Last week, federal agents took possession of a cache of documents about to be auctioned in New York City, which they had determined had been seized from Jews either during or after the Holocaust. Tim Fitzsimons reports:

The Justice Department on Thursday announced the seizure of seventeen funeral scrolls, manuscripts, and community records that were looted from East European Jewish communities annihilated in the Holocaust. . . . One item, prosecutors wrote, was a manuscript containing ancestry records for a Jewish community in the city now known as Cluj-Napoca in Romania, [known as Kolozsvár to Hungarians and Kloyzenberg to Jews].

Contemporaneous records established that the manuscript existed in Romania in 1936, “shortly before the Holocaust had begun.” . . . The recovered scrolls and manuscripts, investigators said, included “prayers for the dead, memorial pages and/or the names of deceased members of the Jewish communities, operating rules of the society, society-member payments, obligations, society regulations, the identity of society religious leaders, and, in some cases, the names of the society members who were deported by the Nazis to Auschwitz.”

In 2003, the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, spooked by the American display of might in Iraq, decided to destroy or surrender his entire nuclear program. Informed observers have suggested that the deal he made with the U.S. should serve as a model for any agreement with Iran. Robert Joseph provides some useful background:

Gaddafi had convinced himself that Libya would be next on the U.S. target list after Iraq. There was no reason or need to threaten Libya with bombing as Gaddafi was quick to tell almost every visitor that he did not want to be Saddam Hussein. The images of Saddam being pulled from his spider hole . . . played on his mind.

President Bush’s goal was to have Libya serve as an alternative model to Iraq. Instead of war, proliferators would give up their nuclear programs in exchange for relief from economic and political sanctions.

Any outcome that permits Iran to enrich uranium at any level will fail the one standard that President Trump has established: Iran will not be allowed to have a nuclear weapon. Limiting enrichment even to low levels will allow Iran to break out of the agreement at any time, no matter what the agreement says.

Iran is not a normal government that observes the rules of international behavior or fair “dealmaking.” This is a regime that relies on regional terror and brutal repression of its citizens to stay in power. It has a long history of using negotiations to expand its nuclear program. Its negotiating tactics are clear: extend the negotiations as long as possible and meet any concession with more demands.