IRAN NUCLEAR CRISIS: See how Iran Duped the West to buy time

Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani claims in the linked articles and video to be a master of subterfuge and deceit, as if he is practically the author of the Iran nuclear crisis. When asked why he engaged in negotiations with the West, Rouhani claims to his own people, “We needed time,” and he points out Iran needed Europeans to block the Bush administration’s willingness to go to war with Iran in order to stop it nuclear enrichment program.

Hassan Rouhani has worked with Ayatollahs at the top level of the Islamic Republic since its beginning in the seventies. He was the lead champion of the Iran-Iraq war; but, because he presents a face that is more pleasing to the West, the West has received him like a breath of fresh air.

 

Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani confesses to duping the West throughout the Iran nuclear crisis

As far back as March 2006, when Iran’s President Rouhani was just beginning talks with the West, The Telegraph reported:

The man who for two years led Iran’s nuclear negotiations has laid out in unprecedented detail how the regime took advantage of talks with Britain, France and Germany to forge ahead with its secret atomic programme.

In a speech to a closed meeting of leading Islamic clerics and academics, Hassan Rouhani, who headed talks with the so-called EU3 until last year, revealed how Teheran played for time and tried to dupe the West after its secret nuclear programme was uncovered by the Iranian opposition in 2002….

In his address to the Supreme Council of Cultural Revolution, Mr Rouhani appears to have been seeking to rebut criticism from hardliners that he gave too much ground in talks with the European troika. The contents of the speech were published in a regime journal that circulates among the ruling elite.

He told his audience: “When we were negotiating with the Europeans in Teheran we were still installing some of the equipment at the Isfahan site. There was plenty of work to be done to complete the site and finish the work there. In reality, by creating a tame situation, we could finish Isfahan.” (“How We Duped the West“)

For the better part of a decade and by his own admission, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has been engaged in a game of obfuscation and stall tactics. Has he suddenly changed what he lauded as a highly successful strategy just because he has become president, or did he become president so that he could fulfill his strategy with the highest level of authority behind his actions? Recent interviews show he is the same Rouhani.

 

Iran’s President Rouhani claims to be mastermind of the Iran nuclear crisis

In a subtitled Iranian video posted on YouTube this past summer, Rouhani, while running for the office of president, boasted again about his role in the Iran nuclear crisis, claiming again that he used nuclear negotiations as a stall tactic that allowed him to expand Iran’s number of working centrifuges by 10,000%. Rouhani brags that Iran went from not being able to produce a single gram of highly enriched uranium to having heavy water plants for the first time that could produce significant quantities of highly enriched uranium. He very clearly states that Iran’s purpose for nuclear negotiations was to buy time.

As a candidate to become president of Iran in this video, Rouhani is being asked tough questions by his Iranian interviewer as to why he was negotiating with the West and why he was making concessions to Western powers. His interviewer faces him with video clips of Western negotiators claiming their own gains in the negotiations, and Rouhani’s response is to tell the interviewer how his smoke-and-mirrors game bought time for Iran to expand its nuclear enrichment program. The irony in the video is that Western negotiators are shown claiming  they went to Tehran to get Iran to stop enriching uranium while Rouhani reveals that the outcome of all those talks was that Iran continually expanded its nuclear enrichment abilities for years.

Rouhani’s strategy, he says, is to change threats from the West into opportunities for Iran. Nothing, he claimed, was agreed to in all the years of negotiation. The negotiations were just “for the uneducated,” i.e., for the dim-witted, to keep them preoccupied while Iran continued its clandestine expansion of nuclear enrichment.

The entire time that the Obama administration and European powers have been negotiating with Iran, Iran has been enriching more uranium to higher levels. Rouhani claims in the video that he has always been carrying out the wishes of Ayatollah Khamenei. So, the intention to enter negotiations in bad faith in order to stall for time goes all the way to the top, according to Iran’s president in this interview where he was speaking to his own people in an effort to gain their vote.

Specifically, President Rouhani claims that his negotiations bought Iran enough time to complete the Bushehr reactor, to begin and complete the once-secret Fordow nuclear plant, to install over 10,00o working centrifuges, to build a heavy water plant from scratch to finish, to begin production of uranium yellowcake, and to start enriching uranium to even higher levels than yellowcake. It has also managed that entire time to keep U.N. inspectors out of the Parchin site, which is suspected to be a development and test site for nuclear detonators. And those are just the accomplishments the West knows about. That’s quite an amazing deceit — to keep the West believing in negotations all those years even as they see all of that nuclear expansion continuing beneath their noses. Will they watch right up to the point of getting to see an Iranian nuclear bomb explode, too?

Watch the video, and you can see that now-President Hassan Rouhani is laughing all the way to the bank. He plainly loves what he accomplished by feinting to the West. He has even managed to get the West to reduce its pressure on Iran’s economy — a campaign pledge, no doubt, to the Iranian public that has been seriously distressed by those sanctions.

 

Iran nuclear crisis drags out by design so that it buys time

Consider that the first vaunted nuclear deal this past November came after years of negotiation, yet it was only a deal that agreed to enter a deal. Now the latest deal in January that that deal promised is “intended to pave the way to a solution to a long standoff over Tehran’s nuclear ambitions will come into force on January 20.” (Reuters) In other words, if the January deal actually actually gets approved by each country by January 20th, it is only an “interim deal” that promises the various parties will all negotiate toward the real deal. So, the deal that was reached by the first deal in November turns out to be a deal to reach another interim deal that promises more time for negotiating toward the actual deal. Getting a nuclear deal out of Iran is like endlessly chasing a mirage.

Is it not by design that an final deal that ends Iran’s possibilities of gaining a nuclear weapon is always just a little further down the road? When Hassan Rouhani promised the world that in six months Iran would reach a nuclear deal with the West, was that just to buy the remaning six months he needed to complete a few nuclear bombs? Who is to say that he doesn’t already have all the nuclear material he needs and has just decided to forego the public tests we are used to seeing as proof while he works to weaponize the material he has? Maybe he will test his first nuclear missile on Tel Aviv or some other city Iran wishes to destroy, rather than wasting perfectly good material on a test in some Iranian desert.

 

What are the chances of ending the Iran nuclear crisis?

“We will in no way, never, dismantle our [nuclear] centrifuges,” Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi told the country’s state-run television station on Sunday, according to New York Times reporter Thomas Erdbrink. (The Free Beacon)

Well, that seems pretty clear. Of course, it may be possible to use the centrifuges at a level of enrichment that is tolerable to the Western world, so what are the odds of that happening?

“We don’t need enrichment right from the Americans, who are they to give that right?” Araqchi said. President Barack Obama “said the upcoming talks have a 50-50 percent chance of success, I say its even less.”

“Iran will continue with 20 percent uranium enrichment by the end of the day on Jan. 19 and will suspend 20 percent enrichment on Jan. 20,” the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) quoted him as saying.

Iran will immediately begin to see “targeted relief” from the economic sanctions as soon as the deal begins, according to Kerry.

Could it be that Iran is only shifting gears because right now it needs money in order to continue its nuclear expansion? Sometimes you have to downshift — temporarily.

So, how much does the new deal to eventually make a deal contribute so far toward ending the Iran nuclear crisis and making the world safe from nuclear weapons in the hands of religious extremists?

The U.N. nuclear watchdog’s increased access in Iran to monitor a landmark agreement with world powers still falls short of what it says it needs to investigate suspicions that Tehran may have worked on designing an atomic bomb.

It is also a far cry from the wide-ranging inspection powers the International Atomic Energy Agency had in Iraq in the 1990s to help unearth and dismantle Saddam Hussein’s clandestine nuclear program after the first Gulf war….

“This is just an appetizer, I guess … a starter,” former chief U.N. nuclear inspector Herman Nackaerts said. (Reuters)

 

How far did the deal to buy time go toward ending the Iran nuclear crisis?

According to The Los Angeles Times and Iraq’s chief negotiator the deal to by time to make a deal accomplished very little:

U.S. officials said Sunday that Iran would be allowed to continue existing research and development projects and with pencil-and-paper design work, but not to advance research with new projects. Araqchi [Iran’s chief negotiator], however, implied that the program would have wide latitude.

“No facility will be closed; enrichment will continue, and qualitative and nuclear research will be expanded,” he said. “All research into a new generation of centrifuges will continue.” (The Los Angeles Times)

If the L.A. Times article is true, it’s hard to see that the deal to make a deal someday accomplished anything at all.

Maybe Iran just needs time to weaponize the material it already has. In the meantime, the have opened the door to making a little money through sanctions relief while continuing to develop better centrifuges and continuing low-level enrichment, producing more the material that can fairly quickly (by comparison) be turned into more high-grade nuclear bomb material.

The new agreement, announced over the weekend, sets out a timetable for how Iran and the six nations, led by the United States, will implement a deal reached in November

Hmm. So, this deal lauded by Obama set a schedule for when we’ll reach a deal to implement the deal we already reached in November. Is there anyone to whom that doesn’t sound like buying time?

 

How many times can Iran buy time before the world is out of time?

During U.S. President Barak Obama’s “new era of engagement with the world,” U.S. Secretary of State, John Kerry, has continuously stated that negotiations over a nuclear deal will not buy Iran time. Haven’t they already bought Iran time … every time Kerry has said this? What have past months since the preliminary deal of November been if not more time? Is a month not a measure of time? A couple of months, a couple of times? In my view, the only question that remains to be seen is how much time is enough time for Iran to reach its objective?

Does anyone seriously think Iran would not crave a nuclear bomb that would make it more powerful than its numerous enemies and, at least, as powerful as Israel, whom its religious elite believe and often proclaim must be destroyed for their religious prophecies to be destroyed? How much is that kind of power worth once achieved to where no one can safely roll it back compared to the temporary cost of economic sanctions?

Yet, the game plays on.

 

More information on the Iran nuclear crisis from both sides:

[amazon_image id=”0870032682″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Iranian Nuclear Crisis: A Memoir[/amazon_image][amazon_image id=”1842774751″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Iran in Crisis? Nuclear Ambitions and the American Response[/amazon_image][amazon_image id=”1780761252″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Nuclear Iran: The Birth of an Atomic State[/amazon_image][amazon_image id=”1566567319″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Understanding the US-Iran Crisis: A Primer[/amazon_image][amazon_image id=”1596985712″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Rise of Nuclear Iran: How Tehran Defies the West[/amazon_image]

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *