West Complicit In Iran's Ongoing Nuclear Weapons Violations

by JASmius



In case we wanted a reminder that there's a race for that Neville Chamberlain Moment:

While negotiations are ongoing between Iran and Western powers for a nuclear agreement, Tehran continues to "illicitly and clandestinely" procure nuclear weapons while the Obama administration and other nations look away because they don't want to risk foiling a deal, according to a Weekly Standard blog post penned by two fellows at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Two recent reports indicate that Iran's procurement is moving at a faster pace than before the November 2013 Joint Plan of Action, according to the article.

Last week, Germany's domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, confirmed to the article's authors that Iran "continues to seek illicit technology for its nuclear and ballistic missiles programs."

And last month, Bloomberg reported that U.N. monitors said "governments reported no new incidents of Iran violating Security Council sanctions against its nuclear program, even though some have unfolded in plain sight."

The report speculated about whether some member states had made a "political decision" not to report violations "to avoid a possible negative impact on ongoing negotiations." [emphases added]

You know, it's becoming a real struggle to keep coming up with superlatives to describe this collective plummet towards multinational suicide.  It really is.  So let me just ask what the value is of "negotiations" that cannot produce the results Western "powers" purport to seek from them?  Of what value is "negotiating" when the party on the other side of the table is openly and contemptuously flouting the points of "agreement" already reached?  When the party on the other side of the table is flauntingly "negotiating" in the worst possible faith?  What possible "negative impact" can there be on "ongoing negotiations" that themselves can have nothing BUT a devastating "negative impact"?

This is the fatal and harrowingly dangerous problem with diplomacy for its own sake: It makes attaining a worthless piece of paper the overarching goal instead of vital national (or multinational) interests.  Yes, even Winston Churchill once said, "To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war," but you know what?  He was wrong.  "Jaw-jaw" is NOT "always better than war-war" when "jaw-jaw," as it so often has, leads to "war-war".  Why?  Because it becomes an end in itself that forfeits every other option in the statecraft toolbox to an enemy that, in this case, has always known what it wanted, always wanted war, and is now in a strong enough position to launch it.  The Chamberlain-Daladier "Western powers" "jaw-jaw" plunged the world into six years of "war-war" against a Nazi Germany that knew what it wanted, always wanted war, and was made strong enough to launch it, and that, among other things, genocidally slaughtered six million Jews.  The pre-war British and French leaders were complicit in that cataclysm.  And now that history is about to repeat itself.

And it just continues:

This weekend's news that an United Nations arms embargo on Iran could be lifted over time may turn the ongoing nuclear talks with that nation "on their head" in the last hours before an agreement is reached, retired General Michael Hayden said Monday.

"Our premise for the negotiation was if not forgiving the Iranians for a vast amount of bad activity, at least ignoring it and isolating it down not just to the nuclear program but to the nuclear enrichment program," the former National Security Agency and CIA director told MSNBC's Morning Joe program. "That's the only way we thought we could get a deal from the Iranians."

However, now Iran wants the outcome of any deal reached to "back up to include all those other things they claimed were never on the table. It's stunning," Hayden said.

No, General, it's not stunning, it's completely rational.  When there's no concession that their enemies won't make to get a "deal" that constitutes their nations' death warrants, there's no reason for the mullahs to stop moving the goal posts and upping the ante forever.  They'd be crazy not to.

But not as crazy as the twenty-first-century Chamberlains and Daladiers, bent on securing another worthless piece of paper that will plunge the world into war - with weapons that the Nazis never had.