US and Iran Nuclear Deal Announced

The State Department has released a “fact sheet” highlighting the various points of the deal. Sanctions against will be lifted immediately, and probably forever. Iran gets to keep a huge number of its nuclear centrifuges spinning, including a thousand of them at the previously hidden and illegal fortified bunker of Fordo, which is supposed to become a “peaceful” nuclear, physics, technology, and research center. There are sunset provisions on everything Iran has tentatively agreed to, although in his Rose Garden press conferenceannouncing the deal, Obama claimed they would somehow be “permanently” blocked from various forms of weapons development.

Despite the perpetual complaints from U.N. inspectors that Iran has cheated them, Obama assured us that “if Iran cheats, the world will know.” Since Iran most predictably balks when serious inspection demands are made, this agreement “framework” could yet collapse, a possibility the President briefly mentioned in his remarks. In fact, he made a point of saying “the work is not yet done” on the deal, so we’re back to the announcement-of-a-declaration-of-a-framework-to-have-more-meetings stuff characteristic of these negotiations.

Most of the President’s remarks consisted of declarations about how “historic” the deal was, straw-man false choices about how the only alternative to his deal is an immediate regional war, excuses about how his supposedly awesome bargain with Iran was the best anyone could have managed under impossible circumstances, and loads of rhetoric about how dedicated to Middle Eastern stability he is. There were loads of promises about how inspections would be so rigorous that Iran could not possibly break the deal, even though they have successfully bamboozled, or outright defied, every previous attempt to monitor their nuclear program. The Iranians knew all along that what Obama most desired was an opportunity to give speeches like this. The messy details can be dealt with later.

The President made rhetorical gestures toward the security of American allies such as Israel and Saudi Arabia under the terms of this agreement. The former nation is now headed by the most vindicated man in the world – Benjamin Netanyau predicted the outcome of Obama’s wheeling and dealing with Iran almost to the word. The latter will now scramble to purchase nuclear weapons of its own, as will everyone else who doesn’t want to find out when Iran’s nuclear umbrella will really snap open, or be caught unarmed beneath it.

One curious detail that stood out from the President’s remarks was his assertion that, without this deal, Iran might have been only 2 to 3 months away from having a nuclear weapon.  That is the kind of timetable Obama and his spokespeople have been deriding for years as uninformed scaremongering, but now it turns out that was a reasonable estimate after all?