Yesterday I said Iran was going to humiliate Obama as much as possible by tearing up his “historic arms control deal” in his face, one paragraph at a time… secure in the knowledge that Obama’s pathological inability to admit error will compel the Administration to make excuses and try to keep the “deal” alive.
Eventually, Iran will go too far, the more sensible Europeans who negotiated against Obama and Iran in Lausanne will pull out, and the whole thing will be formally scuttled, probably before Congress has a chance to shoot it down with a bipartisan vote. But meanwhile, the world’s leading sponsors of terrorism are enjoying themselves tremendously at Obama’s expense.
Case in point: Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei insisted on Thursday, “All sanctions should be removed when the deal is signed. If the sanctions removal depends on other processes, then why did we start the negotiations?”
That’s not how Team Obama has been portraying the deal. The Administration says the sanctions would be phased out gradually.
Of course, the Iranians began saying within hours that Obama and his hapless Secretary of State John Kerry were lying about the terms of the deal. Khamenei repeated that accusation on Thursday. “Americans put out a statement just a few hours after our negotiators finished their talks,” he sniffed. “This statement, which they called a ‘fact sheet,’ was wrong on most of the issues.”
The ayatollah took to Twitter to repeat this criticism in a more insulting manner:
That’s not just Khamenei spouting off – it’s the official position of the entire Iranian government, repeated almost word-for-word by a foreign ministry spokeswoman in an interview with the government-controlled “news” agency. “The U.S. fact sheet is a U.S. version and not acceptable to Iran,” said spokeswoman Marziyeh Afkham. “The Americans have mentioned a version of the negotiations from their own point of view. They are known to the world for having such methods, and yet they have even made the Europeans object. There is no agreement yet. There can be no agreement until all the issues are finalized.”
Khamenei also reiterated Iran’s defiance of another key issue in Obama’s “deal,” the inspection of Iranian military facilities:
So Iran can just move all its nuclear weapons research to its “security” facilities (where most of the really bad stuff is probably already located) and we’ve got absolutely nothing, in exchange for Iran getting everything. That’s not a “deal,” it’s surrender, in a war Iran won without firing a shot. (That’s just a figure of speech, mind you. They fired plenty of shots at American troops in Iraq, and used proxies around the world to attack America and her allies over the years.) They’ve got Obama face-down on the ground, rubbing his face in the dirt, and he’s still wobbling into interviews and claiming it’s a great deal that will guarantee a non-nuclear Iran… at least until he’s safely out of the White House and relaxing in Hawaii, at which point it all becomes someone else’s problem anyway, so who cares? YOLO! For extra added fun, here are Supreme Leader Khamenei’s thoughts on nuclear non-proliferation:
“Do it if you can?” Golly, Obama’s right – surely we can trust this fine, upstanding, responsible nation-state to keep a tight lid on is “peaceful” nuclear technology and keep enriched uranium from spreading across the Middle East. They’ll become a splendid regional hegemon and world power, fueled by the gobs of diplomatic credibility and international legitimacy Obama has been heaping on them, not to mention the money he seems eager to stuff in their pockets by dumping those sanctions.
The worst thing about this farce, assuming it ends with sanctions restored and Obama babbling about how the Iranians messed up his beautiful deal, is that it always involved conceding precious legitimacy to the terror state. Iran wasn’t required to make any concessions on its fanaticism, embrace of terrorism, hatred of Israel, or even hatred of America. They were put on a glide path to nuclear weapons in 10 years or less, without agreeing to anything that would contradict the silly story they’ve been peddling for years about how they just want peaceful nuclear energy for civilian consumption.
And they couldn’t even play nice for a couple of months and promote that fiction until they got a deal signed! They’re unwilling to throw Obama even the smallest of public-relations bones.