July 14th, 2020, marks the fifth anniversary of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) Agreement, often referred to as the Iran Nuclear Deal (or simply the Deal) - the Deal that wasn't. It was yet another attempt at regime change.
Of all the plans to control Iran beginning from Operation Ajax to Operation JCPOA and everything in between, the Iran Nuclear Deal was by far the most devious attempt at undermining the sovereignty of Iran - one way or another. The Greek's Trojan Horse pales compared to this dastardly scheme. Years in the making, the crafty plan even prompted Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) to nominate John Kerry and Javad Zarif to recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize.
As such, it is high time that the Deal's planners, their motivations and their associations were discussed in order to grasp the depth of the deception.
Iran, due to its geopolitical position, has always been considered a jewel in the crown of the colonial powers. Attempts to conquer Iran through a proxy which started with Operation Ajax in August 1953, at the behest of the British and carried out by the CIA were not abandoned even with the ousting of America's man, the Shah. Although the Islamic Revolution reclaimed Iran's sovereignty, America was not ready to abandon its plans of domination over Iran, and by extension, the Persian Gulf.
The Persian Gulf has been the lynchpin of US foreign policy. "To all intents and purposes," a former senior Defense Department official observed, "'Gulf waters' now extend from the Straits of Malacca to the South Atlantic." Nevertheless, bases nearer the [Persian] Gulf had a special importance, and Pentagon planners urged "as substantial a land presence in the as can be managed." (Anthony H. Cordesman, "The Gulf and the Search for Strategic Stability", Boulder: Westview, 1984).
Having failed in numerous attempts including the Nojeh coup at the nascent stages of the IR Iran's newly formed government, war, sanctions, terrorism, and a failed color revolution, the United States needed other alternatives to reach its goal. Unlike the illegal war against Iraq, war with Iran was not a feasible option. The United States was aware of its inability to wage a successful war against Iran without serious damage to itself and its allies.
When George W. Bush took office, he commissioned a war exercise to gage the feasibility of an attack against Iran. The 2002 Millennium Challenge, was a major war game exercise conducted by the United States Armed Forces in mid-2002. The exercise, which ran from July 24 to August 15 and cost $250 million, proved that the US would not defeat Iran. The US even restarted the war games changing rules to ensure an American victory, in reality, cheating itself. This led to accusations that the war game had turned from an honest, open, playtest of U.S. war-fighting capabilities into a controlled and scripted exercise intended to end in a U.S. victory to promote a false narrative of US invincibility.
For this reason, the United States continued its attempts at undermining Iran's sovereignty by means of sanctions, terror, and creating divisions among the Iranians. The JCPOA would be its master plan.
A simple observation of Iran clearly suggests simple ideological divisions among the Iranian people (pro-West, anti-West, minorities, religious, secular) which have all been amply exploited by the United States and allies. None of the exploits delivered the prize the US was seeking. And so it was that it was decided to exploit the one factor which united Iranians of ALL persuasion. Iran's civilian nuclear program.
In an interview with National Public Radio (25 November 2004), Ray Takyeh (Council on Foreign Relations CFR and husband to Iran expert Suzanne Maloney of Brookings) stated that according to polls 75-80% of the Iranians rallied behind the Islamic Republic of Iran in support of its nuclear program, including the full fuel cycle. In other words, the overwhelming uniting factor among the Iranians for the Islamic Republic was the nuclear program. (USIA poll conducted in 2007 found that 64% of those questioned said that US legislation repealing regime change in Iran would not be incentive enough to give up the nuclear program and full fuel-cycle). The next phase was to cause disunity on an issue that united Iranians of all stripes: negotiate away the nuclear program.
The first round of nuclear negotiations 2003-2005 dubbed the Paris Agreement between Iran and the EU3 proved to be futile, and as one European diplomat put it: "We gave them a beautiful box of chocolate that was, however, empty." As West's fortune would have it, the same Iranian officials who had participated in the 2003-2005 negotiations would negotiate the JCPOA.
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