IT is surely time to ring down the curtain on the endless talks about Iran's nuclear program. The deadline for a successful conclusion is tomorrow (Tuesday) and yet again, it is going to be missed. The latest nonsense to come out of the negotiations in Vienna is that Iran's chief negotiator, Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif told US Secretary of State John Kerry Saturday that he needed to fly back to Tehran to consult with the government there on two key issues — the extent of international inspections of Iranian nuclear facilities and the timing of the removal of worldwide sanctions that have crippled the Iranian economy. There are two crucial points here that it seems, in its eagerness to cut a deal, the Obama administration is willfully choosing to overlook. The first and most glaring is that Iran's obligations on inspections of any part of its nuclear program are already laid down clearly in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to which it is a signatory. Though the small print has yet to be revealed, it looks very much as if Washington is prepared to make a special case of the Iranians. This runs counter to all good sense, because if a special case can be made for Iran, then the whole point of the hard-won NPT will have been destroyed. Other states will surely choose to ignore the treaty's provisions and, in time, the world will see a new nuclear arms' race with an extra set of players. Iran has a clear duty under an important international treaty into which it entered freely. That it choses to flout those obligations is a complete scandal. Sanctions were entirely the correct response. And those sanctions should have stayed in place until the Iranian government agreed to the inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency to which all other nuclear states, including Russia, China and the US are subject. There should be no ifs and buts about this. If Tehran continues to duck its clearly defined responsibilities under the NPT, then punishment, in the form of swingeing economic sanctions must follow. And here is the second point. Those sanctions, which have brought Iran to its economic knees, should only be lifted when Tehran accepts the IAEA inspections to which it signed up. Why should this country be rewarded for refusing to honor its commitments to the international community? Parlaying the speed with which sanctions should be removed is a joke. They should be lifted not a moment earlier than when IAEA inspectors can go wherever they want and see whatever they wish to see of Iran's nuclear program. In effect, this long drawn-out negotiating dance has been a pointless effort from the get-go. The driving force behind the whole exercise was Barack Obama's fixation on achieving at least one Middle Eastern foreign policy win. Yet all the while that the US president has been set upon a deal over Iran, the other regional menace Israel, already armed with nuclear weaponry, thanks to technology given or stolen from the US, has been allowed free rein to sabotage what is left of the Palestinian Peace Process. If sanctions were right for Iran, they were equally due on Israel. But of course, that is not the way that Capitol Hill works and Obama knew from the outset that he had no chance of changing this.
