Who Is Lying: Obama Or Iran?

There is Zero Chance of Permanent Accord With Iran

No permanent agreement with Iran over its nuclear program will be possible if Tehran continues to insist it will not dismantle a single centrifuge, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said Sunday. Netanyahu’s comments, made at the opening of the weekly cabinet meeting, came less than a week after the interim agreement with Iran to halt some elements of its nuclear program went into effect.

“If Iran stands by that statement, that means that a permanent agreement – which is the goal of the entire diplomatic process with Iran – cannot succeed,” Netanyahu said.

“Iran is basically insisting on preserving its ability to get fissile material for a bomb without in any way extending the time-line to a nuclear break-out.” This means, he said, that much of what Israel has been warning about in objecting loudly to the interim agreement was already coming true.

In a CNN interview Iranian President Hassan Rouhani declaring to CNN host Fareed Zakaria that Iran “will not accept any limitations” on its “nuclear technology” in the context of a comprehensive agreement between Tehran and the West, and that the Iranians will “not under any circumstances” agree to destroy any uranium enrichment centrifuges.

Zakaria described Rouhani’s statement as a diplomatic “train wreck,” observing that “the Iranian conception of what the deal is going to look like and the American conception now look like they are miles apart.”

The preview of Rouhani’s statements came a day after CNN aired footage of Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif asserting in an interview that Iran is not obligated to dismantle centrifuges, and that White House statements to the contrary – and there have been several such statements - were mischaracterizations.

A report published this week by the U.S.-based Institute of Science and International Security (ISIS) had outlined the minimum requirements that Iran would be obligated to take under any agreement that robustly imposed limits on Tehran’s ability to produce nuclear weapons.

The Wall Street Journal pointedly observed that the report’s prescriptions “aren’t viewed as particularly harsh or hard-line,” and ISIS head David Albright emphasized that they had been produced after ‘extensive discussions in recent months with Obama administration officials working on the Iran file.’

The ISIS reported calculated that any agreement would have to require the Iranians to dismantle 15,000 centrifuges, and that some of the dismantled equipment should actually “be taken out of Iran.”

Source: The Tower