Obama The Iran Deal We Should Have Done

Their propaganda. Don't buy it. Their inspectors are supervised on site by IAEA inspectors. All the people familiar with the procedure say that Iran can't get away with anything. If they try, the deal is off.

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2015/09/11/new-report-debunks-conservative-media-myth-that/205507

http://thehill.com/opinion/op-ed/251660-no-iran-is-not-allowed-to-inspect-itself

 

It doesn't work that way. There is huge permanent equipment that can't be moved. And the nuclear materials they are looking for can't be "cleaned up" like it was spilled coffee or something. If they are doing radioactive work there they won't be able to hide it from the inspectors. They just can't. It will be all over every surface, radioactive, and measurable. We know how this shit works. It's why we settled on this method.

We can go to any facility that has nuclear materials. Naturally they are paranoid about letting foreigners access to every military site they have. They have lots of enemies that would like to know these things. So we can't go there and count tanks (we know already, anyway), but we can go there and count nuclear particles.

 

Conflicts between legal documents usually end up being broadly interpreted. This foreign subsidiary conflict is a small part of the agreement and comes down to two clauses in ITRA.

The terms spelled out in Section 218 "shall remain in effect until the president of the United States certifies two things to Congress: first, that Iran has been removed from the State Department’s list of nations that sponsor terrorism, and second, that Iran has ceased the pursuit, acquisition, and development of weapons of mass destruction."​

If the agreement is implemented and Iran carries through with its commitments, then clause two is met. It is unlikely that clause one will be met any time soon. But I suspect there is a great deal of interpretation as to when the foreign subsidiary loophole will actually be applied to US companies. It also may not be any time soon. If Iran wants to be able to trade with foreign subsidiaries of US companies, it must first get off the state-sponsored terror list. We know that Iran wishes to do so and this gives them more incentive to make it happen, as it was intended.

 

They have complained many times that they do not sponsor terror and should be off the list. There remain international sanctions against them based on the state sponsored terror list and they want them to go away.

This an an area where there may be some some wiggle room for them to make changes. Persian Iran does not and has never sponsored Arab jihadist terrorists like Al Qaeda and ISIS. In fact, they have long been at odds with Al Qaeda, even allowing the US to overfly Iran to attack them. And they are currently at war with ISIS. They are actually on our side against Sunni jihadists.

We labeled them terrorists because of their support for Hezbollah and Hamas. In both cases these groups practice terror attacks against Israeli civilians. But it is in the context of the old Palestinian struggle against Israel for the Holy Land, not to establish a jihad against America. In Iran's view, the US picked a side to arm and they picked a side to arm and we both give them whatever weaponry they can handle to fight for what both consider their homeland.

It is not out of reason to consider that they might makes changes to this policy to gain further sanctions relief if the Iran arms deal works out. Hezbollah is never going to defeat Israel and Iran, with a young and restless population, might decide to move along to re-establish diplomatic and economic relations with the West by eliminating military support of Hezbollah. And they may apply that effort to fighting the jihadists which are perhaps a greater threat to Iran than Israel.