FOD 2015.08.24

Here's a recap of the ongoing saga of obama's fatally flawed deal with Iran. He wants to lift economic sanctions on them in exchange for their promise not to build a nuclear weapon in the next 15 years. How do we know they won't cheat? We have their word for it. If that's not enough for you, they've also promised to inspect themselves.

... Iran will be allowed to use its own inspectors at the secret Parchin nuclear site under its secret side agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

This is a new one in the history of arms control. Parchin is the military complex long suspected as the home of Iran’s nuclear-weapons and ballistic-missile development. The IAEA has sought access to Parchin for more than a decade, and U.S. officials have said the deal requires Iran to come clean about Parchin by agreeing on an inspections protocol with the IAEA by the end of this year.

But that spin started to unravel three weeks ago with the discovery that the Parchin inspections were part of a secret side agreement between the IAEA and Iran—not between Iran and the six negotiating countries. Secretary of State John Kerry has said he hasn’t read the side deal, though his negotiating deputy Wendy Sherman told MSNBC that she “saw the pieces of paper” but couldn’t keep them. IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano has told Members of the U.S. Congress that he’s bound by secrecy and can’t show them the side deals.

In other words, the country that lied for years about its nuclear weapons program will now be trusted to come clean about those lies. And trusted to such a degree that it can limit its self-inspections so they don’t raise “military concerns” in Iran.

Keep in mind that the side deal already excludes a role for the U.S., and that the IAEA lacks any way to enforce its side deal since it has no way of imposing penalties for violations. Iran has also already ruled out any role for American or Canadian nationals on the inspection teams.

In return, Iran gets to sell its oil on the international market, generating billions of dollars in new revenue for the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the entire world. Does anyone seriously doubt that some of that money won't get funneled to terrorist groups?

To make matters worse, other Middle East powers such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt, which are Sunni-majority countries, won't stand idly by while a Shia nation - Iran - gets access to nuclear weapons. And that's without even mentioning Israel.

So we get a nuclear arms race in the most unstable region in the world. We get terrorist groups flush with wads of new cash. And we get the word of highly ideological theocrats - who have repeatedly lied and lied and lied, accompanied by the unending refrain of "Death to America" - that they will behave themselves, at least for the next 15 years.

How could anyone object to that?

Would you buy a used car from these guys?

The sad thing is that there's nothing we can do to derail this deal. Even if the congress rejects the deal, and can get enough votes to override the inevitable obama veto, the other countries involved (the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council–the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, France, and China, plus Germany and the European Union) will go along with it.

The only way out of this mess, the only way to stop Iran from getting its hands on nukes, is for some country to take unilateral military action and destroy Iran's nuclear facilities. Otherwise there's going to be one or more mushroom clouds in our future.

That'll be obama's true legacy.