The government of Iran is presenting its deal with Obama to their people and legislature as a triumph, speaking openly about provisions that have been misrepresented to the American people and Congress by the Obama administration.
Iran’s rulers are working to sell the deal to Iranians, while Obama tries to slip it past Americans, or force it down their throats. What more proof does anyone need that this is a lousy deal for the United States?
President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry were lying through their teeth about keeping Iran’s ballistic missile program in check.
Their missile program will get up and running right away, under the U.N. resolutions Obama used to circumvent the U.S. Constitution. It turns out the only restrictions on Iranian missile technology is contained in an “annex” to the main resolution, and—as Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif triumphantly explained to his legislature—it is “non-binding.”
“This paragraph speaks about missiles with nuclear warheads capability and since we don’t design any of our missiles for carrying nuclear weapons, therefore, this paragraph is not related to us at all,” Zarif crowed, as translated from Iran’s Fars News Agency by CNS News.
Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS) and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) discovered that Obama and Kerry actually worked out some side deals with Iran that were not disclosed to Congress at all. Pompeo and Cotton only got wise to the scam by talking to International Atomic Energy Agency representatives.
“According to the IAEA, the Iran agreement negotiators, including the Obama administration, agreed that the IAEA and Iran would forge separate arrangements to govern the inspection of the Parchin military complex – one of the most secretive military facilities in Iran – and how Iran would satisfy the IAEA’s outstanding questions regarding past weaponization work,” Pompeo and Cotton explained in a press release.
“Both arrangements will not be vetted by any organization other than Iran and the IAEA, and will not be released even to the nations that negotiated the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.] This means that the secret arrangements have not been released for public scrutiny and have not been submitted to Congress as part of its legislatively mandated review of the Iran deal.”
As Pompeo and Cotton note, these side agreements are a clear violation of U.S. law, specifically the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act.
“Not only does this violate the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, it is asking Congress to agree to a deal that it cannot review,” said Rep. Pompeo.
“The failure to disclose the content of these side agreements begs the question, ‘What is the Obama administration hiding?’ Even members of Congress who are sympathetic to this deal cannot and must not accept a deal we aren’t even aware of. I urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to stand up and demand to see the complete deal,” Pompeo continued.
“In failing to secure the disclosure of these secret side deals, the Obama administration is asking Congress and the American people to trust, but not verify,” said Sen. Cotton, hearkening back to the words of a president who knew how to stand for his country’s interests against evil empires. “That we are only now discovering that parts of this dangerous agreement are being kept secret begs the question of what other elements may also be secret and entirely free from public scrutiny.”
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei’s top international affairs adviser confirmed that Iran has no intention of abiding by any restrictions on ballistic missiles, because their nuclear program is entirely peaceful—an effort to shave a fraction of a penny off the civilian electric bills of a oil nation that persisted for years despite the crippling economic sanctions they needed Barack Obama to defeat—so nothing in those U.N. resolutions stops them for working on missiles that can hit Europe.
The Iranian foreign minister also boasted to his lawmakers that Iran had achieved its “main objectives” through Obama’s capitulation, including “maintaining Iran’s dignity and might, establishing the nuclear program, [uranium] enrichment and retaining the heavy-water reactor,” while America got nothing, and the “much-hated Zionist regime” of Israel “has never been this much isolated among its allies.”
It is time for President Obama’s apologists to come to terms with a few things, as they watch the deal grow worse and worse with every passing day:
1. Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry lied about this deal to the American people and Congress. Repeatedly. They were not just making mistakes, getting a few small details wrong, or underestimating Iran’s ability to weasel out of certain provisions. They told deliberate falsehoods every step of the way, for years.
2. This isn’t a deal between America and Iran. It’s a deal between Barack Hussein Obama and Iran. The entire American system of government has been frozen out of the process. The interests of the people of the United States, and our allies in the Middle East, were entirely secondary, to the extent they mattered at all. Obama wanted a “legacy achievement.” Iran got everything else.
3. The framework announced in Lausanne fell substantially sort of everything Obama spent years saying he wanted to achieve. The deal announced in Vienna a few months later was substantially worse for Americans than the Lausanne framework. And the actual deal that goes into effect will be far worse than everything this deeply dishonest, reckless administration announced in Vienna.
Obama and Kerry have managed to shift geopolitical pressure against the United States. From here on out, it will be all about the U.N., or Iran and its patrons, forcing the U.S. to do certain things, not a united international community making non-negotiable demands of Iran. As lousy as Obama’s deal was, the reality already unfolding is far worse.