Daniel Larison has an excellent—“excellent” as in “deeply depressing”—take on President Biden’s stumbling—“stumbling” as in “clearly and severely wrong-headed”—Iranian “policy”, which is, in fact, so bad that I’ve exhausted a whole week’s supply of quotation marks in one goddamn sentence, which means I’ll have to take out a loan, something I can scarcely afford to do. To cut my costs a little, I’ll let Dan do some of the talking, from his latest Eunomia post, How Can Iran ‘Re-Enter’ an Agreement That It Never Left?, taking everybody’s favorite paper of record to task for its arrant knavery neocon nonsense no doubt inadvertent misstatement of facts, to wit, that both the U.S. and Iran want to re-enter the nuclear weapons agreement voided by President Trump, when in fact 1) Iran can’t re-enter an agreement it never left and 2) the notion that the U.S. really wants to re-enter the agreement is dubious in the extreme.1 Says Dan
Only one of the two governments mentioned here [in the Times article] needs to re-enter the agreement. The other never left. There would be nothing to discuss, no re-entry to negotiate, had the U.S. not randomly decided to renege on all of its commitments in 2018. Iran did not do the same thing, and for more than a year after the U.S. pulled out of the agreement they remained in full compliance. Even now, Iran is still a party to the agreement and has reduced its compliance only because of the U.S. breach. This is a matter of basic accuracy. If the paper of record can’t get something this elementary right at the start of its report on the negotiations, what hope is there for understanding more complicated questions?
As Dan goes on to point out, the problem is not limited to deliberate disinformation honest error. The Biden administration has an “add on” that is surely intended to sink even the possibility that the U.S. will make amends for its wanton recklessness by requiring that Iran agree to a second agreement, one that the Times describes thusly:
It [resumption of U.S. compliance with the original agreement] must be followed immediately by an agreement on limiting missiles and support of terrorism — and making it impossible for Iran to produce enough fuel for a bomb for decades.
As Dan points out, there is no likelihood, and no reason, for Iran to make such an agreement, particularly, I might point out, since the U.S. continues to gratuitously fund the terrorist state of Israel to the tune of some $4 billion a year.2 Dan doesn’t make the connection, but I will, that the Biden administration is most likely succumbing both to the standard bureaucratic love of a “bargaining chip”3 and old-fashioned AIPAC lobbying via Congress, most particularly in the form of New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez, an ardent AIPACian and unfortunately chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who opposed the nuclear weapons deal from the get-go. A Democratic president will almost always sacrifice foreign policy for the sake of domestic, and that seems to be precisely what is happening here. Well, I’m sure this won’t lead to trouble down the road.
Afterwords
I first discussed Uncle Joe’s bathetic tendencies here
1. For the “record” (I mean, someone has to maintain it), the authorial miscreants are Steven Erlanger and David E. Sanger.
2. Wikipedia offers a handy though probably incomplete listing of Israeli assassinations.
3. The perennial appeal of the bargaining chip is that “we’ll give up something we don’t need and in exchange they’ll give up something they do need! We’ll get something for nothing!” The “other side” is always assumed to be so dumb that they’ll never figure this out. Because not only are we the good guys, we’re also the smart guys! Funny how that works out!
