Despite President Trump’s wishes, it appears the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will not be helping him destroy the JCPOA (aka the Iran nuclear deal), according to Laura Rozen of AL Monitor:
Iran is honoring the terms of the landmark 2015 nuclear accord, the UN atomic watchdog said in its latest quarterly assessment today, according to news agencies that obtained the confidential six-page report. The latest International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) assessment puts the agency charged with overseeing compliance with the nuclear accord at odds with members of the Donald Trump administration who have signaled that they want to declare Iran in breach of the deal.
IAEA officials said they would not help the Trump administration make a false case for abandoning the agreement.
Not that this is likely to stop Trump from doing what he wants – it’ll simply discredit the United States even more.
The United States Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, may be suffering a problem similar to President Trump’s in that the professionals in the ranks are finding it necessary to correct her statements from the sidelines:
“We don’t typically discuss details of the report before it is made public,” a State Department official told Al-Monitor. “We greatly appreciate the continued exemplary efforts of the IAEA to verify and monitor Iran’s implementation of the JCPOA.”
The State Department’s praise for the IAEA was at odds with a statement from US envoy to the UN Nikki Haley, who bashed Iran for its support of the Palestinian group Hamas and seemed to question whether the agency was being aggressive enough in seeking out sensitive sites in Iran to inspect. The agency has declined to inspect military sites without a good reason, while Iran has dismissed such demands as “merely a dream.”
“We’re not going to visit a military site like Parchin just to send a political signal,” the IAEA official told Reuters, referring to an Iranian military base.
“If inspections of Iranian military sites are ‘merely a dream,’ as Iran says, then Iranian compliance with the JCPOA is also a dream,” Haley said in a press statement.
But a US official, speaking not for attribution, said that Haley, on her Aug. 23 visit to the IAEA in Vienna, had not in fact asked the IAEA to visit any specific Iranian military sites, nor provided any intelligence to the agency that would reflect concerns meriting a request for such a visit.
So the highly aggressive message from Haley may be more show than is generally noted. Is this on purpose, or just more GOP incompetence?
