Thursday, January 01, 2015

01-Jan-15: What lies behind the West "halting" Iran's nuclear program

The background to this news image is in a post of ours from
six weeks ago here
The days remaining until the Islamic Republic of Iran announces the materialization of a game-changing nuclear military threat are running out. When we look back at how this happened, special attention is going to be directed at the role played by the leadership of the United States. An explosive essay by Omri Ceren ("Enabling Iran’s Nukes") went up on the Commentary Magazine website in the past hour. Here is how it starts:
The lies began at the very beginning, with assurances that American diplomacy had secured a “halt” in the Iranian nuclear program.
Late on the night of November 23, 2013, President Barack Obama stood in the State Dining Room and announced that an interim agreement had been reached between Iran and the P5+1 global powers—the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, and China—that “halted the progress of the Iranian nuclear program.” The White House distributed a fact sheet emphasizing that Iran had promised to “halt progress on the growth” of its low-enriched uranium stockpile and to “halt progress on its plutonium track” to a nuclear weapon. Senior-administration officials held a late-night briefing to stress for reporters that the concessions added up to “a halt of activities across the Iranian program”—the word halt was used more than a dozen more times—and that the coming months would also see sustained progress in investigating Iranian research into nuclear detonations. Reporters would be told in subsequent weeks that the agreement even prohibited Iran from further testing on ballistic missiles.
Those statements were, on the whole, false. But on that night, the president and those around him badly needed them to be true. So they pretended they were.
He goes on to demonstrate how the Obama administration’s people - the Supreme Commander included - still cling to hopes about the ongoing negotiations with the Iranians
which they have every reason to know are, in truth, delusional.
It's a lengthy and very well-reasoned, fact-rich piece of deeply disturbing analysis - one of the most unsettling we have seen in a long time. Here is how the article ends:
The administration is back on Capitol Hill assuring lawmakers that progress is being made, that they need just a little more time. And then what? In six months’ time, the West will be in a worse position to extract concessions from Iran. The Iranians will be in a better position to walk away. The spectacle will provide an interesting test case for scholars who evaluate the relative sway of deliberation versus raw political power. Everybody else will be watching to see how many senators and representatives are willing to get played for chumps again, as the most immediate danger to global stability and peace in the 21st century comes closer and closer to reality.
How do we persuade more people to read this from start to finish?

2 comments:

AreaMan said...

The article by Omri Ceren is on Commentary, which is paywalled, so I can not read it.

This Ongoing War said...

AreaMan:

We're happy to send the text to you if you email us: thisongoingwar@gmail.com