Claudia Rosett notes the many similarities between the agreement concerning Iran’s nuclear program and that made in 1994 concerning North Korea’s nuclear program, which led to the Communist regime’s testing a nuclear weapon in 2006. This latest deal, she concludes, threatens even greater danger to the world:

Like the North Korea deal, the Iran deal dignifies a despotic, murderous regime, and provides its worst elements with relief from economic distress, via a flood of rejuvenating resources. In North Korea’s case, the main help arrived in the form of aid. In oil-rich Iran’s case, it comes in the far more lucrative form of sanctions relief, including access to an estimated $55 billion or more (by some estimates, two or three times that amount) in currently frozen funds held abroad. . . .

Like the North Korea Agreed Framework, the Iran nuclear deal pivots narrowly on nuclear issues, as if ballistic missiles, terrorism, arms smuggling, gross violations of human rights, blatant declarations of destructive intent and the malign character of the regime itself were irrelevant to the promised “exclusively peaceful” nuclear program.

Like the North Korea deal, the Iran deal comes loaded with incentives for the U.S. administration to protect its own diplomatic claims of success by ignoring signs of cheating. Monitoring of nuclear facilities is shunted to the secretive International Atomic Energy Agency, which has no power of enforcement, and will have to haggle with Iran for access to suspect sites. . . .

To be sure, there are two highly significant differences between the 1994 North Korea deal and the 2015 Iran deal. Iran, with its oil wealth, location in the heart of the Middle East, messianic Islamic theocracy, and global terror networks, is even more dangerous to the world than North Korea. And, bad as the North Korea deal was, the Iran deal is much worse. Along with its secret side agreements and its promises to lift the arms embargo on Iran in five years and the missile embargo in eight, this deal lets Iran preserve its large, illicitly built nuclear infrastructure and carry on enriching uranium, subject to constraints that will be problematic to enforce and are themselves limited by sunset clauses that even North Korea never managed to obtain at the bargaining table.

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.