|
Trending Topics
|
The Fatal Flaw in the Iran Deal
(Washington Post) Charles Krauthammer - News leaked Monday that President Obama had accepted the Iranian demand that any restrictions on its program be time-limited. After which, the mullahs can crank up their nuclear program at will and produce as much enriched uranium as they want. Sanctions lifted. Restrictions gone. Nuclear development legitimized. A few years of good behavior and Iran would be home free. The agreement thus would provide a predictable path to an Iranian bomb. Indeed, a flourishing path, with trade resumed, oil pumping and foreign investment pouring into a restored economy. Meanwhile, Iran's intercontinental ballistic missile program is subject to no restrictions at all. Why is Iran building them? Their only purpose is to carry nuclear warheads. Such an agreement also means the end of nonproliferation. When a rogue state defies the world, continues illegal enrichment and then gets the world to bless an eventual unrestricted industrial-level enrichment program, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is dead and regional hyperproliferation becomes inevitable. The deal now on offer to the ayatollah would confer legitimacy on the nuclearization of the most rogue of rogue regimes: radically anti-American, deeply jihadist, purveyor of terrorism from Argentina to Bulgaria, puppeteer of a Syrian regime. In fact, the Iranian regime just this week, at the apex of these nuclear talks, staged a spectacular attack on a replica U.S. carrier near the Strait of Hormuz. There is a third choice in addition to appeasement or war. Don't give away the store. Keep the pressure, keep the sanctions. Indeed, increase them. After all, previous sanctions brought Iran to the negotiating table, and that was before the collapse of oil prices, which would now vastly magnify the economic effect of heightened sanctions. Congress is proposing precisely that. We are on the cusp of an epic capitulation. History will not be kind.