Translate

Thursday, August 20, 2015

Krauthammer on Iran Self-Inspections: "Scandalous," This Kind Of Naiveté Shows How Bad They Want A Deal




CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: This is truly shocking. We're talking about the Parchin facility which the Iranians have said will never be inspected and that we have said had to be inspected because of the thought sort of the suspicion everywhere that Parchin was used for Iran to test nuclear detonation devices. This is extremely serious stuff. We were assured that accounting for this activity was center to this agreement. And we know why the administration kept it secret. They kept it secret because nobody can believe that the inspection will be carried out by Iran itself. it would supply the inspectors, it'll will do the photography, it will do the sampling.

So, the administration now says, in its defense, well, this is routine of the IAEA. It is not. Oili Heinonen, the deputy director of IAEA for five years in charge of inspections, has said that he can think of no instance in which a regime was allowed to inspect itself. And Obama had said in April, this deal is not based on trust, it's based on unprecedented verification.

This is a deal with it's obvious when you see this kind of naïveté and this kind of capitulation you have to say to yourself the administration orders were a deal no matter what. The idea that if you oppose this you favor war I think is preposterous. This is actually quite scandalous...

It's Obama's own argument. He says this deal is better than no deal because it doesn't depend on trust. And now we hear that the Parchin inspection is 100% trust. And look, the results are already predetermined because the reason they're inspecting Parchin is because Iran has to account for past military activity. In other words, we have to know what was done, how far they got with the weaponization in order to know how to look for it in the future and to have a baseline. So this is why it's a critical issue. We're not going to have that now.

The Iranians have said all along they never were intended on making a bomb. There has never been any military activity. That's written in the agreement. Iran says it was always a peaceful activity. So we know in advance that the self-inspection will yield a conclusion that there was no weaponization happening. That's already done. The IAEA will report in December after that the agreement is implemented, this is wired in advance, and that's what makes it important, scandalous and farcical all at once. It's hard to know what further could have been done to make the deal as scandalous as it is.