US President Obama gives birth to a global nightmare

US President Hussein Obama used a weekly address (on July 18, 2015) to sell the US-Iran deal. He said it would make America and the world safer (Jana Kasperkevic, “Obama says Iran deal 'will make world safer' as Republicans plot opposition”, The Guardian, July 18, 2015). He claimed the deal would work because it allows for ‘unprecedented’ 24/7 monitoring of key nuclear facilities--and gives international inspectors access to the country’s nuclear supply chain (ibid). In addition, if Iran violates the deal, sanctions will snap back into place (ibid).

Sounds great. But it’s smoke and mirrors. In the real world, the 24/7 inspections won’t work, not all nuclear sites are open for inspection, and violations won’t be punished.

The number ‘24’ doesn’t refer to inspections on a 24-hour notice. In order to get Iran to accept this deal, the US has agreed that Iran will have 24 days’ notice for any inspection Iran wants to delay (Robert Satloff, “Here's what's really wrong with the Iran deal”, Business Insider, July 15, 2015).  That’s not a 24/7 inspection program. It’s a program that allows Iran to hide a lot of illicit nuclear activity before inspectors can show up (ibid).

That’s important because if inspectors do find evidence of non-authorized activity after that 24-day delay, the ‘snap-back’ sanctions requirement that’s supposed to kick in isn’t going to snap back. Here’s why: the way the agreement is written, it appears that there’s only one penalty for any infraction, big or small--taking Iran to the UN Security Council for the ‘snapback’ of international sanctions (Satloff, ibid). That’s like saying that for any crime -- whether a misdemeanor or a felony – there’s only one punishment: the death penalty (ibid). That means that, in the real world, there will be no punishment at all for anything less than a capital crime. A 24-day scrub-down of a site will go a long way to reduce a violation to a ‘less-than-capital-offense’ level.

Then there’s the problem of the snapback itself. The way the agreement appears to be written, if a snap-back is to be initiated because of a violation, all contracts signed by Iran up until that point are grandfathered in. The contracts are immune from sanctions (ibid). With that kind of grandfathering, you can be sure there’ll be a stampede of state-to-state and private sector contracts -- some real, many hypothetical (ibid). These contracts will all have one thing in common—they’ll be a shield for Iran (ibid). They’ll take a very deep bite out of the impact of any re-imposed sanctions (ibid).

The problem with snapbacks goes deeper. The agreement completed includes a statement that Iran considers a re-imposition of sanctions as freeing it from all commitments and restrictions under the deal (ibid). Therefore, a violation would have to be really big for the Security Council to blow up the entire agreement in order to re-impose sanctions (ibid). This provision effectively gives Iran a free pass on all manner of small to mid-level violations (ibid).

The inspections themselves are a fake. Already, it’s been discovered that US inspectors will be banned from Iran—even as US inspectors are considered best able to determine whether Iran has committed a violation (Sara Malm, “US inspectors will be banned from all Iranian nuclear sites under controversial deal amid warnings 'only American experts can tell if they are cheating'”, The Daily Mail, July 17, 2015).

President Obama announced that, under this deal, inspectors will have access to the Iran’s nuclear supply chain (The Guardian, above). But there is currently no agreement that Iran’s military nuclear sites will be open to inspectors (Daily Mail, ibid). There’s no guarantee that such an agreement will ever be reached.

In the meantime, on the same day (July 18^th) Obama promised that this deal will make the world safer (The Guardian, above), Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said this deal didn’t signal any shift whatsoever in Iran's relationship with Washington or its policies in the Middle East (Bozorgmehr Sharafedin Nouri and Babak Dehghanpisheh, “Nuclear deal will not change Iran's relations with U.S.: supreme leader”, Reuters, July 18, 2015).

Instead of agreeing to create a safer world, Iran is still committed to "Death to America" and "Death to Israel" (ibid). Instead of endorsing this ‘deal’, Khamemei wants Iranian politicians to examine the agreement closely to ensure Iranian national interests were preserved (ibid). Iran is not going to allow any disruption in its ‘revolutionary principles or defensive abilities’ (ibid). Since Iran has been called the world’s greatest state sponsor of terrorism, we can all guess what those ‘revolutionary principles’ include (Bill Hoffman, “Ali Safavi: Iran Is Still the Biggest Sponsor of Terrorism”, Newsmax, July 15, 2015).

To make sure we all understood what Khamenei was saying, Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke the next day (July 19^th) about Khamenei’s speech. Netanyahu said that, with this speech, Iran makes no effort at all ''to hide the fact that they will take advantage of the hundreds of billions they receive in this agreement to equip their terror machine" (Tova Dvorin, “Netanyahu Blasts Open Iranian Defiance After Nuclear Deal”, Arutz Sheva, July 19, 2015).

The Ayatollah himself tells us that Obama hasn’t made the world safer. He’s given birth to a global nightmare.

Is anyone listening?