As we have been reporting here at IranTruth for some time, the position Iran’s government is advancing on the Iran Deal does not represent compliance with the internationally affirmed treaty. Rather, Iran is intensely rewriting the few obligations it is prepared to accept, and attempting to impose new ones on the international community. Most egregiously, the Iranian “Iran Deal” does not even consider limits on Iran’s own nuclear program. Instead, it treats the “Iran deal” as if it were about establishing limits on Israel’s nuclear program. The deal that Iran has allegedly agreed to follow bears no resemblance to the one that US Secretary of State John F. Kerry believes he negotiated with them.
Others now within the mainstream of media have begun to notice the divide between what Iran says it will do and what the international ‘agreement’ claims that Iran will do. Tzvi Kahn at US News and World Reports has a lengthy piece that only affirms what we at IranTruth have long been saying.
Since the July 14 agreement, Tehran has increased its support for the Assad regime, Hezbollah and Hamas; strengthened its joint military operations with Russia; provided arms and money to the Taliban;constructed a bomb-making factory in Bahrain; smuggled arms into Kuwait for use by a Hezbollah cell;arrested an Iranian-American citizen as well as a Lebanese citizen with a U.S. green card; launchedcyberattacks against the United States; continued its brutal human rights abuses against its own people; and threatened America and Israel with destruction.
In response, the Obama administration has remained strikingly inert…. What accounts for the administration’s inaction? The answer stems from a U.S. misreading of Iran’s intentions – and from a contrasting Iranian ability to read America’s intentions all too clearly.
The President has been all too clear. He has hidden aspects of the deal from the American people. He has negotiated away our military options, at least if he takes seriously the language of the UN Security Council resolution he adopted before allowing Congress to consider the language of the deal. He has ignored the wisdom of long-established Iranian resistance movements to the tyranny of the mullahs, who have tried to warn him against this deal. Even the international panel on the Syrian war has begun to slip away from him, as he has allowed the realities on the ground to be controlled by America’s enemies.
Congress has been no better. Though they hold hearings that identify the exact degree of Iranian perfidy and murder of American soldiers during the recent war in Iraq, they do nothing to restrain the mullah’s regime. As Iran marches through an Iraq the President let fall into their hands, Congress allows itself to collapse into a mockery of its Constitutional duties. Instead of performing its Constitutional role by considering this deal as the treaty it really is, Congress refused to do even the most minimal of its duties by voting on the Iran deal. It allowed a filibuster to prevent so much as a vote from being taken that might have shown an objection to the Iran regime’s march toward a bomb.
We have only to agree with US News when it says:
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, declared that he would accept the deal but only conditionally. Citing ambiguously worded passages in the agreement, Khamenei stated that America and the European Union must affirm that the future imposition “of any type of sanctions, at any level or under any pretext” – including terrorism and human rights violations – would constitute a violation of the deal, thereby releasing Iran from its obligations. Of course, such terms contradict the U.S. interpretation of the agreement, which rests on the assumption that Washington can impose nonnuclear and snapback sanctions. In effect, Tehran is working to renegotiate the deal such that any U.S. effort to enforce it becomes impossible. And America’s previous willingness to offer ever-greater concessions to secure an agreement has given Khamenei not unreasonable confidence that he can actually pull this off….
If the Obama administration believes that the nuclear deal will make it a lot easier to check Iran’s nefarious activities, it must possess certainty that Tehran accepts Washington’s interpretation of the agreement. The White House’s silence thus far sends a troubling message that Khamanei’s interpretation may yet prevail – and that he may continue to dictate the deal’s terms to an administration that prioritizes the preservation of the deal over its actual substance.
They are quite right. The more the administration persists in its limp enforcement, the more the deal will come to mean just whatever Khamanei says it means. There have been no signs to suggest that the administration intends anything more muscular than submission.
