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"The only actually nuclear-armed state in the Middle East is Israel." (Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
The Dishonest Case Against the Iran Deal
The Iran deal is working perfectly well.
May 08, 2018
President Trump will announce today whether or not to he will recertify the Iran nuclear deal. He has been hinting that he will refuse to do so this time, throwing the whole carefully negotiated framework crafted by his predecessor into disarray.
A parade of warmongers, cretins, and outright liars have been pushing for Trump to do this since he started his presidency. They may well succeed -- but that doesn't change the fact that the Iran deal, which halted the country's nuclear weapons program in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions, is working perfectly well. It should not be breached.
Iran deal critics are barely even trying to construct logical arguments for their position. National Security Adviser John Bolton is, of course, all-in on tearing it up. When he took office he leaked a five-page memo for ginning up a context for breaching the deal, then blaming the dissolution on Iran. The plan was so hamfisted that nobody would be convinced, but that's just Bolton for you. He's not a man who bothers with niceties.
No, he's a guy with close ties to the bizarre organization Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), a quasi-cult and formerly Marxist Iranian group opposed to the Iran government. It presents itself as the official democratic opposition, but in reality it has virtually zero support inside Iran itself. After murdering many Americans in Iran before the 1979 revolution, MEK was designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, but lobbied to be removed by bribing numerous Washington elites from both parties (through various shell organizations), which finally got them taken off in 2012. (It is incredibly illegal to take money from official terrorist groups, but that didn't stop people like Ed Rendell, Howard Dean, or Bolton.) At an MEK conference last year, Bolton boasted: "[B]efore 2019, we here will celebrate in Tehran."
Then there is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyau, who made an anti-deal speech recently which essentially boiled down to "Iran Is Bad" and cited as evidence only that Iran had a nuclear program way back in 2003 about which they hadn't come clean.
Read the rest of the this article at The Week.
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Ryan Cooper
Ryan Cooper is the Managing Editor of The American Prospect. Formerly, he was a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. His work has appeared in the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and the Washington Post.
President Trump will announce today whether or not to he will recertify the Iran nuclear deal. He has been hinting that he will refuse to do so this time, throwing the whole carefully negotiated framework crafted by his predecessor into disarray.
A parade of warmongers, cretins, and outright liars have been pushing for Trump to do this since he started his presidency. They may well succeed -- but that doesn't change the fact that the Iran deal, which halted the country's nuclear weapons program in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions, is working perfectly well. It should not be breached.
Iran deal critics are barely even trying to construct logical arguments for their position. National Security Adviser John Bolton is, of course, all-in on tearing it up. When he took office he leaked a five-page memo for ginning up a context for breaching the deal, then blaming the dissolution on Iran. The plan was so hamfisted that nobody would be convinced, but that's just Bolton for you. He's not a man who bothers with niceties.
No, he's a guy with close ties to the bizarre organization Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), a quasi-cult and formerly Marxist Iranian group opposed to the Iran government. It presents itself as the official democratic opposition, but in reality it has virtually zero support inside Iran itself. After murdering many Americans in Iran before the 1979 revolution, MEK was designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, but lobbied to be removed by bribing numerous Washington elites from both parties (through various shell organizations), which finally got them taken off in 2012. (It is incredibly illegal to take money from official terrorist groups, but that didn't stop people like Ed Rendell, Howard Dean, or Bolton.) At an MEK conference last year, Bolton boasted: "[B]efore 2019, we here will celebrate in Tehran."
Then there is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyau, who made an anti-deal speech recently which essentially boiled down to "Iran Is Bad" and cited as evidence only that Iran had a nuclear program way back in 2003 about which they hadn't come clean.
Read the rest of the this article at The Week.
Ryan Cooper
Ryan Cooper is the Managing Editor of The American Prospect. Formerly, he was a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. His work has appeared in the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and the Washington Post.
President Trump will announce today whether or not to he will recertify the Iran nuclear deal. He has been hinting that he will refuse to do so this time, throwing the whole carefully negotiated framework crafted by his predecessor into disarray.
A parade of warmongers, cretins, and outright liars have been pushing for Trump to do this since he started his presidency. They may well succeed -- but that doesn't change the fact that the Iran deal, which halted the country's nuclear weapons program in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions, is working perfectly well. It should not be breached.
Iran deal critics are barely even trying to construct logical arguments for their position. National Security Adviser John Bolton is, of course, all-in on tearing it up. When he took office he leaked a five-page memo for ginning up a context for breaching the deal, then blaming the dissolution on Iran. The plan was so hamfisted that nobody would be convinced, but that's just Bolton for you. He's not a man who bothers with niceties.
No, he's a guy with close ties to the bizarre organization Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), a quasi-cult and formerly Marxist Iranian group opposed to the Iran government. It presents itself as the official democratic opposition, but in reality it has virtually zero support inside Iran itself. After murdering many Americans in Iran before the 1979 revolution, MEK was designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, but lobbied to be removed by bribing numerous Washington elites from both parties (through various shell organizations), which finally got them taken off in 2012. (It is incredibly illegal to take money from official terrorist groups, but that didn't stop people like Ed Rendell, Howard Dean, or Bolton.) At an MEK conference last year, Bolton boasted: "[B]efore 2019, we here will celebrate in Tehran."
Then there is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyau, who made an anti-deal speech recently which essentially boiled down to "Iran Is Bad" and cited as evidence only that Iran had a nuclear program way back in 2003 about which they hadn't come clean.
Read the rest of the this article at The Week.
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