The Iran deal in the overall context of Iranian hegemonic designs

At LITD, we like to keep things simple. Murkiness inevitably begets problems.

Consider the JCPOA. The consensus, at a minimum, seems to be that just tearing it up and walking away would create massive diplomatic confusion amongst US allies, economic upheaval, given that lots of Western nations have cemented deals with Iran for supplying all manner of goods and services. The argument then goes that Iran would be more motivated than ever to resume its nuclear program and accelerate its pace.

But consider the cost to American stature in the world in the way the agreement was arrived at. (You can refresh your memory by scrolling through LITD posts in such categories as "Iran," "John Kerry," and "Appeasement of Rogue States.") Iranian foreign minister routinely humiliated Kerry and Wendy Sherman at their meetings in Vienna and Geneva. Iran made no effort to scale back its alliances with Hezbollah, the Houthis, North Korea, or any of the other bad actors it supports and shares technology with.

How pathetic did the obsequiousness get during the hammering out of the deal?

The United States and its negotiating partners agreed "in secret" to allow Iran to evade some restrictions in last year's landmark nuclear agreement in order to meet the deadline for it to start getting relief from economic sanctions, according to a report reviewed by Reuters.

The report is to be published on Thursday by the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, said the think tank’s president David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector and co-author of the report. It is based on information provided by several officials of governments involved in the negotiations, who Albright declined to identify.

Reuters could not independently verify the report's assertions.

"The exemptions or loopholes are happening in secret, and it appears that they favor Iran," Albright said. 

Among the exemptions were two that allowed Iran to exceed the deal's limits on how much low-enriched uranium (LEU) it can keep in its nuclear facilities, the report said. LEU can be purified into highly enriched, weapons-grade uranium.

The exemptions, the report said, were approved by the joint commission the deal created to oversee implementation of the accord. The commission is comprised of the United States and its negotiating partners -- called the P5+1 -- and Iran.

One senior "knowledgeable" official was cited by the report as saying that if the joint commission had not acted to create these exemptions, some of Iran’s nuclear facilities would not have been in compliance with the deal by Jan. 16, the deadline for the beginning of the lifting of sanctions.

And, as we know, the humiliation didn't stop once the patty-cake culminated in the deal. In fact, on the one-year anniversary of having (on the day of Obama's 2016 State of the Union Address) seized the crew of two US naval vessels and lifted the data from the crew's phones and laptops, the Khomeini regime put up a huge billboard in Tehran sporting the photograph of the sailors kneeling with their hands behind their heads.

And, as is always the case in this ever-churning world, events keep unfolding.

Yes, it's wonderful that ISIS is collapsing across Iraq and Syria. But Iranian-backed-and-trained militias are now incorporated into the official Iraqi army, and they are routing the Kurds, the player in all this that has been most aligned with US aims, from the region where they live - and have been enjoying relative stability throughout the turmoil that has roiled Iraq for the last couple of decades:

One of the anomalies of the fight against ISIS is that our strategic monomania on suppressing one of the frequent millennia cults that arise in Islam (Christianity has them too, they just don’t kill people–at least on the industrial scale–and tend sit on empty hilltops awaiting the Second Coming) is that we found ourselves allied with a state sponsor of terror: Iran. Today, the Iranian militias we trained and equipped rolled over an ostensible US ally, the Kurdistan Regional Government, began what looks like a campaign of ethnic cleansing in Kirkuk and topped it all off with the beheading of captured Kurdish peshmerga.

This is the result of a lack of thorough housecleaning of foreign-policy employees of the US government from the previous administration:

In all fairness, this strategy was developed by the Obama administration and it was developed without any real complaints out of CENTCOM. And the monomaniacal focus on the destruction of ISIS made partnering with the IRGC inevitable, never mind their track record of blowing up American installations. This policy has continued under the current Defense Secretary and National Security Adviser because they were pretty much co-opted by the status quo when they came on board. We’ve kept on staff Brett McGurk–the nimrod who screwed up Iraqi SOFA negotiations while sleeping with a Wall Street Journal reporter (FEMALE, THANK HEAVEN!!) and getting blow jobs from a State Department staffer (FEMALE, THANK HEAVEN!!) on the roof to the US embassy in Baghdad–who has seen this plan through to its unfortunate, though logical and foreseeable, consequences.

The pro-JCPOA argument I referenced above has as its bottom line the view that, while it does nothing to stop Iranian permeation of most, if not all, Middle East hot spots, nor curb Iranian missile development, it delayed the most existential threat of all by a decade.

But a regime that behaves as Iran has since 1979 and continues to is not going to miss any opportunities to thwart and harm the US, its declared number-one enemy.

Yes, our European allies would feel confused and betrayed if we abruptly tore up the JPCOA.

But how do you think the Kurds feel today as Kirkuk falls?