On Wednesday when the Associated Press published a report claiming that the International Atomic Energy Agency had agreed to let Iran inspect the Parchin military site itself, critics of the nuclear deal were outraged. But the administration and its supporters weren’t rattled. They claimed there was nothing amiss and soon the IAEA itself issued a statement saying the story was “misleading,” though it wouldn’t say exactly what was misleading about it. The IAEA further asserted that it was obligated not to reveal the text of its agreement with Iran. That was enough to set media cheerleaders for President Obama, like those at the Vox website, into full spin mode, claiming that the AP’s reporting was flawed. They argued both that the claim about the Iranians being allowed to inspect their own site was unproven and that even if it were true it was no big deal. We’ll leave the latter claim aside for the moment, but the headline this morning is that doubts about the veracity of the original story are now gone. The AP has released the text of the draft agreement between the IAEA and Iran that is, according to all accounts, not different from the final version. One doesn’t need to be a nuclear expert to understand that the headline on the original story was entirely accurate, “UN to let Iran inspect nuke work site.” This is not only more damning evidence that the nuclear deal is a farce but that Democrats who are prepared to let it go through out of loyalty to President Obama are enabling a shocking betrayal of the nation’s security.
The text of the agreement makes clear that international inspectors won’t get anywhere near Parchin. The Iranians will do all the inspecting and at the end of the process a UN official will be allowed to pay a courtesy visit followed by a “roundtable” discussion of the entire affair. In other words, Parchin and all that happened there will be swept under the rug along with U.S. and IAEA promises about exploring exactly how much progress Iran had made there.
The point of concern is that Parchin is where Iran did its work on the possible military dimensions (PMD) of its nuclear project. The work done there was not theoretical physics but on triggers for nuclear bombs. Supposedly, they stopped their work there a long time ago and the site has already been scrubbed. But that doesn’t mean its unimportant. As even Secretary of State John Kerry admitted, without knowing what was done there, we can’t understand how close Iran is to building a bomb. Any discussion about nuclear “breakout” times, which is crucial to the administration’s scenario for monitoring and preventing Iran from getting a bomb during the ten-year period when the deal is in effect, becomes pure speculation without this knowledge. And if Iran is doing the inspections, the IAEA and the U.S., and American allies won’t get it.
Let’s be clear about who the real culprits are here. The IAEA is a UN agency with a lot of responsibility but its power stems from the cooperation it gets from the nations it inspects. With the U.S. more interested in détente with Iran than in pressing the Iranians on difficult issues, the IAEA is in no position to push Tehran for more access to Parchin or any other military site. It should also be remembered, as we noted earlier this week, the Iranians have already threatened Yukio Amano, the director of the IAEA, and made clear to him that they will not tolerate his making public the details of the arrangements for inspections.
While the administration is telling us all to move along as there’s nothing to see here and their cheerleaders are assuring the country that this is a minor detail of no consequence, the story of the IAEA agreement on Parchin is deeply significant. By itself, it shows that the UN nuclear watchdog agency is being given the runaround by Iran and is forced to take it so long as the U.S. doesn’t pressure Iran to be more transparent.
But context is also everything here. The Parchin agreement provides the setting for the entire inspections process of Iran’s active nuclear facilities. Administration promises of “anytime, anywhere” inspections were as trustworthy as the president’s famous ObamaCare pledges about keeping your insurance and doctors if you liked them. As with the assurances about Parchin, we’re also told that the 24-day waiting period for inspections of active plants is not a big deal. But the message being sent to Iran is clear. It isn’t so much that the inspections regime is a farce as it is that the administration is demonstrating that it doesn’t consider these details to be a major concern. If you believe, as President Obama has repeatedly told us, that Iran is changing and that it is about to “get right with the world,” you don’t worry about inspections. You also don’t worry about Iran’s support for terrorism or its production of ballistic missiles (whose only purpose can be to attack the U.S. and Europe, not those recalcitrant and paranoid Israelis that the president falsely claims are the world’s only opponents of the deal).
That brings us back to the question of what members of the House and Senate are supposed to think about any of this. Democrats have been under a great deal of pressure to back the president on the Iran deal. He has made it clear that he regards this vote as a litmus test of their loyalty to both their party and to him personally. That seems to be enough for most of them, including those who have long professed to care deeply about stopping Iran’s nuclear ambitions. But this sidebar to the general discussion about the merits of the pact with Iran is telling. It shows that when it is demonstrated that the terms of the deal are utterly inadequate even by the administration’s own standards, the bulk of the president’s party is unable or unwilling to draw the proper conclusions.
If letting Iran inspect Parchin by itself is not enough to move undecided Democrats into the columns of those opposing the deal, then obviously nothing will. If we have learned nothing else from this debate, it’s that all of the lip service members of the president’s party have given to the danger from Iran and the need for tough inspections is just a lot of eyewash. The text that the AP has published shows that a vote for the deal now is clearly a vote not for postponing nuclear peril, as some Democrats say, but for indifference to it.
