A new United Nations report suggests that the Obama administration and other western governments may be covering up Iran’s violations of international sanctions of ahead of the upcoming June 30 deadline for a final nuclear deal to be agreed.
As Sangwon Yoon reports at Bloomberg View, the UN report provides clear evidence of sanctions violations, such as the head of the Quds force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps openly violating an international travel ban. However, it says, western countries have stopped reporting Iran’s violations, which could only mean a “reduction of procurement activities by the Iranian side,” or, more likely, a political decision by some member states to refrain from reporting to avoid a possible negative impact on ongoing negotiations.” The report’s evidence suggests a cover-up is the likeliest explanation.
Yoon quotes Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who said: ““This is a clear political decision not to publicize these examples of sanctions evasion in order to ensure that public reporting on this doesn’t in any way jeopardize the talks or harden congressional resolve….The Obama administration has bent over backwards to try and whitewash Iranian violations both on the nuclear side and also on the sanction-busting side.”
In recent days, the State Department has worked hard to dispel a report by the New York Times that Iran had a large excess of enriched uranium and was unlikely to meet a June 30 deadline to oxidize it to meet agreed-upon constraints.
The growing impression–now reinforced by skepticism from the UN, of all places–is that the Obama administration is determined to reach a deal with Iran at any cost, even though doing so would prove Iran a path to a nuclear weapon within several years at most, and would grant it hundreds of billions of dollars in frozen funds to support its ongoing proxy wars.
