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The Iran nuclear deal begins to crumble

Wesley Pruden

By Wesley Pruden

Published May 1,2018

 The Iran nuclear deal begins to crumble

These are not happy days for the liberals, or progressives, or Democrats, or whatever they're calling themselves this week as, one by one, they stink up the familiar labels we've all used over the years.


They're warmed only by their belief that Donald Trump is so evil that good people will neither touch nor praise anything he says, does or advocate. That's in the catechism.


His campaign against Kim Jong-un, sometimes crude and usually bellicose, finally drove Kim to cry "uncle" and sue for a recess, if not for peace. The president of South Korea has already nominated Mr. Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize, for whatever it's worth on the current market, but the liberal elites prefer to continue their swoon over the unearned Nobel Prize for Barack Obama.


Now Israel has discovered what looks like proof that Mr. Obama swallowed a lot of lies to collude with the mullahs for a deal with Iran to "resolve" Iran's nuclear-weapons program. This might be the smoking gun that Mr. Trump needs to justify trashing the deal with the mullahs.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu revealed Monday that his government had seized a cache of documents that proves Iran lied to the world about its nuclear-weapons program for years, even after the Obama agreement was signed in 2015. "Iran did not come clean about its nuclear program," Mr. Netanyahu said in a television address, given in plain English for the world to hear.


The disclosures, which enable President Trump to credibly boast that he was right all along to question the decency and good faith of the mullahs. Presenting 55,000 pages of documents, transcribed on 183 computer disks, the prime minister said Iran had hidden an "atomic archive" of documents describing its nuclear program.


Mr. Netanyahu said Israeli intelligence services had exposed a secret Iranian nuclear project code-named "Amad," which was shelved in 2003, though work in the field continued. The documents show that Iran's nuclear plant was "designed from the get-go for nuclear weapons for Project Amad."


Israel can now prove that Project Amad was a comprehensive program to design, build and test nuclear weapons. "We can also prove that Iran is secretly storing Project Amad material to use at a time of its choice to develop nuclear weapons."


Iran "lied about never having a secret nuclear program. Secondly, even after the deal [with the Obama administration], it continued to expand its nuclear program for future use. Thirdly, Iran lied by not coming clean to the International Atomic Energy Agency. The nuclear deal is based on lies based on Iranian deception."


The Iranian deal, reached with the mullahs by the United States and six Western nations, smelled like rotten fish then, and it really stinks now. Mr. Obama, relying on instincts inherited from his early years as a boy in a Muslim school in Jakarta, was willing to trust the mullahs, a convocation of creepy old men in fly-specked beards who hold the strings of the puppet government in Tehran.


The agreement finally reached by the mullahs and negotiators for the West was never submitted to the Senate as a treaty, as it should have been, because Mr. Obama knew it would never be ratified, not even by Democratic senators eager to kiss up to a Democratic president.


So he just pretended it was not a treaty. If President Trump, who boasts that he knows about negotiating deals and even wrote a book called "The Art of the Deal," decides to renounce the treaty and start over, this could be the opening he needs. He could renounce the deal by declaring that it should have been a treaty, ratified by the U.S. Senate, and it must be replaced by proper order.


Paying such attention to the Constitution may seem quaint and unnecessary in our new and improved age, but that's the way the Constitution says it must be done.

Mr. Netanyahu's disclosures rattled Capitol Hill on Monday. "Everything the Obama administration told us about the Iranian nuclear deal program was a lie," a source described as a senior congressional official tells the Washington Free Beacon. "They assured us that we knew ‘everything about everything' about Iran's nuclear weapons program, that it was put on ice, and that the intelligence community had full insight into what was going on."


The disclosures were received by the usual suspects with the usual smirk and snark. The New York Times, which never meets an enemy of the United States that it can't trust (verification not necessary), sniffed that Mr. Netanyahu's presentation was "highly theatrical" and "without any evidence of violations."


Mr. Trump may never get a peace prize, but the Booby Prize is likely to go to his unhinged enemies at home, blinded by hate and disappointment. Losing hurts, and some of us just can't get over it.

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JWR contributor Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times. His column has appeared in JWR since March, 2000.

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