NYT: White House regrets promising “anytime, anywhere” Iran inspections

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Ed Morrissey:

That’s not going to be the only regretful argument for Barack Obama and John Kerry as they push this dangerous stand-down on Iran’s nuclear-weapons development. David Sanger and Michael Gordon report in the New York Times that their main argument for approving the deal — or not rejecting the deal, more accurately — has its own internal contradictions. In essence, Sanger and Gordon write, Obama and Kerry are arguing that we can trust Iran as a nuclear-weapons power in 15 years.

Needless to say, that argument is a tough sell even among Democrats:

Mr. Obama has been pressing the case that the sharp limits on how much nuclear fuel Iran can hold, how many centrifuges it can spin and what kind of technology it can acquire would make it extraordinarily difficult for Iran to race for the bomb over the next 15 years.

His problem is that most of the significant constraints on Tehran’s program lapse after 15 years — and, after that, Iran is free to produce uranium on an industrial scale.

“The chief reservation I have about the agreement is the fact that in 15 years they have a highly modern and internationally legitimized enrichment capability,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff, a California Democrat who supports the accord. “And that is a bitter pill to swallow.”

This argument might make sense if people believe that this deal will undermine the mullahcracy and bring forth a popular government unlikely to pursue nuclear weapons. In fact, the White House has tried to make that argument, at least indirectly, by claiming this deal will bolster the supposed moderates in the handpicked government run by the mullahs. That is, of course, sheer nonsense. The deal will dump more than $100 billion dollars into the hands of the mullahs and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, the terrorist army that ensures that no challenge to the mullahcracy survives. The best opportunity for that kind of counter-revolution came in 2009, and Obama and the White House ended up validating Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s fixed election victory instead.

Thanks to the massive capital infusion, the deal does just what Sanger and Gordon says it does. This is actually worse than kicking the can down the road, since a continuation of the status quo would have resulted in a nuclear weapon sooner, but with an Iranian government dealing with significant amounts of unrest and poorly funded to deal with it. This deal gives them the best of both worlds — a nuclear weapon on a slightly longer timetable, plus lots of cash to either mollify a restive population or oppress them even further.

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Josh Earnest made the false point today that Iran was going to turn off most of its centrifuges.
What has been happening is that Iran has been trading up to more efficient and newer centrifuges, only ”turning of” old, obsolete, inefficient ones.

All Obama and Kerry wanted was “a deal”. It didn’t matter if it benefited anyone other than Iran or not.