While the US State Department was obliged to admit that Iran remains in full compliance with the P5+1 nuclear deal in a report to Congress, they are clearly not happy about that fact, and with President Trump openly looking to “renegotiate” the deal, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson attacked the pact in general.
Indeed, Tillerson’s comments gave the appearance he didn’t know about the compliance, even though he was the one who signed the letter in the first place, as he attacked the P5+1 deal as a failure and accused Iran of “unchecked” nuclear ambitions posing a grave risk to the world.
Iran was never particularly close to nuclear weapons, and its leadership has repeatedly ruled out developing them. The P5+1 deal allows Iran an extremely limited civilian nuclear program, and since its implementation both the US and IAEA have repeatedly affirmed Iranian compliance.
Which means if the US wants to weasel its way out of the deal, which they clearly do, they need to invent some other problem, with Tillerson claiming that Iran’s status as a “state sponsor of terrorism” could justify backing out of the deal.
Yet “state sponsor of terrorism” is a largely arbitrary designation dependent on US law and not fact, and Iran was one of the handful of nations saddled with that label when the deal was reached, meaning that it would be a particularly weak excuse to scrap the pact. Still, beggars can’t be choosers, and the political goal of scrapping the deal is likely to ultimately trump the lack of a plausible justification for doing so.
Muricanz… What useless stupid fools…
So basically Netanyahu is now sitting in the State Department.
Tick has taken over host.
But all this noise won’t carry much weight at the UN. And the Europeans may no longer be able to justify following the US into the next catastrophe to their valium’d populace.
“Tick has taken over host”. Very good metaphor.
It is totally amazing, in a political season that saw the greatest enthusiasm for a progressive candidate in decades, that we have ended up with this administration of death-wish barbarians who threaten to pull our house down on us.
The loss was in the Democratic primary, which left us with two death wish candidates.
Indeed, the utter corruption of what is supposed to be the opposition but is just a participant in a never-ending Punch and Judy show.
Don’t paint Trump with the war-mongering, man-hating, bull djke, death-worshipper brush of the failed Dem candidate. She beat your boy Bernie — bad — but then got terminated by the Trumpinator — soooo good.
Trump was the right guy to start the revolution by blowing the whistle on the DC criminal class and the lying “fakenews” MSM. There remains one year and six months till the next revolutionary battle on election day 2018. What happens then will depend on what Trump does — and what the deep state does back — in the next 18 months.
Lots of people making predictions, talking like they know something, but clearly notions mostly borne of wishful partisan fantasies. Me, I’m delighted by the confusion and dissonance generated by the noise of competing bs narratives. Perhaps the truth will rise from the disarray. Meanwhile, I hope, I enjoy, and I wait to see what will happen. The old America is dying. That’s a good thing. Bring on the future.
The DNC beat Bernie. And so far, Trump IS Hillary.
I just hope the world survives for the next 18 mos, but I do agree it has just as much chance with Trump as it would have with Clinton, who was arguably even more hawkish than the generals.
Just when I think that I have seen or read the greatest collection of lies and disinformation Tillerson beats it. Just one example. He decries that the 5+1 failed to include non-nuclear issues in the negotiations. You know what Tyrannosaurus Rex? In that case the Iranians would not even have come to the negotiations. Also your ignorance about U235 enrichment is staggering. Its centrifuge process can be very easily checked. I know because I was involved in its development in the Netherlands. One telltale sign for enrichment above the tolerated limit is a greatly reduced production of enriched gas which was not previously announced. And the concentration of U235 in the product can be checked daily in a sample within one hour. Do you know what a mass spectrometer is? Obviously not. At this time Iran has no capacity to produce Pu244. Without U235 or Pu244 Iran can make bombs theoretically but not really. That is exactly what President Obama has achieved and what you and your boss are trying to destroy. For that I have only unprintable words.
As I wrote before, your ignorance is staggering ergo your tirade at Iran has nothing to do with nuclear weapons. You have signed on to an ill constructed and dangerous foreign policy based mainly on military threats. Is that your way to “make America Great”? Evidently.
It never, ever had anything to do with nuclear weapons, and while the US was distracted by a non-existent Iranian weapons program, it let NK proceed with its program. NK likely now has many primitive bombs.
We hope they are primitive bombs, but we don’t really know their tech nor exactly where they got it.
We do know that truly primitive bombs work, and are easy to do. The failures in the North’s program suggest they are trying something more complex, using less nuclear material in some more complex way.
Do you mean that a wooden clothes peg, two drawing pins and a piece of cardboard wouldn’t work with a nuclear bomb?
OK, I would want a really long piece of string tied to the cardboard, but conceptually…
It has long been my view that the negotiated agreement also had the intent to get Natanyahu’s weekly threats against Iran off our backs. In that respect the agreement was successful.
NK has many … bombs. So what?
When did NK invade or attack any one.
NK should just say “We know we can’t defeat America. But we can and will wipeout Seoul in 20 minutes if anyone attacks us. That is 3 million people. Tokyo will take 40 minutes. 10 to 20 million people. Attack us and you cannot prevent the slaughter.
Leave us alone and go away. As in Cuba and Iraq, your sanctions have murdered a million children. You have condemned 30 million people to poverty and starvation, you have broken every treaty you ever signed with us. We don’t trust you. We don’t like you. Just go away.
We will not initiate war against anyone. But if you attack us, S Korea and Japan are history.
So Mr President, do you want to be the next American who murders millions of Asiatics because you do not care about Gooks and Slants?”
Mike Whitney has an excellent post in counterpunch this week on the reasons North Korea has genuine fear of the USA and why its nuke program is eminently justifiable.
Absolutely, my feeling is that if they get into a dick measuring contest with USA, then the USA has to win because otherwise others won’t “respect” them.
It is easier when dealing with a big bully, to say “Sure you can beat me up, but then I will beat up your sister.”
Not what the great John Wayne would have done, but darned effective.
The purpose of my post was not to single out NK, though my wording was a little careless. I think the proliferation of nuclear weapons is not a good thing for the world, don’t you? But I agree NK made a rational decision to resume its weapons program during the naughts based on Bush Admin rhetoric and threats and the failure of existing nuclear states to negotiate verifiable reductions and eventual dismantling of those devices to guarantee they can never be used.
The purpose of my post was to point out that the US was really not concerned about proliferation to either Iran (which was not developing them) or NK (which was). If it had truly been concerned about proliferation, it would not have committed aggressions against non-nuclear states like Iraq and Libya, threatened non-nuclear states with its own nuclear weapons, and even outed one of its own CIA agents working on non-proliferation.
I’m not suggesting a conscious conspiracy, but proliferation actually serves the institutional imperatives of the MIC, because it increases the overall threat level in the world and helps to justify ever increasing military expenditures. That’s an underlying reason why efforts to prevent proliferation have been so ineffective.
Dieter, you wrote:
“…your ignorance about U235 enrichment is staggering. Its centrifuge process can be very easily checked. I know because I was involved in its development in the Netherlands.”
Then you wrote:
“At this time Iran has no capacity to produce Pu244. Without U235 or Pu244 Iran can make bombs theoretically but not really.”
I don’t want to be harsh, but first you slam someone for “staggering ignorance”, while claiming some authority in the matter from personal hands-on experience in the development of a centrifuge enrichment process. Wow! impressive. But then you,… well,… you blow it, by throwing in the bit about Pu244. C’mon Dieter, surely you know that the fissile isotope of Plutonium used in the Plutonium bomb is Pu239. Whoops!
I stand corrected! Yes, I blew it.
The US can not unilaterally scrap a multilateral deal. All it can do is unilaterally withdraw. It was the EU that wanted the deal, to open up trade with Iran, and forced Obama to comply. Multi-lateral sanctions are lifted and will not be re-instated. If the US insists on unilateral sanctions, only Boeing will suffer.
Exactly. The USA has already lost out on trade, and it deserves to lose more. Pretending Iran is a danger or a terror haven is wishful thinking for the warmongers and Zionists.
I actually want to reply to you about your comment on the BDS Israel article thread, but it just closed. You went so far as to argue that the Arab nation invaders of Israel were meticulous about remaining within UN plan boundaries. You must be kidding, and certainly have lost your mind. Are you that desperate to rationalize your anti-Israel pigeonhole? If anyone would be capable of such controlled planning, it would be those who made the desert bloom, and who managed to bolster their military equipment during a ceasefire. That’s not the Arab Muslim extremists and their imperialist Islamic heritage.
How does Tillerson judge Iran to be a state sponsor of terror with a straight face? What would that make our staunch ally, Saudi Arabia?
Brainwashing. There is something in the bread rolls and water in Washington.
Until the pro-Israel element is purged from our State Department, you can be sure that the US foreign policy will just be a reflection of Israel’s wishes. How much of our national debt is due to our stupid Middle East policies?
This must have been the result of a recent “Iran pow-wow” at the White House.
The US effort to back out of the Iran deal cannot carry with it the other nations whose cooperation on sanctions was key to getting the deal. The US had no trade to sanction, having cut off Iran for decades. It was the others’ whose sanctions hurt, and they won’t do it again no matter what the US does on paper.
All this can do is complicate other US diplomacy. It is not going to change anything on Iran. We never were going to have a sudden increase of US trade with Iran.
It is the summit of irresponsibility to renounce an agreement that is working.
Iran’s oil is a threat to our fracking mania.
If it had not been for McConnell and his destructive troops this would not have been an agreement but a treaty.
Man I hate these hypocrite Jesus freaks. Pence wants to save fetuses so he can send them off to war.
It doesn’t matter because they can’t stop Iran. Iran is very advanced in anti-missile capabilities, to the point where Israel’s nukes are probably worthless in theatre. Just like the entire U.S. Navy.
AlQaeda McCain met with MKO honcho Maryam Rajavi in Albania last week. There are people and organizations whose only purpose is to start a war between Iran and the United States. It’s just way too easy, comfortable, convenient, and acceptable to pour hate onto Iranians, so too few really care.
And here I thought the State Department was America’s diplomatic corps.
T Rex really is a top diplomat. His explanations rival Picky Nikki Haley for fuzziness and falsity.The hypocrisy of talking of noncompliance when the USA has just tried to sabotage the UN’s plan for an agreement to get rid of nuclear weapons,thus defying the Non Proliferation Agreement where the nuke powers agreed to reduce, not upgrade the nukes they hold, is obvious to fair observers.
If Hezbollah are terrorists then so were the Vietcong, the Sioux Ghost Dancers and the partisans of the Warsaw Uprising.
Rex Tillerson and Bibi Netanyahu can go f**k themselves.
Americans were hoodwinked and cheated by Trump and the Zionists. Now it is Zionist agenda that is being implemented by Trump presidency.Not America first.With Banon out and Conway,Burke likely to be kicked out the Zionist take over of America will be complete
It’s amazing. The US government (meaning the 1% banking and multinational CEO class) and its media lied to the public about a nonexistent Iraqi nuclear program, those lies subsequently confirmed after the destruction of the Iraqi state. It continued to lie for 14 years about the ongoing existence of an Iranian nuclear weapons, which every National Intelligence Estimate since 2007 has concluded “with high confidence” was abandoned in 2003, if it even existed in 2003. Yet people like John Bolton continue to lie about the origin of the North Korean bomb, claiming NK violated the Agreed Framework, a claim debunked by the late Gordon Prather debunked in articles on this very site dating back to 2002.
You can fool
somemost of the people all the time after all.Typical Zionist shill. Defeated on all points, you trot out irrelevant facts and ad hominem attacks.
Just FYI and reflection, I’m not Arab and not Muslim. In fact, in my youth in the early ’60s, I was a supporter of Zionism, but as over the ensuing years its excesses, prompted me to read up on the actual history of Zionism and its fundamental contradiction of attempting to protect the individual human rights of one group of people by granting them special privileges at the expense of the individual human rights of another group.
The bottom line is that the indigenous people, who are predominantly the descendants of people who lived there 2000 years ago, have been dispossessed and treated brutally for the benefit of settlers who have little if any historical connection with the land. Even Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi understood that most Palestinian fellahin were descendants of Jews. They co-authored a Yiddish book about it in the early 20th Century.
If there is a shill here, your assumptions and manner paint you as one. In terms of Human Rights, it doesn’t matter where the fellahin are from, for your information.. This isn’t a UN board game, or Arab Muslim heaven, for that matter. There was a war upon Israel’s declaration of independence, instigated by Arab Muslims, you , a non-Arab non-Muslim, characteristically like to ignore. A War for Independence, and a Civil War, no less. The Arab Muslims lost. The Arab Muslim invaders are the ones responsible for external refugees and their resettlement. The Israelis have gone above and beyond when they agreed to the PA, and so on.
Until you stop your historical revisionist fantasies and pay attention to Arab Muslim actions, consequences, and accountability, and in particular their attempts to shift responsibility from their own aggression, losses, and unyielding resentment, you will remain lost in their playground fantasy of tragic persistent hostility. Israel is established, with its 20% voting enfranchised Arab Muslims. Islamic imperialism, however, has supporters like you and Saudi Arabia, with its totalitarian monarchy and public beheadings of democratic dissidents. Why don’t you go get to know what you’re so vigorously trying to justify and confuse with social justice and “non-“anti-Semitism?