Dear KMAG: 20200114 Open Topic

Wholey Schiff Batman!!!
OBAMA PASSED THE BUCK. TRUMP REFUSED TO PLAY.
The Iran deal was never meant to stop Iran from building a bomb—it was supposed to delay it until disaster happened on someone else’s watch
By Lee Smith
January 13, 2020

….the Democrats are not pro-terrorist. They’re simply intent on protecting the historic agreement that legalized the nuclear weapons program of a terror state.…
The JCPOA was the instrument Obama used to secure the administration’s ultimate goal—realigning U.S. interests with those of Iran. For the U.S. to be able to minimize its footprint in the Middle East, the Obama White House needed a proxy force—much like the Iranians use proxies to advance their interests. Soleimani managed Iranian proxies and Obama, who praised the late commander, believed he was capable of stabilizing the region on behalf of America.
In 2015, when the JCPOA went into effect, Soleimani was removed from the U.N. sanctions list, a provision that, according to press reports at the time, the Iranians saw as “nonnegotiable.” That’s how Obama wanted it, too.
As I explained in Tablet last week, Obama had subscribed to the myth that U.S. policymakers had built up around Iran over 40 years—that the third-world obscurantist regime was in fact a formidable power that the U.S. dare not challenge lest it risk an apocalyptic war….
Former Bush administration Senior Director for the Middle East Michael Doran said on Twitter he had knowledge of messages from the Obama administration to Soleimani. “We don’t know the subject matter of the messages,” Doran told Tablet, “but given the tenor of Obama’s letters to [Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei, it is a reasonable assumption that the administration wrote to Soleimani to court him rather than to deter him.” A senior U.S. official confirmed to Tablet the existence of the messages from the Obama administration to Soleimani….
The nuclear program, the regime’s crown jewel, is controlled not by the imaginary moderates who want rapprochement with the Great Satan. It is rather in the hands of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and the expeditionary unit Soleimani led, the Quds Force, which have been waging war on the U.S. and its allies for four decades. This is why the previous White House did not stand with the Iranian protesters who filled the streets in 2010. The Iranian security forces shooting civilians in the streets were the same people with whom Obama needed to make a deal. Taking sides against them would have made that harder; likely impossible.
Trump, by contrast, says he is not that interested in making a deal. “I couldn’t care less if they negotiate,” he tweeted Sunday about Iranian leadership. “Will be totally up to them but, no nuclear weapons and ‘don’t kill your protesters.’”
……The world’s most famous dealmaker appears not to be angling for a deal, and for good reason—there’s no deal to be had because there’s nothing left to negotiate. Obama set it up that way. The JCPOA guaranteed that the Iranians would all but have a bomb within 10 years—or by the end of the second term of Obama’s successor.…
In 2023, the U.N. ban on assistance to Iran’s ballistic missile program will end. The ban on the manufacture of advanced centrifuges will begin to expire, shortening the amount of time it will take to build a bomb. Perhaps most importantly, in 2025, the U.N. snapback mechanism allowing the U.S. to reimpose sanctions will expire, meaning that we would need to persuade Russia and China to restore international sanctions on Iran. The effect is that there is nothing short of military action to stop the Iranians from marching toward the bomb. It was Obama who said that by years 13, 14, or 15 of the deal Iran would be within a hairbreadth of a nuclear bomb By 2031 with all nuclear restrictions lifted, the Islamic Republic will have a full-scale nuclear weapons program…..