Yesterday I was watching CNN when they covered a presentation by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu live.  In the run-up CNN announced that the presentation had something to do with the Iranian nuclear agreement.  Given Netanyahu’s persistent and dogged opposition to the deal and the fact that Trump is scheduled to determine whether to pull out of the agreement over the next two weeks, I jumped to the conclusion that the Israelis had evidence that the Iranians were not in compliance with the agreement. Certainly this would be an attempt by the Israeli PM to persuade Trump to exit the agreement and to give him cover to do so.

My suspicions were confirmed when Netanyahu stated his presentation in English; obviously he was targeting a US audience, not his fellow Israeli citizens.  He stated early on that he had proof that the Iranians were not in compliance with the agreement because they still have a nuclear program. He went on to display a huge bookshelf full of binders which he said were full of Iranian documentation of their nuclear program along with an impressive display of CD’s which he said contained additional Iranian nuclear program documentation. Netanyahu explained that the documentation, which was originally stored at a secret location in Iran, was spirited out to the country by Israeli agents.

My first impression was, “Wow, I had always heard that the Israeli intelligent services were good, but it is beyond impressive that they were able to locate and obtain such a massive amount of highly secret material right under the Iranians’ noses.  As Netanyahu started going through examples of the material my second impression was, “He is about to prove without a shadow of a doubt that the Iranians have been cheating all along and that the deal is deader than a door nail”.

However, as Netanyahu continued to go through one page of Iranian documentation after another, it became obvious that the massive amount of data that the Israeli intelligence services had been able to retrieve proved only that the Iranians had lied to the world and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) when they said before the agreement was signed that they never had any intention of developing nuclear weapons, that they certainly didn’t have a nuclear weapons program. That’s not news!  Everyone knew that they were lying; otherwise an agreement to dismantle their nuclear weapons program would not have been necessary.

The fact that they had retained the documentation of their efforts to build a nuclear weapon also cannot be considered unusual.  It isn’t covered in the agreement.  What rational country would destroy such valuable scientific documentation even if they had no intention of ever using it.  International agreements are often broken by one party or another.  Of course one can never predict when an irresponsible person might be elected President of the United States and decide to pull out of the deal less than three years after it was signed.  It is prudent for a rational country to remain ready for all possible eventualities.

This morning on CNN I also learned that the Trump administration put out the statement shortly after Netanyahu completed his presentation which included the sentence: “Iran has a robust, clandestine nuclear weapons program that it has tried and failed to hide from the world and from its own people.”  Yesterday morning the administration issued a correction in which they changed the phrase “the Iranians has a nuclear program…” to “the Iranians had a nuclear program…”.  Opps!  Sorry; please forgive us for this small inadvertent typo by one of our interns.  Yea right, blame it on an intern. It’s just a small typo that just happens to completely change the entire narrative – it means that Netanyahu has nothing new, that he has no evidence that the Iranians are not in compliance with the nuclear agreement now as the International Atomic Energy Agency and our country’s experts have confirmed over and over again.

In other words Netanyahu’s entire presentation was nothing more than a transparent fig leaf offered to Trump to allow him to do what he wants to do anyway – to pull the US out of the agreement. The fact that the administration issued their statement so soon after Netanyahu finished his presentation is a clear indication that the Israeli PM and Trump were in close coordination on the briefing.  The entire affair was obviously intended to counter the efforts by French President Emmanuel Macron, German Prime Minister Angela Merkel, and other European leaders to talk some sense to Donald Trump.

It is also a clear indication that Trump fully intends to pull the US out of the agreement.  He will proceed with this stupidity not because it would be in the best interest of our country and the rest of the world; our foremost experts on the subject have argued that that would instead be a disaster.  Trump will proceed because he made this a “bumper sticker” issue during his campaign and throughout his time in the White House. He knows that if he does not follow through with his often repeated pledge it would not sit well with his loyal base of voters and he damn sure isn’t going admit that he was wrong.  And let’s not forget that he made this a major issue early on because he was ignorant of the facts and because in his narcissistic mind he believes that he, “the great negotiator”, could have crafted “a much better deal”.

I could write another page or two as to why it is beyond stupid for our country to pull out of this agreement, but for brevity sake I will address that subject in a subsequent blog post.

Cajun    5/2/2018