Iran's Charmer in Chief Wins Again

With a final announcement due any moment from negotiations over Iran's nuclear program in Lausanne, Switzerland, Iran appears to be doing quite well for itself.

After all, before the real negotiations began, Iran won vague recognition -- from the U.S. and five other great powers -- that it has a right to enrich uranium. Between 2008 and 2012, the United Nations Security Council passed five resolutions sanctioning Tehran for violating the nuclear non-proliferation treaty by operating centrifuges at facilities it had not bothered to tell the International Atomic Energy Agency about.

Now, if press leaks turn out to be correct, Iran is on the brink of securing an agreement to allow it to keep thousands of those centrifuges, and also to operate its laboratory at Fordow, a facility burrowed deep into a mountain for the production of what Zarif assures us are medical isotopes. When U.S. spies smoked out that facility in 2009, Obama demanded that Iran come clean about all of its past nuclear activities. Last week, the IAEA reported that Iran continues to stonewall the agency on the possible military dimensions of its nuclear program before 2003.

[link to www.bloombergview.com]