IRAN AGREEMENT – AT 9:05 A.M. ET: The Iran nuclear agreement, or understanding, or partial agreement, or something, is dominating discussion across the internet.
Obama has been giving interviews defending the deal. He gave one to Tom Friedman of The New York Times, in which he said all the right things about the security of Israel. The problem is, Obama has so little credibility remaining, except on the party-line left, that what he says is met with a general yawn.
In the meantime, real experts are warning that the Iranian deal is very bad. From ace defense reporter Bill Gertz, at the Washington Free Beacon:
Despite promises by President Obama that Iranian cheating on a new treaty will be detected, verifying Tehran’s compliance with a future nuclear accord will be very difficult if not impossible, arms experts say.
“The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action will not be effectively verifiable,” said Paula DeSutter, assistant secretary of state for verification, compliance, and implementation from 2002 to 2009.
Obama said Saturday that the framework nuclear deal reached in Switzerland would provide “unprecedented verification.”
International inspectors “will have unprecedented access to Iran’s nuclear program because Iran will face more inspections than any other country in the world,” he said in a Saturday radio address.
“If Iran cheats, the world will know it,” Obama said. “If we see something suspicious, we will inspect it. So this deal is not based on trust, it’s based on unprecedented verification.”
But arms control experts challenged the administration’s assertions that a final deal to be hammered out in detail between now and June can be verified, based on Iran’s past cheating and the failure of similar arms verification procedures.
A White House fact sheet on the outline of the future agreement states that the new accord will not require Iran to dismantle centrifuges, or to remove stockpiled nuclear material from the country or convert such material into less dangerous fuel rods.
The agreement also would permit continued nuclear research at facilities built in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which Iran signed in 1970 but has violated repeatedly since at least the early 2000s.
The centerpiece for verifying Iranian compliance will be a document called the Additional Protocol of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), according to the White House.
However, the State Department’s most recent report on arms compliance, made public in July, states that Iran signed an IAEA Additional Protocol in 2003 but “implemented it provisionally and selectively from 2003 to 2006,” when Tehran stopped complying altogether.
“The framework claims that Iran will once again execute an Additional Protocol with IAEA,” said William R. Harris, an international lawyer who formerly took part in drafting and verifying U.S. arms control agreements. “This might yield unprecedented verification opportunities, but can the international community count on faithful implementation?”
Harris also said Iran could cheat by shipping secretly built nuclear arms to North Korea, based on published reports indicating Iran co-financed North Korea’s nuclear tests, and that Iranian ballistic missile test signals reportedly showed “earmarks” of North Korean guidance systems.
COMMENT: Read the whole thing. A Bill Gertz report is always authoritative. This one is very worrying. The point is made later in the piece that the framework agreement announced Thursday does not require Iran to correct its past violations of nuclear agreements. They are, in effect, accepted. What incentive does Iran have to honor the new agreement or any future ones?
April 6, 2015 |