I am not going to spend three days
again straightening you out on this. Of course there was posturing. "Let us in. Never! Let us in. Never! Let us in. Never!" The fact is that the US never had sufficient evidence for the UN inspectors to even make a formal request under the agreement to inspect a military site, so the UN inspectors never made a formal request under the agreement to inspect a military site, and the Iranians never turned down a formal request to inspect a military site. Why do you think everybody else is still a party to the agreement? Because Iran never breached the agreement. It was all Trumped-up as a pretext to withdraw from the agreement.
Kind of sounds like the reason we invaded Iraq, doesn't it? Do the words "aluminum rods" jog your memory?
But forget all that. Let's, for the sake of argument, say that Trump exited the agreement because the US isn't Superman and doesn't have x-ray vision, blah, blah, blah. How does exiting the agreement because the UN inspectors can't inspect military sites get us closer to the goal of inspecting military sites, or more generally detecting that Iran is working on a nuclear weapon? It doesn't. It takes us back to square one. Of course, now that we are back at square one, we can return to the old, worn out, we'll sanction them back to the stone age routine, which has worked so well with North Korea. Santayana springs to mind. We shot ourselves in the foot, or cut off our nose to spite our face, or one of any number of other pithy aphorisms. But at least Trump exacted his revenge for Obama making fun of him at the White House press corps dinner for having to make tough decisions like whether to fire Meat Loaf. That's what's important. Making the world safe for democracy.
Oh, I forgot. The purpose of the agreement was never to
stop Iran's development of a nuclear weapon; it was to
slow down Iran's development of a nuclear weapon. Throw as many obstacles as possible in their way to delay the inevitable. Make them really work for it. You know, move stuff around in the dead of night. Set up secret facilities in caves. Play cat and mouse with the inspectors. All the usual stuff. The issue is not
if Iran gets a nuclear weapon; the issue is
when Iran gets a nuclear weapon.
So, let's review:
Again, do you believe that a full team of the world's leading experts on monitoring and diplomacy just dashed this out on a napkin and didn't think about these things? That they worked up this deal, signed it, and then realized, "D'OH!!! We forgot about the *military bases*. Nuts. No way to tell what's going in or out of those things. Oh well."
That's exactly what happened.
I speak English. So let me repeat. That's exactly what happened.
