denouncing American forces and foreign policy anywhere and everywhere, whose worldview has changed little since crying, “Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh. NLF is going to win” in the streets. The only difference is that he now wears an expensive suit.
Their ideology is not America. It is not American. It is the same poisonous left-wing hatred which led Kerry to the Viet Cong, to the Sandinistas and to Assad. It is the same resentment of America that Obama carried to Cairo, Havana and Tehran. We have met the enemy and he is in the White House.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 