Hastening War

Lee Smith – Weekly Standard 

War, President Obama says, is the only alternative to his deal with Iran. But if the president’s overriding goal is to avoid bloody conflict, why is he arming the Middle East for a shootout that may lead to Armageddon?

The Iran nuclear deal lifts the U.N. arms embargo and ensures a huge cash windfall to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, which will fund its imperial wars across the Middle East. As a result, the other side is girding its loins for combat, too. Saudi Arabia is almost certain to go shopping for a nuclear weapon, now that the path is clear for Iran to get a nuke. But, of more immediate concern, the White House has been selling conventional weapons systems to the Sunni Arab states at record levels….

Many believed that the silver lining in the Iran nuclear deal would be improved relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors, thanks to a shared concern over a nuclearized Islamic Republic. Israel and Saudi Arabia would perhaps coordinate on regional defense and fighting the deal in Washington. Nope. As Obama noted in his speech at American University last week, the government of Israel is the one country that says the deal is rotten…. Whatever they may think privately, the Gulf states will not stand alongside Israel to oppose the deal.

In this Feb. 3, 2007 file photo, an Iranian technician walks through the Uranium Conversion Facility just outside the city of Isfahan, south of the capital Tehran. (AP)

Why the Iran Deal Will Work

Ernest Moniz – Chicago Tribune

Quite the opposite of enabling Iran to move to a bomb, it pulls Iran away from the threshold of being able to do so….

The deal is based on sound science. I spent 40 years on the nuclear physics faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and drew heavily on the nuclear expertise built up over decades in the Department of Energy’s national laboratories, including the Argonne National Laboratory.

The JCPOA blocks Iran’s pathways to the nuclear material needed for a nuclear weapon. It drastically reduces Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile, currently enough for at least 10 weapons, by 98 percent and eliminates all stockpiled 20 percent-enriched uranium not required for its current research reactor.

It cuts back installed centrifuges by well over two-thirds, allows enrichment only with Iran’s least capable centrifuge for 10 years and nearly eliminates the extensive ongoing research and development program on the next-generation centrifuge for that period.

Watch Obama’s speech about the Iranian nuclear accord at American University: