STUNNING, AND FROM A LIBERAL PAPER – AT 8:16 A.M. ET: It is rare that a newspaper editorial provides a watershed, but an editorial in yesterday's Washington Post qualifies. The Post is a liberal paper, a supporter of the Obama administration. Its editorial page, though, has been responsible, reasoned, and mature, words we never apply to the editorial page of The New York Times. Yesterday the Post raised a profoundly troubling question about Obama's approach to Iran, a question that has been on many of our minds. From the Post:
...a recent controversy over Iran’s compliance with the interim accord now governing its nuclear work is troubling. The deal allowed Iran to continue enriching uranium, but required that amounts over a specified ceiling be converted into an oxide powder that cannot easily be further enriched. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran met the requirement for the total size of its stockpile on June 30, but it did so by converting some of its enriched uranium into a different oxide form, apparently because of problems with a plant set up to carry out the powder conversion.
Rather than publicly report this departure from the accord, the Obama administration chose to quietly accept it. When a respected independent think tank, the Institute for Science and International Security, began pointing out the problem, the administration’s response was to rush to Iran’s defense — and heatedly attack the institute as well as a report in the New York Times.
This points to two dangers in the implementation of any longterm deal. One is “a U.S. willingness to legally reinterpret the deal when Iran cannot do what it said it would do, in order to justify that non-performance,” institute President David Albright and his colleague Andrea Stricker wrote. In other words, overlooking Iranian cheating is easier than confronting it.
This weakness is matched by a White House proclivity to respond to questions about Iran’s performance by attacking those who raise them. Mr. Albright, a physicist with a long record of providing non-partisan expert analysis of nuclear proliferation issues, said on the Foreign Policy Web site that he had been unfairly labeled as an adversary of the Iran deal and that campaign-style “war room” tactics are being used by the White House to fend off legitimate questions.
In the case of the oxide conversion, the discrepancy may be less important than the administration’s warped reaction. A final accord will require Iran to ship most of its uranium stockpile out of the country, or reverse its enrichment. But there surely will be other instances of Iranian non-compliance. If the deal is to serve U.S. interests, the Obama administration and its successors will have to respond to them more firmly and less defensively.
COMMENT: We learned yesterday of a phone call from the White House to sympathizers in many leftist organizations that laid the groundwork for what looks like a vicious smear campaign against anyone who dares oppose a deal with Iran, with special emphasis on Congressional Democrats who may waver.
The Post gets it right. Responsible Americans are worried about a deal with Iran, and some are brave enough to worry about the loyalties of the president of the United States.
July 7, 2015 |