Since nuclear negotiations between Iran and the U.S. began, the White House has insisted on “decoupling” the issue of atomic weapons from Tehran’s support for terrorism, attacks on American soldiers in Iraq, and meddling in Afghanistan, Syria, and elsewhere. Now, writes Stephen Hayes, the administration has reversed this stance, and—as with so many others—not for the better:
[T]he administration is effectively ending [its] decision to “decouple” nuclear talks from broader regime behavior, not in order to hold Iran to account for its many offenses but as something of a reward for its supporting a nuclear deal. . . . In his Rose Garden statement less than three months ago, the president declared that under the terms of any agreement, sanctions on Iran “for its support of terrorism, its human rights abuses, its ballistic-missile program, will continue to be fully enforced.” But the Associated Press reported earlier this month that “the Obama administration may have to backtrack on its promise that it will suspend only nuclear-related economic sanctions” and will do so by redefining what it means to be “nuclear-related.”
Under the new interpretation, sanctions unrelated to Iran’s nuclear program may be deemed “nuclear-related” if they helped push Iran into nuclear talks or if they overlap with “previous actions conceived as efforts to stop Iran’s nuclear program.” . . . We can’t yet know all the [other] concessions the United States has made in order to secure a deal, but the list of those that are known is long and embarrassing.
Read more on Weekly Standard: http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/iran-deal-then-and-now_978661.html?page=1