nuclear-news

Why Limit Iranian Enrichment Peacefully When You Can Bomb Them Instead?

A deal was limiting Iran’s enrichment of uranium until Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of it. Instead the Dealmaker bombed Iran, threatening to set the region on fire, writes Joe Lauria. With a ceasefire what does he do now?

By Joe Lauria, Consortium News. June 24, 2025, https://consortiumnews.com/2025/06/24/why-limit-iranian-enrichment-peacefully-when-you-can-bomb-them-instead/

In the last great achievement of international diplomacy, the United States and its allies Britain, France and Germany, concluded a deal in 2015 with Russia, China and Iran — something that today would be unthinkable — to limit Iran’s nuclear enrichment to purely civilian uses at 3.67 percent. 

Negotiations on the deal began in November 2013, just three months before the U.S.-backed unconstitutional change of government in Kiev that started the long slide in U.S.-Russian relations. That did not prevent the nuclear deal from being concluded in July 2015 and endorsed by the Security Council in October of that year. 

Seven years later, Washington and its European allies began  fighting a hot war against Moscow through its proxy Ukraine. Relations with China have also sharply deteriorated. The idea of such cooperation on Iran now is unthinkable.

But in 2013 such wise diplomacy was still possible and the result was a peaceful resolution of the Iranian enrichment issue.

Iran agreed to stringent monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency and in exchange, the United States, Europe and the United Nations lifted economic sanctions against Tehran. 

The IAEA certified that the deal was working. Iran was sticking to 3.67 percent enrichment. Diplomacy worked. Iran’s nuclear program was in check.

But the Israelis had opposed it all along because Israel’s aim has long been to overthrow the government in Iran in Israel’s quest for regional dominance.  

Netanyahu could not stop Barack Obama from working with the Chinese and the Russians to conclude the deal that solved the nuclear issue and left the Iranian government in a more secure position. 

Then Donald Trump became president. He did what Netanyahu wanted. He pulled the U.S. out of the deal, saying it was a lousy agreement and he could do better. But there was no new deal.  Iran continued to cooperate with the existing agreement for a year before increasing enrichment, eventually to 60 percent for leverage in the negotiation. (90 percent is needed for a bomb, but U.S. intelligence and the IAEA said in recents months that Iran is not pursuing a bomb).

Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden, did nothing to return the U.S. to the deal to save it when he got into the White House, dishonoring probably Obama’s greatest achievement.

Trump 2.0’s idea of a better deal to limit Tehran’s enrichment was to demand zero percent after Iran agreed to return to 3.67 percent. Trump would look like a fool if he accepted 3.67 percent, as that would mean agreeing to the very deal that was working well before he tore it up. 

So it was bombs away instead.   

Clearing Smoke Reveals Trump’s Lies

More than 24 hours after the smoke cleared above Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan nuclear facilities Trump’s lies during his address Saturday night came clearly into view. 

The strikes were not “a spectacular military success.” Iran’s “key nuclear enrichment facilities” were not “completely and totally obliterated.” There is no evidence that a single centrifuge was damaged and Iran’s 60 percent enriched fuel had already been removed and is in a location unknown to Israel, the U.S. and the IAEA.

Trump called Iran the “bully of the Middle East” when any neutral person knows that bully is Israel backed by the U.S., the bully of the world. 

In just the past few months, with U.S. backing, Israel has invaded Lebanon and Syria, launched an unprovoked attack on Iran and is committing genocide in Gaza. The last time Iran invaded anyone was Iraq in 1982 but only after Iraq had invaded it first in 1980. 

Israel gets away with this by portraying itself as the perpetual victim of an imminent new Holocaust 80 years after the fact and thus needs to invade and bomb its neighbors in “self defense” to pre-empt this from happening.

Regional hostility toward Israel does not stem from a reaction to its decades of aggression against Palestinians and its neighbors but purely from anti-semitic hatred.  These countries must constantly be attacked to wipe out this hatred, not to reconstitute an ancient Hebrew empire from (beyond) the River to the Sea. 

One power that empire never conquered was Persia

With their overlapping empires — Israel’s regional and the U.S.’s global — Iran, the land of Darius and Cyrus, is the prime target. The U.S. has sought to control it since at least its 1953 coup restored the shah to power for its oil and because of its Cold War rivalry with Russia.

Trump mimicked Israel, calling Iran “the world’s number one state sponsor of terror,” when an objective analysis would correctly award that title to the Gulf Sunni monarchies, principally Saudi Arabia, all allied with the United States.

They have sponsored al-Qaeda and ISIS and all their offshoots and rebrandings, while Iran has mostly supported militia resisting occupations in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Gaza.

Though formed in 1982 in response to Israel’s invasion and occupation of Lebanon, Hezbollah was only designated a terrorist organization by the European Union in 2013, for instance. Though founded in 1987, the EU did not view Hamas as a terrorist group until 2001.

Then Trump said of Iran:

“They have been killing our people, blowing off their arms, blowing off their legs with roadside bombs. That was their specialty. We lost over 1,000 people, and hundreds of thousands throughout the Middle East and around the world have died as a direct result of their hate.” 

This is a bizarre statement that can only be related to attacks by militia against U.S. occupation forces in Iraq after the U.S. 2003 invasion. But only some of these groups were Iranian-backed and they killed not a thousand, but 169 U.S. soldiers, whom Trump referred to as “our people,” as if they were tourists and not an occupying army. 

Trump’s thousand U.S. victims appears to come from propaganda put out by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, which calls itself “a leading independent research institute, serving as Israel’s global embassy for national security and applied diplomacy.”

It combats what it calls “apartheid antisemitism.” It falsely called the 2015 nuclear agreement that Trump withdrew from “a deal that would allow Iran to become a nuclear-armed state.” In 2015, Haaretz named Sheldon Adelson, Trump’s principal donor, “one of the main financers of JCFA in recent years.”

Israel had to cut short its ambitions to conquer Iran (at least overtly) and agree to a ceasefire because it was running out of interceptor missiles; it’s economy, already weakened by Gaza, was threatened at $200 million a day; and it sustained far more damage than it will admit.

Now that there is a ceasefire, Trump is back to square one. The New York Times reported: 

“Rafael Mariano Grossi, the director of the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog, welcomed news of a cease-fire. In a social-media post, he said he has invited Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi to meet to discuss a diplomatic solution on Iran’s nuclear program.”

That solution would be a return to 3.67 percent enrichment and Iran giving up its 60 percent stockpile, in other words, returning exactly to the deal Trump tore up to plunge the region into extreme danger with his bombing stunt.

Where will he turn now?

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange. 

June 27, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Iran, secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA | Leave a comment