John Kerry’s Ludicrous Statements on Iran and Syria

Secretary of State John Kerry in a briefing Tuesday made a jaw-dropping comment regarding the knotty issue of Iran’s past disclosure of the possible military dimensions (PMDs) of its program. This is essential if inspectors are going to know where to look for violations. He declared that “the possible military dimensions, frankly, gets distorted a little bit in some of the discussion, in that we’re not fixated on Iran specifically accounting for what they did at one point in time or another. We know what they did. We have no doubt. We have absolute knowledge with respect to the certain military activities they were engaged in.” Going further down the rabbit hole, he insisted, “What we’re concerned about is going forward. It’s critical to us to know that going forward, those activities have been stopped, and that we can account for that in a legitimate way. That clearly is one of the requirements in our judgment for what has to be achieved in order to have a legitimate agreement. And in order to have an agreement to trigger any kind of material significant sanctions relief, we would have to have those answers.” No, the point of PMD disclosure is that without out it going forward we will not have adequate inspections and verifications if we don’t know where and how prior work was conducted. 

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Mark Dubowitz, the widely respected sanctions guru from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, agrees with Kerry’s original statement. “For Secretary Kerry to claim we have absolute knowledge of Iran’s weaponization activities is to assume a level of U.S. intelligence capability that defies historical experience. That’s why he, President Obama, Undersecretary Sherman, and IAEA chief Amano all have made PMD resolution such an essential condition of any nuclear deal,” Dubowitz tells me. “The U.S. track record in detecting and stopping countries from going nuclear should make Kerry more modest in his claims and assumptions. The U.S. missed the Soviet Union, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea. Washington underestimated Saddam’s program in 1990. Then it overestimated his program in 2003 and went to war to stop a nonexistent WMD program. Given this track record, the Obama administration’s abandonment of yet another nuclear demand, especially one as critical as a resolution of Iran’s weaponization past and present, is inexplicable.”

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