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As a senior State Department official told author Trita Parsi, the real problem was that the U.S. wouldn't take "Yes" for an answer. It was only in Obama's second term, after John Kerry replaced Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, that the U.S. finally did take "Yes" for an answer, leading to the JCPOA between Iran, the U.S. and other major powers in 2015. So it was not U.S.-backed sanctions that brought Iran to the table, but the failure of sanctions that brought the U.S. to the table.
Also in 2015, the IAEA completed its work on "Outstanding Issues" regarding Iran's past nuclear-related activities. On each specific case of dual-use research or technology imports, the IAEA found no proof that they were related to nuclear weapons rather than conventional military or civilian uses. Under Amano's leadership and U.S. pressure, the IAEA "assessed" that "a range of activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device were conducted in Iran prior to the end of 2003," but that "these activities did not advance beyond feasibility studies and the acquisition of certain relevant technical competences and capabilities."
The JCPOA has broad support in Washington. But the U.S. political debate over the JCPOA has essentially ignored the actual results of the IAEA's work in Iran, the CIA's distorting role in it and the extent to which the CIA has replicated the institutional biases, the reinforcing of preconceptions, the forgeries, the politicization and the corruption by "other agendas" that were supposed to be corrected to prevent any repetition of the WMD fiasco in Iraq.
Politicians who support the JCPOA now claim that it stopped Iran getting nuclear weapons, while those who oppose the JCPOA claim that it would allow Iran to acquire them. They are both wrong because, as the IAEA has concluded, and even President Bush acknowledged, Iran does not have an active nuclear weapons program. The worst that the IAEA can objectively say is that Iran may have done some basic nuclear weapons-related research some time before 2003 - but then again, maybe it didn't.
Mohamed ElBaradei wrote in his memoir, The Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times, that, if Iran ever conducted even rudimentary nuclear weapons research, he was sure it was only during the Iran-Iraq War, which ended in 1988, when the U.S. and its allies helped Iraq to kill up to 100,000 Iranians with chemical weapons. If ElBaradei's suspicions were correct, Iran's dilemma since that time would have been that it could not admit to that work in the 1980s without facing even greater mistrust and hostility from the U.S. and its allies, and risking a similar fate to Iraq.
Regardless of uncertainties regarding Iran's actions in the 1980s, the U.S.'s campaign against Iran has violated the most critical lessons U.S. and UN officials claimed to have learned from the debacle in Iraq. The CIA has used its almost entirely baseless suspicions about nuclear weapons in Iran as pretexts to "support other agendas" and "keep the inspected party in a permanent state of weakness," exactly as the UNMOVIC Compendium warned against ever again doing to another country.
In Iran as in Iraq, this has led to an illegal regime of brutal sanctions, under which thousands of children are dying from preventable diseases and malnutrition, and to threats of another illegal U.S. war that would engulf the Middle East and the world in even greater chaos than the one the CIA engineered against Iraq.
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