Who’s the Warmonger? by Rachel Ehrenfeld
President Obama’s choice to talk about the Iran deal a day before the much
talked about Republican candidates’ debate on FoxNews was planned to bury the issue. Indeed, the major media has been busy covering the candidates and the disastrous agreement with Iran has been pushed to the wayside for the moment.
Had Obama just given his Iran deal stump speech, that might have worked.
But, he chose to berate opponents of the deal in ad hominem fashion, for example saying that the Republican caucus in Congress was making common cause with the hardliners in Iran. This statement alone has caused considerable outrage.
One does not have to study the parts of the Iran deal the White House has released for the public to read to realize that administration claims outdo the most absurdist fiction. What makes this scary are not only the continuing and unrelenting pre- and post-deal threats to the United States from the Ayatollah Khamenei, but the insulting and vitriolic statements by President Obama and members of his administration in an attempt to personally belittle the opponents to the deal, in the best tradition of killing the messengers.
Responding to Senator Deb Fisher’s (R-Neb) question on the inspections of Iranian nuclear sites the United States and its partners signed onto with Iran, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz blurted out, “The aim is not to go to military sites.” On other occasions, Moniz has said that the inspections of military sites were never on the negotiating table anyway. This, despite statements by Wendy Sherman and other administration officials in 2013, 2014, and 2015 regarding the administration’s absolute requirement that IAEA inspectors get into military sites, especially Parchin.
How dim does the administration think we are? Where else are nuclear weapons constructed but at military sites? It is known that the Iranians used Parchin to conduct experiments relevant to the detonation of nuclear warheads. What was going on in Parchin is of critical importance to the IAEA’s verification regime.
But, wait, the plot thickens. We learn that the soil of Parchin and other military sites will be sampled by the IAEA, which the administration believes is sufficient for IAEA’s inspection purposes. Then we learn that the U.S. had agreed to allow the Iranians to collect those samples. Secretary Kerry, refusing to discuss the issue while testifying before the Senate last week, stated this information was classified. However, this information had been made public in Vienna.
Now comes the news that Iran began “sanitizing” Parchin immediately after the signing of the deal on July 14. On Wednesday, the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), a Washington think-tank, put out one of its Imagery Briefs with satellite photos showing bulldozers moving land at Parchin. ISIS said that “the renewed activity occurring after the signing of the JCPOA raises obvious concerns that Iran is conducting further sanitization efforts to defeat IAEA verification…this renewed activity may be a last ditch effort to try to ensure that no incriminating evidence will be found.”
U.S. lead nuclear negotiator with Iran, Under Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, told Congress on Wednesday not to worry: “the IAEA could do its work at the base even if its inspectors weren’t physically at the site. She said soil sampling overseen by Iran could provide the necessary assurances about the activities at Parchin.”
This is a particularly good example of how the Obama administration has been proceeding. One day it’s “inspectors must and will absolutely be required to get into Iranian military sites,” the next it’s “military site inspections were never on the table,” the next it’s “Iran will do the sampling,” and then “oh, well, you know that inspectors don’t even have to be on the site to produce reliable inspections.”
In the last few weeks, some skeptics of the deal have suggested that the JCPOA’s flaws are becoming borderline-comical (or at least they would be if the deal wasn’t such a catastrophe). Revelations like this are the reason why: the White House is telling Congress that Iran can be trusted to turn over evidence from Parchin while independent researchers with photographs are telling the public and Congress that Iran is destroying evidence at Parchin.
The White House is hiding details from Congress. It could call for the IAEA side deals if it wanted. Any member state that sits on the IAEA’s Board of Governors, as does the U.S., can request that the Iran-IAEA documents be distributed to all member states. While a simple majority of the board could scotch this, it would be highly unlikely to do so. If the administration obtained the documents it would have to give them to Congress. This is no doubt the reason the U.S. hasn’t called for them.
And to hide details from the public, the administration has been caught deliberately mixing classified and unclassified information into the same documents so that lawmakers and staffers can’t make them public.
In his speech on Wednesday, Obama accused the deal’s opponents of a) not reading the JCPOA agreement and b) suddenly becoming nuclear scientists. Obama may have found nuclear scientists who, for self-serving reasons, support the Iran deal, but the great bulk of nuclear scientists and other national security experts oppose the public details of the agreement, calling it “a disaster.”
It is scary to imagine how much worse the details are in the side-agreements that neither Congress nor the public has access to. When Obama attacks the opponents of the deal calling them “warmongers,” he should look in the mirror. He will see the warmonger whose actions have already caused an arms race that will lead to bloody war. He legitimized the terrorist theocracy of Iran, lifting the sanctions and giving them a $100-$150 billion bonus.
Obama has been comparing himself with Presidents Kennedy, Nixon and Reagan who also negotiated with the enemy. However, they negotiated from a position of strength and did not cave in to the enemy. Reagan’s motto was “Trust, but verify”.
Obama, on the other hand, as Mike Huckabee put it, has adopted the motto “Trust (the enemy) and Vilify (your opponents).
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