Iranian deal disaster from start

The more we learn about it — as Iranian and Obama-administration deceptions are uncovered — the more we know it was a disaster from the start…

There is no wonder, then, why almost every news story about the Iran deal has confirmed the wisdom of getting out of it.

1) On the eve of Trump’s decision to withdraw from the deal, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s dramatic televised disclosures of captured Iranian documents more or less confirmed the obvious: Iran never had any intention of forgoing its nuclear-bomb-making efforts, as implied by prior politicized national-intelligence estimates. The only mystery was why Iran had carefully recorded evidence of its own deception. In eerie fashion, it was almost as if at some future date Iran had planned to add insult to injury by reminding its mugged partners just how gullible they had been. Or perhaps some Iranian diplomatic grandees feared that in revolutionary Tehran, any purported appeasers would have been tried for treason, so they needed documentary evidence that they had been patriotic cheaters all along.

2) To swing the deal, the Obama administration sent advisers around the banking world to facilitate Iranian efforts to convert their released embargoed funds into Great Satan currency — a warping of the American financial system that was ostensibly illegal at the time. In other words, the Obama administration for some strange reason more or less went beyond the requirements of the Iran deal and used the U.S. government to help undermine its own restrictions on facilitating Iranian commerce and banking — while keeping the entire sordid mess quiet as they hectored skeptics of the deal as naïve or conspiratorial. Such habitual Obama-administration deception and conniving may explain why former secretary of state John Kerry this May so publicly and nonchalantly met Iranian representatives overseas, apparently seeing nothing wrong in the attempt to undermine the very policies of his own president. Old habits die hard.

3) Recently, we’ve seen more of the same Iranian self-congratulation for their own powers of deception — this time relating to the September 11 attacks. After the cancellation of the Iran deal, Iran’s state-controlled television mysteriously released the Farsi-language confessionals of one Mohammad-Javad Larijani. He is a supposed “international-affairs assistant” who conceded that Iranian intelligence officers had intentionally given the 9/11 al-Qaeda murderers safe transit through the Islamic Republic before 9/11. The natural logic is that only thanks to Iran’s complicity did the World Trade Center implode. One wonders to what degree Larijani’s bizarre boast is true or the sick and spiteful baiting of a sore loser — or whether the Obama administration knew of such rumored Iranian 9/11 involvement in 9/11 at the time of the Iran deal. In any case, Iran made official what most knew from 1979 onward: It has been in a perpetual war with the United States, whom it fears and hates.

4) Given the Iranian sense of inferiority and its tic of goading its hated Great Satan rival, expect more such disclosures in the future, as Iran now tries to humiliate the U.S. for its prior stupidity as recompense for its inability to leverage our imbecility any further.

5) With a wink and nod, Iran also announced that its supposedly mothballed nuclear facility at Natanz will restart uranium enrichment with new centrifuges, but for now theoretically in accordance with the Iran deal. We are supposed to think that the trustworthy Iranians would not have done that, or would not have been capable of doing that, had Trump just kept up the nonproliferation charade. Or is it worse than that? Are they again hinting that they the deal was so bad and their proliferation efforts so easily jump-started, that they have always had only contempt for those so stupid to take them at their word?