PaulaK

NOW - Obama says that Iran is "in a stronger strategic position now than before the war started."

If anyone believes this nonsense, here are the facts he is counting on you not knowing. The deal did not end Iran's nuclear program. It rented a pause. Iran kept its centrifuges, kept Fordow buried in a mountain, kept enriching to 3.67%, and the key restrictions came with expiration dates. The sunset clauses began lifting in 2025. Obama's own answer at the time was that breakout time "would have shrunk almost down to zero" as the deal expired. His deal scheduled the problem for his successors. The regime lied its way into the deal. The JCPOA was premised on Iran coming clean about past weapons work. In 2018 Israel pulled Iran's own nuclear archive out of a Tehran warehouse: tens of thousands of documents on the Amad Project, a crash program to build nuclear weapons, preserved and hidden while Iran certified it had no such program. The IAEA later found uranium traces at undeclared sites Iran never explained. The deal paid for terror. Sanctions relief unfroze roughly $100 billion and the US delivered $1.7 billion in cash. That money flowed to the IRGC, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis. Diplomacy with a regime at war with you is financing, not peace. And the result? By 2025 Iran was enriching to 60%, a short technical step from weapons grade, with enough material for multiple bombs and the IAEA declaring it in violation of its obligations. That is what required military force this year. Iran marched to the threshold under the deal's cover and after it. "I didn't have to fire a missile" is true. He handed the regime money, legitimacy, and a timetable, and left the missiles to be fired a decade later by someone else. Appeasing a dictatorship doesn't buy peace. It buys the dictatorship time.