ALLEGED AGREEMENT IS A CON JOB

By David M. Weinberg, ISRAEL HAYOM

Ahead of the accord reached between the P5+1 and Iran Tuesday, The New York Times reported that it was expected to be a “political agreement,” not a “legally binding treaty.” 

Furthermore, Israeli sources said the two sides would “announce understandings” and ?present a 100-page document, but not “sign” anything. It will take months of additional negotiations to develop the relevant implementation documents.

All of which is meant to obfuscate the details, Israeli officials fear, and cloud the matter enough to confuse or bamboozle Congress. It will also allow the Iranians to (correctly) claim that they never truly “signed away” their nuclear capacities. In the meantime, U.N. and other international mechanisms to lift sanctions on Iran will go into high gear.?

However, the root corruption of the agreement is that Iran gets to keep its nuclear facilities, and there will be no truly intrusive international supervision of what goes on ?deep inside them.

The accord leaves Iran with all its nuclear development facilities intact, including the Fordo underground center, instead of dismantling them. This allows the Iranians to continue refining their nuclear skills. Even at low levels of enrichment (3.5% and 5%, which are not useful for a bomb) this provides a framework with which Tehran can bypass Western restrictions and hoodwink Western inspectors.?

After all, Iran has clandestinely crossed every “red line” set by the West over the past 20 years — putting nuclear plants online, building heavy-water facilities, refining uranium, working on explosive triggers and warheads, and generally breaching all of its obligations under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty — and has gotten away with it. It has lied, formally and repeatedly, to the international community about its nuclear efforts.

So any deal that scales back sanctions and allows Iran to keep operating its advanced nuclear development facilities even at a low level is a fatal bargain. So warned Simon Henderson of the Washington Institute and Olli Heinonen, a former deputy director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, as long as two years ago.

U.S. President Obama’s response to this was to promise that he would accept nothing less than a Western right to conduct “anywhere, anytime” international inspections of Iran’s most secret nuclear and military facilities.

Indeed, veteran investigators have testified in front of Congress literally dozens of times that anywhere-anytime access is a minimum prerequisite to a verifiable deal.

Alas, Obama has now backed down from that. It’s an American collapse.

Under the terms of the accord, it seems that IAEA inspectors will have to “coordinate” their visits to suspect Iranian sites, “in consultation between Iran and the world powers.” Worse still, Iran will have the right to deny and challenge U.N. requests to send inspectors to suspicious sites. In these cases, an arbitration board composed of Iran and the powers would decide on the issue.

They call this “managed access,” which is a euphemism for nowhere, no-time inspections.

This means that Iran will continue to play the negotiation game over every Western inspection request. With lawyers and more lawyers, diplomats and more diplomats. Lots of hotels and endless discussions.

In other words, Iran will be able to delay and delay access to true military or nuclear sites, just as it has done with the Parchin military base, where it is suspected to have experimented with nuclear weapons production.

Only now, under the accord and after at least three years of requests (and after a major Iranian cleanup effort, documented by Western satellite photos) will Iran finally “grant” access to Parchin. Sometime soon.

Yay. What a great victory for Obama and nuclear containment of Iran.