Iran Continues To Balk With The IAEA (Dan 8:3)

An Iranian military truck carries a Bavar-373 air defence missile system past a portrait of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei during the Army Day parade in Tehran on April 18, 2015. Photographer: Behrouz Mehri/AFP/Getty Images

Iranian Commander Rejects Nuclear Inspections at Military Bases

International inspectors won’t be allowed access to military bases in a deal with world powers to curb Tehran’s nuclear program, a top Iranian commander said.

“They will not even be permitted to inspect the most normal military site in their dreams,” said Brigadier General Hossein Salami, deputy head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, according to the state-run Press TV news channel.

“Visiting a military base by a foreign inspector would mean the occupation of our land because all our defense secrets are there,” Salami said. “Even talking about the subject means national humiliation.”

Those comments underscored the difficulty that awaits negotiators from the U.S. and five other world powers as they try to reach a final accord with Iran by June 30 that would trade curbs on that country’s nuclear program for a lifting of economic sanctions. Talks will resume this week in Vienna.

“Don’t think there’s a snowball’s chance in hell that a Congress is going to approve this framework the way it’s set up,” Senator Lindsey Graham, a possible Republican presidential candidate, said on the “Fox News Sunday” program.

“Anytime-anywhere inspections of military/nonmilitary facilities will be a bipartisan must,” said the South Carolina senator, who serves on the Armed Services Committee. “This idea that we can’t go where we need to go is going to fail.”

Suspicious Sites

A U.S. fact sheet issued by the State Department says that a framework for a deal, negotiated in Switzerland, calls for the right to investigate “suspicious sites” or allegations of covert activities “anywhere in the country.”

A joint statement issued by Iran and the European Union on the day the framework was announced, April 2, refers only to an agreement to abide by an “additional protocol” of the International Atomic Energy Agency designed to give inspectors greater access to check for any clandestine nuclear work.

Secretary of State John Kerry has said any deal with Iran will include unfettered international inspections.

President Barack Obama has said criticism of the deal’s framework in Iran isn’t surprising and won’t deter U.S. negotiators.

“What’s always been clear is that Iran has its own politics around this issue,” Obama said at an April 11 news conference. “They have their own hard-liners. They have their own countervailing impulses in terms of whether or not to go forward with something, just as we have in our country.”

The two sides also disagree about the pace of any sanctions relief. While Kerry has said sanctions would be lifted “in phases” as inspectors verify Iran’s compliance with nuclear obligations, Iran has said sanctions must be lifted as soon as a deal is reached.

While the U.S. and other world powers suspect Iran is trying to acquire nuclear weapons, Iran says its nuclear program is designed solely for peaceful civilian use.

IAEA Cannot Inspect Iran’s Military Sites (Rev 16)

National view: A fatal flaw exists in Iran nuclear deal

By Charles Krauthammer on Feb 27, 2015 at 8:03 p.m.

A sunset clause?

The news from the nuclear talks with Iran already was troubling. Iran was being granted the “right to enrich.” It would be allowed to retain and spin thousands of centrifuges. It could continue construction of the Arak plutonium reactor. Yet so thoroughly was Iran stonewalling International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors that on Feb. 19 the IAEA reported its concern “about the possible existence in Iran of undisclosed . . .development of a nuclear payload for a missile.”

Bad enough. Then it got worse: News leaked Monday of the elements of a “sunset clause.” President Obama had accepted the Iranian demand that any restrictions on its program be time-limited. After which, the mullahs can crank up their nuclear program at will and produce as much enriched uranium as they want.

Sanctions lifted. Restrictions gone. Nuclear development legitimized. Iran would re-enter the international community, as Obama suggested in an interview in December, as “a very successful regional power.” A few years — probably around 10 — of good behavior and Iran would be home free.

The agreement thus would provide a predictable path to an Iranian bomb. Indeed, a flourishing path, with trade resumed, oil pumping and foreign investment pouring into a restored economy.

Meanwhile, Iran’s intercontinental ballistic missile program is subject to no restrictions at all. It’s not even part of these negotiations.

Why is Iran building them? You don’t build ICBMs to deliver sticks of dynamite. Their only purpose is to carry nuclear warheads. Nor does Iran need an ICBM to hit Riyadh or Tel Aviv. Intercontinental missiles are for reaching, well, other continents. North America, for example.

Such an agreement also means the end of nonproliferation. When a rogue state defies the world, continues illegal enrichment and then gets the world to bless an eventual unrestricted industrial-level enrichment program, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is dead. And regional hyperproliferation becomes inevitable as Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and others seek shelter in going nuclear themselves.

Wasn’t Obama’s great international cause a nuclear-free world? Within months of his swearing-in, he went to Prague to so declare. He then led a 50-party Nuclear Security Summit, one of whose proclaimed achievements was having Canada give up some enriched uranium.

Having disarmed the Canadian threat, Obama turned to Iran. The deal now on offer to the ayatollah would confer legitimacy on the nuclearization of the most rogue of rogue regimes: radically anti-American, deeply jihadist, purveyor of terrorism from Argentina to Bulgaria, puppeteer of a Syrian regime that specializes in dropping barrel bombs on civilians. In fact, the Iranian regime just last week, at the apex of these nuclear talks, staged a spectacular attack on a replica U.S. carrier near the Strait of Hormuz.

Well, say the administration apologists, what’s your alternative? Do you want war?

It’s Obama’s usual, subtle false-choice maneuver: It’s either appeasement or war.

It’s not. True, there are no good choices, but Obama’s prospective deal is the worst possible. Not only does Iran get a clear path to the bomb but it gets sanctions lifted, all pressure removed and international legitimacy.

There is a third choice. If you are not stopping Iran’s program, don’t give away the store. Keep the pressure, keep the sanctions. Indeed, increase them. After all, previous sanctions brought Iran to its knees and to the negotiating table in the first place. And that was before the collapse of oil prices, which would now vastly magnify the economic effect of heightened sanctions.

Congress is proposing precisely that. Combined with cheap oil, it could so destabilize the Iranian economy as to threaten the clerical regime. That’s the opening. Then offer to renew negotiations for sanctions relief but from a very different starting point — no enrichment. Or, if you like, with a few token centrifuges for face-saving purposes.

And no sunset.

That’s the carrot. As for the stick, make it quietly known that the United States will not stand in the way of any threatened nation that takes things into its own hands. We leave the regional threat to the regional powers, say, Israeli bombers overflying Saudi Arabia.

Consider where we began: six U.N. Security Council resolutions demanding an end to Iranian enrichment. Consider what we are now offering: an interim arrangement ending with a sunset clause that allows the mullahs a robust, industrial-strength, internationally sanctioned nuclear program.

Such a deal makes the Cuba normalization look good and the Ukrainian cease-fires positively brilliant. We are on the cusp of an epic capitulation. History will not be kind.

Charles Krauthammer is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group. He can be reached at letters@charleskrauthammer.com.