RUTHFULLY YOURS

Last week, Kerry and the White House changed their tune. “We’re not fixated on Iran specifically accounting for what they did at one point in time or another,” Kerry told reporters. “It’s critical to us to know that going forward, those activities have been stopped, and that we can account for that in a legitimate way.”

Well, it’s true that if your chief concern is to prevent Iran from building a bomb sometime in the future, you need a verification regime to know when Iran starts to move toward breakout. Unless there is a full accounting of Iran’s past nuclear activities, unless IAEA inspectors are allowed to visit possible military sites like Parchin and interview scientists believed to have a role in weapons development, it cannot establish benchmarks to show what Iran is doing now and has done in the past. Without those benchmarks, it will be impossible in the future to verify whether Tehran is abiding by a proposed agreement. Maybe in the next few years, for instance, the Iranians will be nearing breakout capacity but no one will know since the work is being done in an undisclosed secret site. In other words, if Iran doesn’t come clean now about PMDs, any deal will be worthless in preventing Iran from getting a bomb.

The administration knows this, which is why until last week it demanded that Iran fulfill the IAEA’s requirements. But with the deadline for a proposed deal approaching, the administration is getting desperate—and that’s why it’s lying to the American public and throwing the IAEA under the bus. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and other Iranian officials say there is no way they’re opening up military sites to inspectors. So if Obama wants a deal, he’s going to have to budge, not Tehran.

Of course, the administration has been caving in to Iranian demands from the very beginning of Obama’s tenure, starting with the failure to support Iran’s Green Movement in June 2009. The White House has not only acquiesced to all of Iran’s conditions during the nuclear negotiations convened in European cities, it has also privileged Tehran’s interests on Middle Eastern battlefields. Indeed, the point of the nuclear agreement is to smooth the path for a larger accommodation between the Obama White House and the clerical regime, which the administration believes will allow the United States to minimize its role in the Middle East, even as the Iranian empire grows to fill the void.

The desire to reach a nuclear deal with the mullahs, in short, turns out to have little to do with stopping Iran from getting a bomb. This explains what otherwise looks like a fatally flawed negotiating strategy by the Obama administration. Remember: At the outset, the Iranians claimed that they did not have a nuclear weapons program, never had one, and had no intention of ever building one. Indeed, according to some Iranians, the supreme leader himself had issued a fatwa stating that Iran could not have or use nuclear weapons. Since the United States is the stronger power by far, if the point were to deny Iran a nuclear capability, the only sound negotiating position once evidence of Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions became incontrovertible, would have been for the Obama administration to walk from the table.

But what the administration actually wanted was a deal—any deal. At the outset, it was as if the White House were talking about the price of a car while Iran was haggling over the price of a balloon. But given the White House investment in continuing to talk no matter what, it was inevitable that its position would move closer and closer to that of the Iranians. And that’s what happened last week—John Kerry told the American public that the White House was about to close the deal on a balloon.

The problem is not just that the administration has made concession after concession to Iran—on everything from sanctions relief to Iran’s so-called right to enrich uranium. This is much more fundamental than just another concession. By saying that the Iranians don’t have to come clean on their past activities, the White House has effectively adopted Iran’s baseline position. If you ignore what nuclear activities Iran has entertained in the past, you cannot possibly know what they can or will do in the future. If you know nothing about the program’s PMDs, or where there might be more secret sites, you have little choice but to take Iran’s word for it. And the Iranians say they’re not building a bomb. And if they are, so what? The White House said last week that it doesn’t want to hear about it.

The Iran nuclear deal as currently structured is not going to make the world safer for Americans and our allies. Rather, it’s going to provide a dark room for a dark regime where it can build the world’s deadliest weapon.