June 25, 2015

The NYT Pre-Announces Iran Deal Failure

Judging from this NYT editorial a nuclear deal with Iran is not going to happen. The blame will of course be put on Iran even while the real reasons for the likely failure are unreasonable U.S. demands.

The editorial blames the Iranian senior leader Khamenei for the failure. Khamenei yesterday held a speech and repeated his red lines and parameters for a deal. There was nothing new in it. The same points have been made by him in since the start of the negotiations.

He says there will no IAEA snap inspections of Iranian military sites. It is well known that the U.S. used such international inspections in Iraq to extensively spy on the Iraqi military. There will be no questioning of Iranian scientists by the IAEA. Five nuclear scientist have been murdered in Iran after their names and faces became publicly known. Israel is suspected to be behind those killings. It is unreasonable to ask those scientist to risk their lifes to answer irrelevant questions about unfounded allegations of former nuclear research. Khamenei insist on an immediate lift of the sanctions when a deal is signed. He reasonably suspects that any other scheme, like with the sanctions on Iraq, would be used to keep the sanctions on forever while pressing on Iran to fulfill additional commitments. This especially when the IAEA, which is under strong U.S. influence, would be the agency to judge if a commitment is fulfilled or not. The agency would never be satisfied and the sanctions would stay.

The NYT editorial says Khamenei's points are "at odds with a framework agreement reached on April 2". That is a bit weird as the actual full framework agreement has not been made public. So how do the editorial writers know this? "Western officials also say Iran has agreed to ..." Oh, western officials claim something. Then of course they, not Khamenei who has repeated the above points over and over again, must be right?

The editorial comes two days after the NYT published an op-ed by one Alan Kuiperman which claimed that the Iran deal "has a fatal flaw". The op-ed was so fatally flawed on the facts that the Arms Control Association felt it necessary to rebuke (scroll down) it in detail.

Today the news side of the NYT carries a piece by its main sophister David Sanger which reports on a letter some republicans and five former functionaries of the Obama administration sent to him about the Iran deal warning that the deal "may be flawed". Only in the 11th paragraph do we learn their names and that the group was led by Dennis Ross, a well known Israel stooge. Only in the 26th of 27 long waxing paragraphs do we learn that letter was not written by those who sent it:

The letter emerged from a study group on nuclear issues organized by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a policy institute.

Not mentioned is that the Washington Institute was founded by AIPAC and is part of the Israeli lobby. Any letter that "emerged" there was likely written in Tel Aviv.

That the NYT now seems to run against any reasonable deal is suspicious. The paper is often the pre-publishing administration outlet spiked by background talks to "announce" official administration positions before they become official. I regard its current onslaught on a reasonable deal and the early assignment of guilt as a pre-announcement of the U.S. government position which will become official when, in a week or two, the current talks in Geneva will have failed.

Posted by b on June 25, 2015 at 18:51 UTC | Permalink

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