President Biden is eager to re-engage with Iran and return to the nuclear deal. Still, the killer regime has no interest in changing that way. It is driving its development of nuclear weapons and its network of deadly militias throughout the Middle East in its continued drive toward hegemony.
Biden said during the campaign that he would rejoin the nuclear deal “as a starting point for continuation negotiations” if “Iran returns to strict compliance,” working “to strengthen and expand the provisions of the nuclear deal, while addressing other issues of concern, “such as Iran’s ballistic missile program, human rights abuses and” destabilizing activity. ”
That was always naive, and Iran’s foreign minister Javad Zarif confirmed it on Friday: “There can be no renegotiations,” he wrote in foreign affairs. “Iran’s regional and defense policies were not under discussion,” as the West will not withdraw from the region and stop selling weapons to its allies.
Zarif proudly stated that “Iran has significantly increased its nuclear capabilities” and, in fact, the International Atomic Energy Agency revealed this month in a confidential report that Iran took a crucial step in December, initiating an assembly line to convert uranium metal, a key-weapon component prohibited by the nuclear deal. France, Germany and Britain jointly warned of the “serious military implications”, noting that the metal “has no credible civilian use”.
Earlier this month, Tehran said it was producing 20 percent enriched uranium, well above the 3.67 percent agreed in the nuclear deal, crossing what even European peacekeepers have considered a line. red. The IAEA said in November that Iran had accumulated a low-enriched uranium stock 12 times what was allowed under the agreement. Iran prevented the agency from visiting last month and vows to ban inspectors permanently if U.S. sanctions are not lifted on Feb. 21.
Nor is the problem just nuclear weapons. Tehran’s multi-day military exercises this month included tests aimed at ballistic missiles and bombers, Iranian state television said, a “hypothetical enemy anti-missile shield” and “hypothetical enemy bases.” Some missiles landed just 100 kilometers from the USS Nimitz, and their debris flew after they exploded. A missile touched the water 20 miles from a merchant ship.
Newsweek recently reported that Iran is delivering “suicide drones” (advanced unmanned aerial vehicles) to its Houthi representatives in Yemen. With a range of 2,000 kilometers, they can reach Israel, Saudi Arabia and even American targets in the region.
All of this should be a wake-up call for the new president, but Biden looks set to remain calm. His election as CIA director William Burns played a key role in the 2013 Obama administration secret talks with Tehran that led to the 2015 nuclear deal. And it seems Biden wants to turn Robert Malley in his special envoy to Iran.
Malley was ousted from the 2008 Obama campaign following news that he had met with members of the terrorist group Hamas, but became the director in the Middle East of President Barack Obama’s National Security Council. Last year, he actually condemned the assassination of top Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.
A dozen former Iranian hostages and human rights activists sent a letter to Biden’s designated secretary of state urging him not to put Malley in the administration, as he “would send a horrific signal to the dictatorship of Iran in which the United States is only focused on re-entering Iran’s nuclear deal and ignoring regional terror and domestic crimes against humanity. “
This was exactly the Obama-era approach, and Biden seems determined to repeat that deadly mistake.