|
By Morton A. Klein
(AUGUST 21, 2023 / JERUSALEM POST) In June 2015, while then-president Barack Obama’s negotiating team, sitting in a palace in Vienna, was in the last stages of appeasing the terrorist Islamic Republic of Iran – with Obama’s head negotiator bursting into tears at the negotiating table and begging Iran to enter into the disastrous anti-American and anti-Israel deal – the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Obama’s Treasury secretary, and his former chief of staff, Jack Lew appeared at the annual Jerusalem Post Conference in New York to try to promote the JCPOA and its almost-as-bad predecessor, the interim Iran deal, the JPA.
During Lew’s lengthy conference speech, he stuck to and trotted out every Obama administration line (and lie) to try to sell the Iran deal to the American-Jewish public. Lew pledged that “the final deal will be built around an incredibly robust and intrusive inspections regime on Iran’s nuclear program” and that “this deal will only be finalized if the connective tissue of the agreement meets a tough standard of intense verification and scrutiny.”
But in fact, the deal placed Iranian military facilities (where nuclear weaponization development was most likely to take place) off limits to inspectors; it placed virtually insurmountable obstacles in the way of inspecting potential secret sites; it gave Iran significant notice before inspectors would arrive; and, in a side deal, even allowed Iran to take its own soil samples. In other words, the opposite of the “incredibly robust and intrusive inspections” and “intense verification” promised by Lew.
Lew also assured the crowd in New York: “We are not operating on an assumption that Iran will act in good faith.” But that assurance was belied by Obama’s Neville Chamberlain-like Iran deal lead negotiator Wendy Sherman, who absurdly said in her book that the Iran deal “was anchored by a common wish to make peace,” “higher principles,” “reimagining of the world,” and seeing the Iranians as “partners.”
Early in his speech, Lew also asserted that “what we are doing [is] to effectively guarantee that Iran never obtains a nuclear weapon. Making sure Iran never gets a nuclear weapon is a national security priority of the highest order.”
But “never” apparently really meant 10 years – or even one year. Lew later mentioned: “Under the agreement we are pursuing, for at least 10 years Iran will be kept at least one year away from having enough enriched uranium to produce a nuclear weapon.” Obama also admitted that, at most, after 13 to 15 years, all nuclear restrictions on Iran ended.
| 
