That is the heading the Washington Post put on the letter by me that appears today, July 21, 2015, on their editorial page. What follows is the letter itself verbatim.
"The July 17 letter from Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz al Saud, "The Iran deal hurts U.S. allies," implied that it was the Clinton administration's 1994 agreement with North Korea that led to North Korea obtaining nuclear weapons. That agreement caused it to adhere to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, shutting down its plutonium-producing reactor and halting it nuclear weapons program. Those actions were undone, with North Korea obtaining nuclear weapons, after March 2001, when the George W. Bush administration changed course and increased sanctions in a failed effort to bring about the end of the North Korean regime."
J. Barkley Rosser, Jr. Harrisonburg, Va.
I note that the Saudis are now officially supporting the nuclear deal with Iran, agreeing that it puts serouis limits on any possible efforts by Iran to gain nuclear weapons, although this change of stance is barely being noticed in the US media, which continues to lump the Saudis in with the Israelis as opposing the agreement.
ReplyDeleteI shall note that it was not just the Korean situation Bush messed up in terms of controlling nuclear weapons, but Iran itself. Several European states negotiated a possible agreement with Iran in 2005, but the Bush administration brushed it aside and tightened sanctions. The upshot was that rather than caving the Iranians boosted their number of centrifuges from 200 to a scary 20,000, along with advancing their missile delivery capabilities, all the while holding to Khameini's fatwa to refrain from directly pursuing a nuclear bomb. That Bush move certainly did not pan out at all, and the clowns in the US Congress declaring that walking away from the deal will lead to tighter sanctions and a better deal are just in la la land.
BTW, I heard on the radio that Thomas Sowell, who I consider to be a serious and intelligent scholar, if one I do not always agree with, has declared this deal to the be the "worst foreign policy decision made in all human history." Really. Has the man completely lost his mind? Accordign to him the second worst was the Ming dynasty decsion in 1443 to end further exploratory voyages by its seamen. Wow, and I thought this discussion could not get any stupider or crazier.
Does Mr. Sowell believe that it is a decision worse than those made by the Bush administration to start two wars in the middle east with adversaries who did not actually wage an aggressive policy against the U.S.? Now there is barely talk about al Qaeda or the Taliban. Does Sowell believe that a direct attack on Iran by the U.S. or Israel is really the better way to proceed?
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