By Kenneth R. Timmerman • Fox News
Security expert Ryan Mauro comments on ‘Fox & Friends First.’
The Iran nuclear deal is dead – and the mullahs who rule the Islamic Republic have only themselves to blame.
There is no need for President Trump to even announce that the United States is pulling out of the deal. Iran killed the agreement through its own willful actions and blatant lies, even before the deal was officially implemented on Jan. 16, 2016.
President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry – who negotiated the nuclear deal with Iran and the European Union, Russia, China, France, Britain and Germany – heaped praise on the agreement when it was reached in July 2015, ignoring its fatal flaws.
The premise of the deal, which was designed to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, was simple: Iran agreed to restrictions on its nuclear activities and said it would provide the International Atomic Energy Agency with a full accounting of its past military activities – meaning its secret efforts to develop nuclear weapons.
In exchange for Iran accepting these restriction and disclosure requirements, the international community agreed to lift crippling economic sanctions on the Islamic Republic. Doing this pumped an estimated $100 billion and $150 billion into the coffers of the Iranian regime. It was as if Iran hit the jackpot in the richest lottery in the world – quite a victory.
But Monday’s revelation by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should be a game-changer. Netanyahu revealed a spectacular coup by the Mossad (Israel’s foreign intelligence agency) that spirited away Iran’s Atomic Archive, providing unequivocal proof that Iran never kept its commitments to disclose information about its nuclear weapons program.
Instead, the Atomic Archive shows that Iran lied to keep its nuclear program a secret. The Iranian government’s lies mean the Iran deal is null and void, because Iran never fulfilled its end of the bargain.
Iran got the money from the nuclear deal and by all accounts has been using it to brutally repress its own people, support Syrian dictator Bashar Assad in his civil war that has killed hundreds thousands of people in seven years, and wage a proxy war in Yemen against Saudi Arabia.
In addition, Iran has expanded funding for the terrorist groups Hezbollah and Hamas, which today bracket Israel from north and south with over 150,000 rockets and missiles. New armed Iranian drones, based in Syria, have attempted four separate attacks on Israel. The first was shot down by Israel inside Israeli air space and the other three drones were shot down by the Russians before they left Syria.
The Netanyahu press conference was blocked initially by Twitter when Netanyahu posted segments on his official Twitter account. This is not surprising. Netanyahu’s revelations have got the Obama-Kerry “echo chamber” in the media and the arms control community in full damage control mode, trying to save an agreement that never should have been signed in the first place.
A report issued by the International Atomic Energy Agency in December 2015 clearly shows that the agency acknowledged that Iran had stonewalled its questions, failed to provide answers about multiple nuclear weapons-related programs, and flat-out denied it ever had a plan to build five 10-kiloton nuclear warheads. The Atomic Archive that Netanyahu revealed on Monday exposed Iran’s denial as a lie, and proved that Iran had maintained a clandestine nuclear weapons program beyond 2003, when Iran falsely claimed its program had ended.
The International Atomic Agency report also exposed other Iranian lies about its nuclear program, including Iranian claims denying that it did metallurgy work for nuclear devices; denying that it conducted nuclear weapons-related multipoint initiation experiments; and hiding that fact that it deliberately scrubbed an area of the Parchin military complex where it had been engaged in explosives testing of non-nuclear components of a nuclear weapon.
The report also showed Iran lied when it denied doing computer modeling of nuclear explosive devices up through 2009; was clearly hiding information when it refused to answer questions about 2002 preparations for underground nuclear tests; and hid the fact that it operated two workshops where it conducted tests to fit a nuclear warhead onto a missile.
These are key areas of Iran’s previous nuclear weapons development activity that Iran failed to resolve with the International Atomic Energy Agency. In other words, the agency report that the Obama administration claimed “resolved” Iran’s previous bad behavior did nothing of the sort. It was a whitewash.
But Iran was taking no chances, even with a toothless “watchdog” like the International Atomic Energy Agency and a rock-solid guarantee from the Obama-Kerry team that no U.S. inspectors would ever visit Iran. As Netanyahu revealed on Monday, Iran gave the order in January 2016 to collect all incriminating documents dealing with its nuclear weapons development program and hide them away in high-tech vaults in a nondescript warehouse in the south of Tehran.
For two years, Mossad probed and planned. And then, as Netanyahu revealed Monday, in January Mossad pulled off what must be the most astonishing intelligence coup of Israel’s history and spirited out documents weighing over half a ton and brought them – or copies – to Israel.
So now we have incontrovertible proof that Iran was never in compliance with the nuclear deal. It never came clean on its past nuclear activities, and it set up an Atomic Archive so it could resume nuclear weapons work at a moment’s notice.
In other words, there never was an Iran nuclear deal. It was a hoax – a deception crafted with the full participation of President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry to let Iran off the hook.
In a YouTube message Thursday, Iranian Foreign minister Javad Zarif said you don’t broker the sale of a house, move in, and then two years later get to renegotiate the price. To extend his metaphor, if you move into the house but fail to make any payments on the mortgage – including the initial down payment – you get evicted.
It’s time for President Trump to serve Iran with its eviction notice.