WarSclerotic

Iranian FM: Tehran won’t attend nuclear talks if ‘Zionist regime’ present | The Times of Israel.

( Of course we can count on Obama/Kerry answering “They’re our allies.  If you don’t talk to them you don’t talk to us.”  Right? )

Ahead of expected negotiations with world powers on final agreement, Zarif says Israel ‘biggest danger to region and the world’

By Times of Israel staff and AP November 29, 2013, 5:34 pm

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif (photo credit: AP/Craig Ruttle/File)

Iran will not attend nuclear talks if the “Zionist regime” participates, Iran’s foreign minister announced on Friday.

A report by the country’s official news agency IRNA quoted Mohammad Javad Zarif as saying that the Islamic Republic “would not attend a meeting in which the Quds [Jerusalem] occupying regime participates.”

“We consider the Zionist regime as the biggest danger to the region and the world,” Zarif told the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB), according to IRNA.

Following last weekend’s interim deal between Iran and six world powers, the two sides are set to start talks on a final agreement that would see Iran further curb its nuclear program in exchange for eased international sanctions.

The report said the foreign minister’s remarks came in response to possible Israeli participation in the expected talks. It did not elaborate on the source of the reports on Israel’s possible presence.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has slammed the Geneva deal as a “historic mistake” and announced the dispatch to the US of his national security adviser to try to shape the final agreement with Iran. President Barack Obama and Netanyahu agreed on the dispatch of the Israeli team when they spoke on Sunday, not long after the Geneva deal was reached, so that Israel’s concerns would be made known to the US negotiators, but there was no public suggestion that Israel would have a direct role in any future negotiations with Iran.

“Definitely…we will not be in a room where the Zionist regimeˈs envoy is present,” Zarif promised.

He said instead of putting pressure on Iran, the world powers should try to push for regional disarmament, a reference to disarming Israel’s own alleged nuclear arsenal. Israel maintains a policy of ambiguity, neither confirming nor denying it possesses a nuclear arsenal.

Since the 1979 Islamic revolution that brought Islamist leaders to power, Iran does not recognize Israel and supports terror groups like Hamas and Lebanon’s Hezbollah. It’s leaders frequently speak of Israel’s inevitable demise. Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei nine days ago called Israel the “rabid dog” of the region, and said its people “should not be called humans.”

Last weekend, in a meeting with world powers, Iran agreed to freeze parts of its nuclear program in return for the easing of Western sanctions.

Western powers and Israel worry Iran’s nuclear program could be used to build an atomic bomb. Iran says its nuclear program is only for peaceful purposes, like power generation and medical research.

Meanwhile, Iranian nuclear envoy Reza Najafi said the interim nuclear deal likely will start to be implemented at the end of next month or in early January. Najafi spoke Friday near the end of a two-day meeting of the United Nations nuclear agency, which will monitor the agreement reached in Geneva.

Israel Hayom | The Iran nuclear agreement and the common sense test.

Yoram Ettinger

Israel’s flight simulator a valuable tool for combating Iran – YouTube.

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From Foxnews – Nov. 29   2013

When the need becomes unavoidable, Israel is ready…

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Into the fray: Will the West withstand the Obama presidency? | JPost | Israel News.

11/28/2013 22:44

The really chilling aspect of the Obama-incumbency is that it is difficult to diagnose whether the abysmal results it produced—including the recent Geneva debacle—reflect crushing failure or calculated success

I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles – principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings. – Barack Hussein Obama, Cairo, 2009

For anyone who understands that the US Constitution is not a Sharia-compliant document –neither in letter nor in spirit – it should be alarmingly apparent that the Obama-incumbency is a dramatic and disturbing point of inflection in the history of America and its “Western” allies. By “Western” I mean countries whose political practices and societal norms are rooted in Judeo- Christian foundations in a cultural rather than in any religious sense.

The devil is not in the details

One does not have to be an expert in Islamic history or culture, or be familiar with the details of Koranic verse or Hadithic texts to realize that Obama’s characterization of the alleged affinity between America and Islam is entirely detached from any reality on the ground–particularly with regard to the matters he enumerates in the preceding excerpt from his 2009 Cairo speech.

All one has to do is follow the daily news that routinely convey reports of the Hobbesian horrors that flared across Syria, Libya, Egypt and other Arab countries once the Leviathan “cap” of tyranny, holding these bestial impulses in check, was “uncorked.”

Worse, in some parts of the Muslim world, blood curdling atrocities have become so commonplace they hardly make the news at all.

For when it comes to issues such as justice, progress, tolerance and respect for societal and/or religious diversity, a yawning chasm divides America from Islam. Indeed, American society, as a product of the values embodied in the Constitution and the Judeo-Christian values it draws on; and Islamic society as a product of Sharia and the Muslim values it draws on, are irreconcilably exclusive and antithetically opposed to one another.

No amount of convoluted scholarly debate on the intricacies of Islamic scriptures or benign interpretations of their “real” significance, can change the gruesome facts that prevail throughout Muslim-majority societies – from West Africa to East Asia.

Justice? Like stoning of female rape victims for “adultery? Progress? Like fathers slaughtering daughters to preserve their “honor”? Tolerance? Like summary lynching of “gays” because of their sexual preferences? Dignity of all human beings? Like butchery of non- Muslim “infidels” for practicing their faith?

Pervasive and perverse

Neither are these unrepresentative or isolated anecdotal instances of barbarity and bigotry that occur in Islamic societies. Indeed, they– and other manifestations of harsh brutality, totally foreign to American and “Western” ways –pervade much of the Muslim world. Extensive surveys of Muslim majority countries across Africa and Asia show that there is widespread endorsement for making Sharia the law of the land and adopting the severe practices prescribed in it.

A recent 2013 poll by Pew Research Center found that “solid majorities in most of the countries surveyed across the Middle East and North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia favor the establishment of sharia, including 71% of Muslims in Nigeria, 72% in Indonesia, 74% in Egypt and 89% in the Palestinian territories.”

An earlier pre-Arab Spring survey conducted in 2010 across seven major Muslim countries from Nigeria to Indonesia found that in most there were large majorities in favor of stoning for adultery, amputation of limbs for theft and death for apostasy (leaving Islam).

So while there is considerable country-to-country variation in the degree of support for the enforcement of the more brutal Sharia compliant prescriptions, it is clear that in terms of defining societal parameters – individual liberties, gender equality (including equality before the law), religious tolerance and socio-cultural pluralism – a gigantic gulf separates America from Islam.

One would be hard pressed to find any area where they do in fact “overlap and share common principles” in any significant manner.

‘Islam has always been part of America’s story’

In his Cairo “outreach” speech, with the Muslim Brotherhood seated in positions of prominence –much to the chagrin of his host Hosni Mubarak – Obama told his audience: “I know, too, that Islam has always been a part of America’s story.” Then extolling the alleged Muslim contribution to the development of the US he declared, no more than a few years after 9/11, when in the name of Islam, Muslims reduced the Twin Towers to a pile of rubble, he remarked: “Since our founding, American Muslims have enriched the United States. They have… built our tallest building [sic].”

Admittedly, much water has flown under the bridge since Obama’s initial outreach address to the Muslim world in June 2009, shortly after his election. But precisely because it was delivered when he was still unencumbered by domestic constraints and foreign frustrations, it perhaps reflected most accurately the unfiltered essence of the political instincts he brought to the Oval Office and the inputs that have gone into shaping his geopolitical credo.

His interpretation of the international role the US should play, the nature of the country’s interests, and the manner in which they should be pursued; his perception of friend and foe and the attitudes that should be adopted towards them, all seem to entail dramatic and disconcerting departure from that of most of his predecessors.

In this regard, he is the first US president who is explicitly and overtly unmoored, both cognitively and emotionally, from the bollards of America’s founding Judeo-Christian heritage, and who somehow conceives that Islam is not inherently inimical to American values.

It is through this Islamo-philic prism that the Obama-administration’s attitude to, and performance of, its foreign policy must be evaluated–including last weekend’s acquiescence on the Iranian nuclear issue.

The chilling thing

In the course of half a decade, under the stewardship of Obama, the US has had its standing shredded both in the eyes of its allies – and worse – in the eyes of its adversaries.

Debacle has piled upon debacle. Allies have been abandoned and enemies emboldened, worse, empowered. Inappropriate action has been complemented by equally inappropriate inaction. True, in 2009 Obama was handed an unenviable heritage from the preceding administration–a severe financial-turned-economic crisis and two ill-considered ground wars in Asia. But Obama has ensured that the latter will end in futile failure– even demoralizing defeat; while in dealing with the former he has precipitated soaring deficits, crippling debt and chronic and debilitating joblessness, coupled with burgeoning dependence on welfare.

But the really chilling aspect of the Obama incumbency is that it is genuinely difficult to diagnose whether the abysmal results we see represent a crushing failure of his policies or a calculated success; whether they are the product of chronic ineptitude or purposeful foresight; whether they reflect myopic misunderstanding, moronic incompetence or malicious intent.

This general conundrum is particularly pertinent with regard to what transpired in Geneva last Sunday, which appeared to many – including erstwhile Obamaphiles – to be an inexplicable US climb-down from what looked “suspiciously” like positions that heralded emerging success.

Some had little doubt as to what lay behind the move. In a forceful article, Caroline Glick asserted bluntly: “His goal is not to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power…The goal of Obama’s foreign policy is to weaken the State of Israel.”

Undermining allies, underpinning adversaries

Others took a more general, less Israel-centric, perspective on Obama motives.

“Obama has no interest in weakening our adversaries while he does seem to have an interest in weakening our allies”, warned Dinesh D’Souza, adding: “If you were trying to find a consistent way to predict what Obama is doing in the ME it is very simple. He has been undermining our allies and allowed our adversaries to remain in power.”

D’Souza, who directed the 2012 highest grossing documentary, “2016: Obama’s America,” which made a number of troubling predictions as to what to expect in the second term of Barack Obama, has now released a new video, suggesting how the president, driven by his “anti-colonial mindset” he allegedly imbued from his father, plans to “take America down a notch.”

D’Souza warned that Obama would “promiscuously” increase the debt to mortgage the US to foreign interests and would purposely strive to shrink the influence of American foreign policy. He points to what he sees as a “double-standard” in US policy under the current administration in the Mideast, intervening when this seems to advance Islamist interests (as in Egypt in 2010) and refraining to do so when this does not (as in Iran in 2009); engaging in Libya to depose a largely reformed Gaddafi but not in Syria to topple an inimical Assad.

D’Souza concludes that “this is not the unintentional effect of a blundering president,” hinting darkly :” When an intelligent man does something contradictory, it’s not because he is a fool but it is because he is up to something else.”

‘Then, it all makes perfect sense’

Now while I would advise against uncritical acceptance of all D’Souza’s arguments and interpretations of Obama’s conduct, they paint a picture plausible enough to be taken seriously. They certainly provide a cogent context for interpreting the reason for, and the significance of, what longtime Obama supporter Alan Dershowitz dubbed the US’s “Chamberlain moment” in Geneva over the weekend.

The veteran Democratic stalwart condemned the P5+1 pact, forged with the Iranian theocracy, as “a deal which is bad for the United States, for the West, and for Israel…” He railed : “…all reasonable, thinking people should understand that weakening the sanctions against Iran without demanding that they dismantle their nuclear weapons program is a prescription for disaster. Have we learned nothing from North Korea and Neville Chamberlain?”

By contrast, Bashar Assad lauded the accord! Indeed, with the ink barely dry on the agreement, it seems on the verge of falling apart, with Iran rejecting the White House interpretation of central clauses in it–regarding Iran’s right to enrich (with the Russians supporting Tehran’s version), and continued construction as the planned plutonium producing plant at Arak; and uncertainties as to the off-site development of components for its future operation.

Were all these flaws and ambiguities unintentionally overlooked? Or were they intentionally ignored? Was the agreement designed to prevent Iran from attaining weaponized nuclear capabilities? Or was it devised to sow dissension in the international front, assembled with such difficulty, to impose effective sanctions on Iran?

So on the face of it Dershowitz’s exasperated query” Have we learned nothing from North Korea and Neville Chamberlain?” should be perfectly understandable.

Unless of course, one assumes, as do Glick and D’Souza, that Obama’s “ goal is not to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power…[but] to weaken the State of Israel,” and that “Obama has no interest in weakening our adversaries while he does seem to have an interest in weakening our allies.”

Then, it all makes perfect sense!

Fractured foundations? 

I do not pretend to know what Barack Obama’s true intentions are. I cannot determine with certainty whether he is a bungling novice or a brilliant strategist. I can only judge from his conduct and draw conclusions from my observations.

Now if I were asked: “How would anyone, who was purposefully aiming to undermine the Western world and bolster its antipodal adversaries, behave?,” I would be compelled to respond: “Much like Obama.” It is difficult to understate the long-term ramifications of the Obama-incumbency on what we have come to call the “West.” However it is becoming increasingly apparent that it will emerge from it severely battered, its spirit emaciated and its foundations fundamentally fractured.

Whether it will withstand the Obama legacy, only time will tell. But the outcome is far from certain.

Martin Sherman (www.martinsherman.net) is founder and executive director of the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies. (www.strategicisrael.org)

Final Iran deal needs to balance out the concessions – The Washington Post.

By Editorial Board, Friday, November 29, 1:36 AM

THE FACT sheet distributed by the Obama administration about the nuclear agreement with Iran is notable for its omissions.

The 2,000-word document, like President Obama’s televised statement Saturday night about the deal, stresses Iran’s pledge to cap its enrichment of uranium, delay the completion of a plutonium-producing reactor and accept additional inspections — measures that will guard against an attempt to produce a bomb while negotiations continue.

What the White House didn’t report is that the text of the accord makes several major concessions to Tehran on the terms of a planned second-stage agreement. Though White House officials and Secretary of State John F. Kerry repeatedly said that Iran’s assertion of a “right to enrich” uranium would not be recognized in an interim deal, the text says the “comprehensive solution” will “involve a mutually defined enrichment program with mutually agreed parameters.” In other words, the United States and its partners have already agreed that Iranian enrichment activity will continue indefinitely. In contrast, a long-standing U.S. demand that an underground enrichment facility be closed is not mentioned.

Mr. Obama and other U.S. officials have spoken about a six-month time frame for completing negotiations, but the agreement says the six-month arrangement can be renewed “by mutual consent” and that “the parties aim to conclude negotiating and commence implementing [in] no more than one year.” It also states that “there would be additional steps in between the initial measures and the final step,” including “addressing the U.N. Security Council resolutions.” Those resolutions order Iran to suspend uranium enrichment, but the agreement does not say whether those demands will be enforced.

The most troubling part of the document provides for what amounts to a sunset clause in the comprehensive agreement. It says the final deal will “have a specified long-term duration to be agreed upon,” and that once that time period is complete, “the Iranian nuclear program will be treated in the same manner as that of any non-nuclear weapon state party” to the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran thus could look forward to a time when there would be no sanctions and no special restrictions on its nuclear capacity; it could install an unlimited number of centrifuges and produce plutonium without violating any international accord.

Administration officials say they regard Iran’s agreement to the words “long-term” in the sunset clause as a significant concession. In theory, this might mean 15 to 20 years. Iran, however, has proposed a far shorter period; we are told it was three to five years. Whatever the final compromise, it would be dangerous to allow this Iranian regime to have an unrestricted nuclear program at any time — and it surely would be unacceptable to Israel and Iran’s Arab neighbors. The United States should retain the ability to block the expiration of controls with its veto in the U.N. Security Council.

The interim arrangement, as we have said, is worthy because it checks Iran’s progress toward a bomb and is far preferable to the military action that otherwise might have been necessary. But the agreement leaves the United States and its partners at a disadvantage in negotiating the comprehensive settlement. The concessions made to Iran will have to be balanced by a major rollback of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure — with no automatic expiration date.

Read more on this issue: David Ignatius: Iran — the next stage Eugene Robinson: Iran deal is a diplomatic success story Michael Singh: Answers to key questions will determine Iran deal’s success

© The Washington Post Company

How sloppy US diplomacy is empowering Iran | The Times of Israel.

Israel isn’t the only Middle East player concluding that the Geneva negotiators deserve a prize for incompetence, and that a dire amateurish trend is gathering pace

By Avi Issacharoff November 29, 2013, 9:14 am

Germany’s Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, US Secretary of State John Kerry, and French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius greet each other at the UN Palais, early Sunday, November 24, 2013, in Geneva, after announcing an interim deal at the Iran nuclear talks. (photo credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster, Pool)

After all the hype about an interim agreement between Iran and world powers on Sunday, it became clear on Wednesday that the deal is not actually finalized. Not only has the six-month interim agreement not come into effect yet, but also Iran is free to proceed with its military program at full speed until the deal’s final “technical” details have been worked out, as US State Department Spokeswoman Jen Psaki put it.

Psaki was speaking on Tuesday, just a few hours after Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif announced that his country’s interim agreement with the P5+1 — the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and Germany — does not obligate it to stop construction of the heavy-water production plant in Arak, which could be used in the production of weapons-grade plutonium. Zarif said the agreement only required Iran to cease heavy water production at the site.

Various experts have also said that the agreement published by the White House leaves the Iranians the ability to manufacture crucial components for their nuclear program outside the Arak facility and install them if the site is reopened. The highlight came later on Tuesday when the Iranian Foreign Ministry announced that the agreement Washington published was not the one it had agreed to. If it weren’t so sad, it might almost be funny.

In her earlier announcement, Psaki explained that there is no clear timetable for implementing the signed interim agreement with Iran. If that is really the case, someone on the American negotiating team in Geneva deserves a prize for incompetence – or possibly for misleading the public.

Leaving aside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s contempt for the interim accord, and his now openly problematic relationship with President Barack Obama over this most acute of crisis, certain Arab countries, particularly those belonging to the Saudi-Egyptian camp, see the handling of the negotiations with Iran and the resulting agreement as part of trend. The White House, they say, is reliably amateurish and clumsy when attempting to intervene in the Middle East. In 2010, White House Spokesperson Robert Gibbs declared that the administration had no intention of allowing Iran to continue enriching uranium. But as of November 2013, under the interim deal’s terms — which allow Iran to continue enrichment to 5% — Washington has consented to this very thing. So happily state Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Zarif, and other Iranian leaders.

The nuclear issue is not the only one that worries various countries in the region, particularly Saudi Arabia. “The [Persian] Gulf countries are now concerned that the US is essentially supporting Iranian hegemony in the region and that there in nothing that they can do about it,” said professor Asher Susser, of the Department of Modern Middle Eastern History and The Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African studies at Tel Aviv University. “An important historical shift is now reaching its climax. The Middle East’s center has shifted from the Arab countries to the Persian Gulf. And when the US permits Iranian hegemony, it projects onto the situation in Syria, Iraq and other places. Saudi Arabia is now concerned about the Iranian-Shi’ite subversion, which is only expected to worsen over time.

The problem for these worried countries, Susser went on, “is, again, that there is nothing that they can do. Consider Syria, for example. Everyone has buried [President Basher] Assad, and who’s fighting alongside him? Iran and Hezbollah. Which Arab country has taken his side? Not a single one. No country has given him military support.”

According to Susser, if these processes continue, the Arab countries will have no choice but to tighten bonds with Iran. “They won’t like it but they may not have any other alternative,” he said.

Making Riyadh sweat

The first signs of these tightening bonds were already apparent this week, when Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu visited Tehran and met with Rouhani and Zarif. Davutoglu welcomed Iran’s announcement that it is willing to attend the second round of talks to try to find a political solution to the Syrian crisis scheduled for January 2014 in Geneva.

Khalid Bin Ahmed al-Khalifa, the foreign minister of Bahrain, has also invited Tehran to participate in a dialogue held annually in Manama, Bahrain’s capital. The foreign minister noted that his country was one of the first to acknowledge the interim agreement between Iran and the world powers. This is the same Bahrain that Tehran considers to be Iran’s 14th province.

If all that wasn’t enough to cause Saudi Arabia to break out in a cold sweat, there was the phone call between Damascus and Tehran on Wednesday. Assad, who has taught the leaders of the Arab world a thing or two about survival, spoke to his Iranian counterpart. According to reports from Syria, Rouhani promised to support Damascus in its war against the “terrorists.” Assad added that Iran’s success in Geneva would enhance its position in the region and in the world and that a strategic partnership between the two countries would have bearing on the situation in Syria.

Dr. Michal Yaari, an expert on Saudi Arabian foreign policy from the Open University and Bar Ilan University, said that Riyadh’s greatest concern is that the US will to ignore Saudi Arabian interests and focus on Iran. “Outwardly, they have been relatively cordial. They did not attack the Geneva agreement outright, they only hinted at their objections,” he said. “But beneath the surface, Riyadh understands that Washington may choose to proceed in a way that conflicts with Saudi Arabian interests, causing a crisis.

Iran, she clarified, “is their greatest enemy. On the religious front, there’s the hostility between the Sunnis and the Shiites. On the ethnic front, there’s the Arab-Persian conflict. From a security perspective, since Iraq disintegrated, no power has been able to stand in the way of Iranian hegemony in the Persian Gulf. And politically, there are the Iranian attempts to weaken the monarchies in the region. They see an Iranian threat everywhere they turn. So while Tehran may not have the upper hand in all of the conflicts in the region, it certainly is not losing its battles.”

There have been quite a few reports recently of improved relations between Riyadh and Jerusalem, including of senior officials in Saudi Arabia who referred directly to the two countries’ shared interests. But Yaari doesn’t recommend that Israel start preparing to host the Saudi king in Jerusalem just yet.

“The Saudi ambassador to Britain made a statement the day before the interim agreement was signed, to the effect that his country won’t ‘stand idly by’ while Iran remains a threat. But he made sure to mention Israel’s nuclear reactor, as a form of lip service. Statements about improved relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia are harmful to Riyadh.

“Saudi Arabia may need Israel’s assistance on security issues to a certain extent, but any relationship between the two countries will harm its position in the Arab world,” Yaari elaborated. “So if any such relationship is formed, Saudi Arabia will insist on keeping it a secret.”

You know it’s a bad deal when… | JPost | Israel News.

By DAVID M. WEINBERG

11/28/2013 22:20

Obama is betting on appeasement of the Ayatollahs to generate Persian perestroika.

You know the accord reached in Geneva last weekend between the P5+1 and Iran is a bad deal when the US Secretary of State, John Kerry, proclaims that the accord does not recognize Iran’s “right to enrich” uranium, and five minutes later the Iranian foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, says it does.

Woe to us that Zarif speaks with more credibility than Kerry. Officials in Washington have now confirmed the Iranian interpretation by commenting on the record that it is “not realistic” to expect, even in a further accord, that Iran will agree to zero enrichment.

You know it’s a bad deal when John Kerry says that the accord’s main purpose is to “put time on the clock,” but Dr. Ephraim Asculai, a veteran of both the IAEA and the Israel Atomic Energy Commission, determines that the Iran accord “does not do anything to change Iran’s breakout time, except perhaps in a very minor way.”

Asculai says the interim agreement adds only “a few days” onto the regime’s clock, should it decide to sprint toward a bomb.

You know it’s a bad deal when one of the most-ballyhooed Iranian “concessions” is its agreement – for the next six months – not to install plutonium production equipment in the heavy water reactor in Arak.

But this is a joke, since the reactor is still under construction and will be so for at least another 12 months, and Washington now admits that the text of the accord has a loophole that allows Tehran to build components off-site for later installation in the reactor.

You know it’s a bad deal when the second most-celebrated Iranian “concession” is its agreement to temporarily halt enriching uranium to a 20 percent level (and convert what they have into fuel rods or uranium oxide) and to limit the number of centrifuges in Natanz by half and the number of centrifuges in Fordo by threequarters.

Israeli analysts term these restrictions almost meaningless. Iran already has more than eight tons of low-enriched uranium, enough for four to five atom bombs; and with nearly 18,000 fully-operational centrifuges, it can enrich uranium to any level it wants within a short period of time.

So Iran is already a nuclear threshold country in terms of its ability to produce fissile material, and this situation won’t change. The Iranians can quietly accept the freeze on high-enriched uranium, and make a swift run any day in the future towards the critical amounts needed for a bomb.

You know it’s a bad deal when one of the much-touted-breakthroughs is Iranian agreement to supposedly “intrusive” UN inspections.

But the UN has missed every major Iranian nuclear advance over the past twenty years, and been very slow to call-out the Iranians when it did find evidence of Iranian misdoing.

Moreover, the hypothetically-intrusive UN inspections do not include access to the places where Iran is suspected of working on nuclear weaponization, like Parchin. In fact the interim accord doesn’t restrict or relate at all to Iran’s military programs in nuclear metallurgy, warhead design, and long-range missile production.

You know it’s a bad deal when the US administration official in charge of the negotiations with Iran is none other than Wendy Sherman, US under secretary of state for political affairs.

Sherman was the US official who negotiated America’s flimsy accords with North Korea in 2005 and 2007 – each of which was hailed as “historic and transformative” by Washington, only to be violated with impunity by the North Koreans again and again.

Today the Kim regime has uranium enrichment facilities, has restarted (again) its plutonium-producing nuclear reactor at Yongbyon, has conducted a series of increasingly successful longrange missile tests, and has carried out three nuclear tests (in 2006, 2009 and 2013).

You know it’s a bad deal when columnist Tom Friedman of The New York Times, widely viewed as a spokesman for Obama, makes it clear that America has “more important” and comprehensive goals in mind than “just” halting the Iranian nuclear program. For Friedman (and quite clearly Obama), détente with Iran is “worth” some acceptance of Iran’s nuclear status. They’re making a “worthy bet” (Friedman) that “Iranian moderates can be empowered” by the easing of sanctions, the legitimization of Iran’s nuclear program within limits, and ending Iran’s isolation from the world.

In other words, they’re betting that appeasement of the Ayatollahs is going to generate Persian perestroika. Oh yeah.

You know it’s a bad deal when the yearlong – until-now-secret – American-Iranian talks have reportedly not focused at all on Iran’s “bad” behavior in the region.

Behavior such as supporting Hezbollah and Syria’s Assad, to its subversive activities in Egypt and Jordan, to its genocidal statements with regard to Israel.

All this is being swept under the rug in a dangerously-enthusiastic rush to craft a new nuclear deal with Iran.

Of course, it’s a deal that may last long enough for Obama to serve-out his presidential tenure without having to really confront the Iranians, so it’s “worth it.”

You know it’s a bad deal when just about every administration spokesman has explained over and over again in recent weeks that war with Iran is not an acceptable option.

Thus residual, ritual American incantations of the diplomatic formula that “all options remain on the table” – one being that military action could still be contemplated if the Iranians don’t follow through on their new commitments – ring totally hollow. It’s clear that the Obama administration has no intention of striking the Iranian nuclear military complex, ever, under any circumstances.

You know it’s a bad deal when the Geneva accord may not really be much of an actual agreement at all.

Former US National Security Council official Elliott Abrams has pointed out that the accord summary released by the White House is couched in “aspirational” terms, suggesting that actual “implementation” of Iranian commitments still need to be negotiated, and the White House now admits as much. Zarif has actually called the White House texts “invalid and one-sided interpretations of the texts agreed to in Geneva.”

You know it’s a bad deal when the French foreign minister and others are already saying that the so-called interim accord could be in place for a year or more, since talks on a longer-term agreement may be prolonged and difficult.

And who knows whether Tehran will ever agree to a tougher accord.

So Obama’s “interim” accord could become a lasting arrangement; the worst possible scenario.

You know it’s a bad deal when President Shimon Peres and Ambassador Uri Savir, who negotiated the disastrous Oslo accords, think the Geneva accord is a good deal.

You know it’s a bad deal when Obama and Kerry have taken to belittling Israel’s concerns, and to battering American Jewish and congressional critics of the Geneva deal with insinuations of disloyalty, dual loyalty and warmongering.

But all is fair in Obama’s drive for a new regional order in which Israel is a bit player and side concern, and America’s grand reconciliation with radical Islam is the paramount strategic objective.