Obama's bad deal with Iran was worthless from the beginning--Iran did not declare its nuclear activity at sites where it was working on a bomb

Hans Ruhle:

In response to the killing of Iranian General Soleimani by a U.S. airstrike, Iran announced that it would no longer adhere to the 2015 nuclear agreement. As was the case with Washington’s previous withdrawal from that agreement, many observers are lamenting that a major opportunity for curbing Iran’s nuclear activities has now been lost. Alas, this view gets it wrong. The nuclear deal never had the significance that many attributed to it. The agreement’s portended goal of verifiably preventing Iran’s military nuclearization for 10 to 15 years could never have been achieved.

The core element of the Joint Coordinated Plan of Action (JCPOA)[1] between Iran, the United States, the UK, France, Germany, Russia, China and the European Union was to substantially reduce and permanently limit the capacity of the Natanz enrichment facility, which had been designed for 50,000 centrifuges. In the JCPOA, which was not an international treaty, but only a “non-binding agreement,” Iran agreed to reduce its stock of low-enriched uranium by 98 percent, to reduce the number of centrifuges by two-thirds from 19,000 to 5,000, and for the next 15 years to produce only low-enriched uranium (3.67 percent U-235) on the basis of rather primitive IR-1 centrifuges.

There was a catch, however. Iran demanded that the parties agree that for the purposes of the JCPOA the two known enrichment facilities at Natanz and Fordow were the only ones actively operated by Iran, i.e. that Iran did not operate any further uranium enrichment plants. However, U.S. intelligence had known for quite some time that Iran was operating about a dozen secret facilities, with one or more of them enriching uranium to weapons-grade levels. When President Obama came into office, he was briefed accordingly.

As early as 2006, press reports alleged that the Mossad had determined the existence of two parallel nuclear programs in Iran – one openly declared to the IAEA and a second, secret program operated by the military and the Revolutionary Guards. In February 2012, the American Institute for Science and International Security published a study entitled “The Physics Research Center and Iran’s Parallel Military Nuclear Program.” Its verdict was clear: “Evidence obtained by the IAEA indicates that the Iranian revolutionary regime made its first decision to research and develop nuclear weapons in the mid-to-late 1980s, and it ordered the development of a parallel military nuclear fuel cycle.”[2] In November 2013, at the beginning of the negotiations on the nuclear agreement, a member of the Obama administration told the New York Times that there had not been a time in the last 15 years when Iran had not worked on secret facilities.

In his book “Playing to the Edge,” former CIA director Michael Hayden offers a particularly vivid description of this dilemma. At a meeting of the National Security Council in Spring 2009, President Obama had asked Hayden how much fissile material Iran had stored in Natanz. Hayden replied: “Mr. President, I actually know that but let me offer you a different frame of reference. In one sense, it almost doesn’t matter. There isn’t an electron or a neutron at Natanz that’s ever going to end up in a nuclear weapon. They’ll spin that uranium at some secret military facility beyond the eyes of the IAEA.”[3] Hayden, whose book was published around the time of the conclusion of the JCPOA, argued that U.S. intelligence had always assumed that enrichment for weapons-grade uranium was carried out in secret facilities. Consequently, he demanded that IAEA inspectors should be given unrestricted access anytime, anywhere, especially to the facilities operated by the Revolutionary Guards.

Against this background, it is clear that the nuclear agreement with Iran was a charade from the very beginning. In terms of restrictions on uranium enrichment, the JCPOA applied only to the 18 facilities that had been declared by Iran; accordingly, the IAEA was controlling only these. However, enrichment to weapons-grade levels proceeds in the secret facilities reported by Hayden and probably known to most Western intelligence services. This means that the IAEA’s regular statements that Iran was complying with the agreement were accurate – yet also utterly worthless.

It could not get more absurd than this: the Obama Administration, together with its allies, concluded an agreement with Iran that centered on the long-term prevention of the production of weapons-grade uranium in Natanz, even though they knew that weapons-grade uranium was not produced there, but in secret facilities of the Revolutionary Guards.
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There is more.

Obama's bad deal was a fraud from the beginning.  So on top of being a fraud, Obama also provided funding for Iran to use in its proxy wars against Israel and Saudi Arabia.  It was a deal that never made any sense on the surface and was even worse when you consider Iran was never really bound by it in its other secret facilities.

Trump was wise to reimpose sanctions on the regime.