JCPOS

When the premise is faulty, everything that follows is fruit of the poisonous tree.

Following up on the frenzied efforts of former SOS John Kerry to save the JCPOA while flouting the Logan Act, former President Obama released a three-page statement attempting a bullet-pointed (as opposed to missile-pointed, one supposes) rebuttal to the policy implications of President Trump’s withdrawal from the “Iran Deal”.

Whether Obama’s long-winded protest was a) “burial in paperwork” or b) an informed argument remains irrelevant.  Rather, it was another attempt to obfuscate the unsupported premise of the JCPOA: specifically, it never was the mechanism for ensuring that Iran never gets possession of a nuclear weapon as presented by its creators and cheerleaders.

In fact, the JCPOA was crafted in such a way to give all the advantage and rewards to the Iranians for a promise that could never be enforced.  Furthermore, both the crafters of the deal and its supporters are on record about the actual ultimate purpose of the JCPOA, and a lot of room has been left to interpret that its ultimate aims are even more nefarious than they let on.

Consider the statement from Julia Frifield, Obama’s assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs, in 2015:  “The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action is not a treaty or an executive agreement, and it is not a signed document.”  Ostensibly well-meaning literati argue as if the JCPOA should or ought to be binding, rather than whether or not it actually is; pace Bret Stephens, who’s less charitable toward the deal and its crafters, “It’s questionable whether the deal has any legal force at all.”  

Consider the New York Times, champion of both Obama and the JCPOA, lamenting the cancellation of “the lifeline offered by the 2015 nuclear deal, which was supposed to alleviate pressure on Iran’s economy and crack open the barriers to the West”, indicating that the ostensible corrective purpose of the JCPOA—keeping Iran from going militarily nuclear—was always tangential at best; the primary driver of the JCPOA was to rehabilitate the Islamic Republic whether or not its behavior changed.  

(Or, in classic Obamanian terms, the Hope that it would Change.)

Consider how Obama and JCPOA cheerleaders have lamented that “no one will take America and its commitments at their word”, when he and then Secretary of State Clinton unilaterally cancelled a 2004 written understanding between President George W. Bush and Israel PM Ariel Sharon vis a vis settlements and the territories.

Consider how many times Obama felt compelled to mention the 1953 CIA backed coup in Iran that reinstalled the Shah.  In his 2009 Grovel in Cairo, Obama felt compelled to mention Iran’s “democratically elected government” (an arguable assertion, but one can also consider that Hitler and Hamas were also democratically elected), and that “No single nation should pick and choose which nations hold nuclear weapons…any nation – including Iran – should have the right to access peaceful nuclear power.”  In July 2015, as part of the sales push for the JCPOA, Obama sat down with NYT eminence Thomas Friedman and repeated the self-flagellating litany.  

While Obama considered the US responsible for the Islamization of Iran and therefore in debt enough to them to at least allow for the opportunity to nuclearize “peacefully”, if not militarily, as penance for 1953, it didn’t go unnoticed that Obama's apologies were directed to the theofascist rulers of the Islamic Republic rather than the Iranian people.

In fact the Iranians had a short-lived attempt at a post-coup liberal democracy which was killed by the Ayatollah and his minions in a takeover that mirrored Bolshevism. This should cancel out any American responsibility for Iran’s political self-destruction, as well as indicate how thin any line is between “civilian” and “military” in that country, particularly as long as the current regime runs the Islamic Republic.

Therefore, for at least as long as the regime hasn’t changed, why should Iran be allowed any nuclear materials at all, even one centrifuge, no matter how slow and outdated?  One Congressional Democrat pooh-poohed concerned about cheating by claiming “they can’t remove the trail” of removed illicit material—but why wouldn’t the Iranians claim that the “trail” was left from the “permitted” radioactive material?  To paraphrase Yasser Arafat, what makes one think that Iranians wouldn’t lie for a cause they would kill for?  Considering the zeal with which the Obama/Kerry cabal pursued this deal at the cost of “letting Hezbollah off the hook” and suppressing our own pursuit of drug traffickers—what makes one think they wouldn’t cover up for Iranian lies as well as their own? 

One should only conclude that the entire premise of the JCPOA was to provide political cover for the Obama/Kerry cabal and its cheerleaders for what they considered Iran’s inevitable if not entitled nuclearization.

In a classic sketch lampooning the 1938 Munich agreement, John Cleese (as PM Chamberlain) holds the infamous “piece of paper”, annnouncing as the wind blows it away “I have in my hand a piece of…Shit!"  

The JCPOS wasn’t worth even that much.