IRAN AGREEMENT – THE IMPORTANT BASICS – AT 8:26 A.M. ET:   It takes a fine reporter, like Eli Lake of Bloomberg, to cut through the haze of the Iran agreement and get to the truth.  And the truth is that the West – what's left of it – made most of the serious concessions in talks leading to the Iran nuclear agreement.  It's a pathetic story.  From Bloomberg: 

Now that the President Barack Obama and his administration are selling the Iran nuclear deal, they say U.S. negotiators held a firm line against Iran's last-minute push for even more concessions. But if you compare the deal today with what was described in a White House fact sheet on the "framework" reached in April it shows that the West ceded a lot of ground to Iran in those final days in Vienna.

In a few cases, the White House line is partially true. Iran's leaders had publicly insisted that they would forbid international inspectors any access to military sites, and its negotiators tried to get an immediate lifting of a U.N. arms embargo on conventional weapons. In both cases, Iran compromised for the final deal. But more often it was the West that backed down, and in more significant ways.

For example, in April the White House touted that, "Iran has committed indefinitely to not conduct reprocessing or reprocessing research and development on spent nuclear fuel." Yet the new pact will allow Iran to reprocess such fuel after 15 years. The final agreement says Iran can begin production of efficient advanced centrifuges to enrich uranium in eight years. The April fact sheet strongly implied research into advanced centrifuges would be delayed for 10 years.

Senior administration officials in April said the nuclear agreement would allow inspectors "anytime, anywhere" access to suspected nuclear sites, but the new deal will give Iran 24 days' notice of any inspections, as well as a say in whether inspectors will be able to visit certain sites at all. The U.S. also agreed in the final days of talks to lift a U.N. conventional weapons embargo on Iran in five years, and to end sanctions on Iran's ballistic missile program in eight, both issues on which the framework deal is silent.

More concerns arise from the "road map" that the International Atomic Energy Agency released Tuesday, on how it will resolve longstanding questions about the history of Iran's efforts to build a nuclear weapon. First, the description of how it plans to do so is dangerously vague. Equally important: Until May, the U.S. position was that Iran had to come clean about that history before there would be any sanctions relief. Now that issue has been shunted aside in terms of lifting sanctions.

While it's true that the April deal was only a framework, and that some changes should have been expected, all these concessions taken together represent a retreat by the U.S. team since the spring. "The fact sheet allowed just enough wiggle room to give the impression that nothing had been conceded in Lausanne," Valerie Lincy, the executive director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, told me. "But when I read the agreement, it's clear there are things that have been conceded in terms of the details on advanced centrifuges, reprocessing of plutonium and the inspections."

COMMENT:  Read the whole thing.  It's excellent, compelling, and demonstrates conclusively that what we're being told by the Obama administration is sheer nonsense.

July 20, 2015