An editorial in yesterday’s Chicago Tribune notes that, while negotiations with Iran were going on, Secretary of State Kerry said Iran was going to have to disclose its past work on building nuclear weapons, i.e., weaponization, as part of any deal.
When the agreement was finally announced, the International Atomic Energy Agency was delegated the job of finding this out.
But the Obama administration is now hedging. The Administration is saying it doesn’t need Iran to say what it has been doing. “[W]e believe we already know about Iran’s past activities,” it claims. This from intelligence agencies that have gotten virtually nothing right about the Middle East for decades.
President Obama’s legacy is built on three things: Obamacare, opening relations with Cuba, and the Iran nuclear deal. For President Obama to say that Iran is not complying with the nuclear agreement would be to admit the failure of his own policy and his own legacy. That won’t happen. Any real review of Iran’s compliance with the nuclear deal will have to wait the inauguration of a new president in January, 2017.
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