Final countdown on Iran nuclear deal: End appeasement

May 2 (UPI) — On May 12, President Donald Trump will decide whether or not to tear up the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.

He has described it as “insane” and “the worst deal in history.” French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel flew to Washington last month to try to persuade the U.S. president to stick to the deal. British Prime Minister Theresa May and the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs and security, Federica Mogherini, have added their voices to the strong chorus calling for Trump to keep the deal.

Meanwhile, Israel’s prime minister, in a special televised news conference on Monday, revealed that Mossad agents had seized more than half a ton of files that proved Iran lied about developing a nuclear weapons program. Netanyahu concluded that the whole nuclear deal, hailed by former U.S. President Barack Obama as the high point of his presidency, was based on Iranian lies and deception.

Netanyahu’s revelations were immediately denounced by Iran as “childish propaganda.” But the White House stated that the Israelis had provided “new and compelling details” about Tehran’s efforts to develop “missile-deliverable nuclear weapons.”

On Sunday, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the United States would cancel the nuclear deal unless steps are taken to fix it. No doubt he was referring to serious flaws in the deal, such as the prohibition on international inspectors gaining access to military sites inside Iran. It is almost certain that all of the clandestine nuclear work being undertaken in Iran will be within such military sites, controlled by the blacklisted Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

In a misguided effort to appease the theocratic regime in Iran, the EU has long pursued a policy it refers to as “constructive dialogue.” This has included a reluctance to mention human rights to a regime that has achieved the number one slot as the main proponent of the death penalty per capita in the world. Over 60 percent of all executions in the Middle East are carried out, often in public, inside Iran.

The venally corrupt mullahs have also reduced women to the role of second-class citizens. Iranian women are regularly attacked on the streets by thugs from the state’s religious police for “bad-veiling.” Torture, floggings, amputations, eye gouging and multiple hangings are the order of the day under the ayatollah’s medieval system of oppression. Despite this barbaric tyranny, Mogherini has repeatedly visited Tehran, dutifully donning the veil and posing for selfies with Iranian politicians, handing a propaganda coup to the mullahs.

It is perhaps not surprising that millions of Iranians took to the streets in a mass uprising that spread to over 140 cities earlier this year and continues to this day, despite a brutal crackdown by the mullahs, with many deaths and over 8,000 arrests. The impoverished citizens are fed up seeing their nation’s wealth squandered on foreign meddling in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen, while they are left to starve at home. Obama’s flawed nuclear deal released over $150 billion in assets frozen by strict sanctions, which the mullahs have used to export terrorism and to bolster Bashar al-Assad’s murderous civil war and other vicious conflicts in the Middle East.

The theocratic regime has also used money released under the deal to redouble its secret development of atomic weapons and ballistic missile delivery systems.

Winston Churchill said: “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.” The West has cravenly fed the Iranian crocodile for far too long, standing aside as it devours its neighbors across the Middle East. The time has come to end appeasement and to treat Iran as the international pariah it has become.

The countdown to May 12 has begun.

Struan Stevenson, coordinator of Campaign for Iran Change, was a member of the European Parliament representing Scotland (1999-2014), president of the Parliament’s Delegation for Relations with Iraq (2009-14) and chairman of Friends of a Free Iran Intergroup (2004-14). He is an international lecturer on the Middle East and is also president of the European Iraqi Freedom Association.