Obama To Lift Sanctions Without Confirming Iran’s Previous Nuclear Weapons Progress

by JASmius



Now please understand, I'm not a big fan of economic sanctions on dictatorships, because they never work.  No authoritarian regime has ever been coerced into doing the West's bidding by any economic sanctions regime.  Ever.  The closest anybody ever came was Franklin Roosevelt's oil embargo on Imperial Japan to force them out of China, and we know how that turned out, now don't we?

Sure, starving the mullahs of a few revenue streams of varying sizes is money that they can't pour into their sprawling, hydra-like terrorist apparatus, and that's a good thing as far as it goes.  Heck, that policy should have been put in place thirty-six years ago and kept there ever since.  But it's no substitute for military action, invasion, and regime-change, which is the only thing that can prevent an Islamic Fundamentalist nuclear nightmare.

With that contextual backdrop established, this is about as surprising as the stains on Miley Cyrus's sofa:

In his first State Department news conference since breaking his leg last month in a bicycling accident, [John] Kerry suggested major sanctions might be lifted long before international inspectors get definitive answers to their longstanding questions about Iranian experiments and nuclear design work that appeared aimed at developing...bomb[s]. The sanctions block oil sales and financial transfers.

“We’re not fixated on Iran specifically accounting for what they did at one point in time or another,” said Mr. Kerry, who appeared by video from Boston. Instead, he said: “It’s critical to us to know that going forward, those activities have been stopped and that we can account for that in a legitimate way. That clearly is one of the requirements in our judgment for what has to be achieved in order to have a legitimate agreement.”…

Even though you have no way of verifying it.

“It looks like a weakening of the United States’ prior position, or at least laying the initial basis for a weakening later,” said David Albright, the president of the Institution for Science and International Security.

“If the U.S. government knows so much about Iran’s nuclear weapons program,” Mr. Albright added, it “should publish openly a detailed history of Iran’s nuclear program, including names, dates, activities and places.”

Or, in Eeyore's words, "[I]f there’s one lesson to glean from the past twelve years of Middle Eastern history, it’s that you can take American assessments of rogue powers’ WMD capabilities to the bank."

But, all snark aside, it begs the question of why the Obama Regime doesn't publish such a detailed history of Iran's nuclear program.  If they've got chapter and verse on it, why don't they disclose it?  If that narrative is as innocuous as the White House wants everybody to believe, wouldn't that discredit us rightwing "warmongering" critics and put everybody else's minds at ease about what a great "deal" this is?  Or at the very least bolster the case for why preemptively lifting all sanctions isn't...oh, what's the word?  Blitheringly nucking futs?

AP has a theory on that as well:

[I]f it turns out Iran’s bomb program is much farther along than the U.S. suspected, then it’s another debacle for U.S. intelligence and a potentially huge embarrassment for Obama on the eve of signing the final deal. If you think O’s taking heat from the GOP now, imagine if Iran confirmed that it already has the know-how to build a miniaturized warhead capable of being seated in an ICBM. As far as the White House is concerned, the less the public knows about what Iran knows, the better. [emphasis added]

As long as the Iranian nuclear arsenal remains "speculative" (no matter how educatedly so), it's just "rightwing warmongering".  Once the Iranian nuclear arsenal becomes established fact, it becomes a mortal existential threat to the entire planet and O's Chamberlainian piece of paper an act of rank insanity.

But a piece of paper that he'll sign anyway.  And, thanks to "Baghdad Bob" Corker, one that Senate Republicans won't be able to stop.

I think Obama needs to update his legacy declaration.  It should read, "My legacy will be an America....



....reduced to irradiated ashes by the rest of the world."