Mike Pompeo went on the Sean Hannity Show to tell more lies about the nuclear deal:

SECRETARY POMPEO: Remember, that was the fundamental flaw of the Kerry-Obama deal, the JCPOA, the Iran deal. They allowed Iran to have enormous wealth, lots of money, put cash on pallets and sent it to Iran, and then let them continue to enrich uranium so they had the capacity to build out their nuclear weapon system and foment terror. Those were the failures of the previous agreement the President identified, and I think we’ve made real progress.

Pompeo isn’t telling the truth here, and he must think that his audience is stupid enough to believe the whoppers that he’s telling them. There was no flaw in the deal. What Pompeo is describing is the compromise required in any negotiated deal. He is dismissing reasonable compromise itself as a flaw, which reminds us that neither he nor anyone else in the administration has any interest in diplomacy with Iran. Iran was allowed to enrich uranium at a very low level. That had nothing to do with a “nuclear weapon system.” Iran doesn’t possess a “nuclear weapon sytem” and can’t build one because of the deal that Pompeo routinely trashes. The agreement did not have any failures. Until the U.S. reneged on it, it was working exactly as planned, and in spite of U.S. violations of the agreement it has continued to function remarkably well because of continued Iranian compliance. It has been one of the most successful nonproliferation agreements ever made. To the extent that Iran is now reducing its compliance, that is entirely the fault of the destructive “maximum pressure” campaign that Pompeo has championed for more than a year.

When a nonproliferation agreement is based on an exchange of sanctions relief for compliance with restrictions on a nuclear program, the sanctioned party is going to gain access to their own money again. That is how a negotiated agreement works. Iran was always going to regain access to frozen assets under any agreement, so faulting the agreement for delivering on our end of the bargain is about as dim-witted as it gets. Sanctions “work” only to the extent that they contribute to the targeted government’s willingness to make concessions on the disputed issue. If there is no realistic chance of obtaining sanctions relief, sanctions just produce resistance and intransigence. That is why the Trump administration’s sanctions have failed and will continue to fail. The administration has made such excessive and unreasonable demands, and it has already proven that they can’t be trusted, so Iran has no reason to believe that promises of sanctions relief would ever be honored in the future.

Trump’s Iran policy has taken the U.S. backwards for more than a year. The only progress they have made is to make war with Iran more likely. Pompeo’s insistence that the U.S. has made “progress” with its Iran policy is every bit as false as his other claims.