Just as a refresher, let’s recall the words of Mikhail Ulyanov, Vladimir Putin’s mediator in the talks for Joe Biden’s efforts to re-enter the Iran deal. Speaking in English to reporters last week, Ulyanov bragged how he and his Chinese partners got Iran a much better deal out of the US than Tehran would otherwise have gotten:
Shocking video: This is the lead Russian negotiator for the Iran nuclear talks, Mikhail Ulyanov.
He’s bragging about how Russia, Iran, and China teamed up to deliver huge wins for Iran’s nuclear program in Vienna negotiations. pic.twitter.com/oiTOgfh99i
— POLARIS (@polarisnatsec) March 6, 2022
“Iran got much more than it could expect. Much more … Our Chinese friends were also very efficient and useful as co-negotiators.”
This raised all sorts of questions about why we allowed the Russians and China to be involved in these negotiations at all. That would have been a good question even before the invasion of Ukraine, but Putin’s maniacal war should have ended any assumptions that Russia or China would negotiate as good-faith partners on security. Russia’s demands that our sanctions not impede oil transactions through Iran would have been another big red flag, but thus far the White House has ignored all of these signals to plunge ahead on a deal that was bad the first time around and looks worse as a rerun.
With all that as context, now let’s look at the official White House response to claims by Putin that the US operated chemical- and biological-weapons facility in Ukraine. Jen Psaki righteously declared the Russian and Chinese governments to be liars and propagandists, but …
This is preposterous. It’s the kind of disinformation operation we’ve seen repeatedly from the Russians over the years in Ukraine and in other countries, which have been debunked, and an example of the types of false pretexts we have been warning the Russians would invent.
— Jen Psaki (@PressSec) March 9, 2022
It’s Russia that has a long and well-documented track record of using chemical weapons, including in attempted assassinations and poisoning of Putin’s political enemies like Alexey Navalny.
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— Jen Psaki (@PressSec) March 9, 2022
Huh. So explain to me again why we invited Russia to negotiate a deal over illegal WMD development in Iran? I mean, Psaki’s not wrong about these allegations — she’s entirely correct, in fact. And that’s why having Mikhail Ulyanov on hand to negotiate Iran’s compliance on non-proliferation of nuclear weapons is akin to having Ted Bundy mediate Jeffrey Dahmer’s sentencing.
What will Russia do when it comes to enforcing the terms of the Iran deal? Psaki gives us a preview:
Also, Russia has a track record of accusing the West of the very violations that Russia itself is perpetrating. In December, Russia falsely accused the U.S. of deploying contractors with chemical weapons in Ukraine.
— Jen Psaki (@PressSec) March 9, 2022
So … maybe the mullahs might get a harshly worded memo from the Kremlin when they conduct their first nuclear-weapons test? Seems doubtful; Putin would be much more likely to accuse the US of faking it. And Xi Jinping would sing from the same hymnal, as Psaki suggests:
Now that Russia has made these false claims, and China has seemingly endorsed this propaganda, we should all be on the lookout for Russia to possibly use chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine, or to create a false flag operation using them. It’s a clear pattern.
— Jen Psaki (@PressSec) March 9, 2022
So again, the question remains: why did Joe Biden and Antony Blinken invite Russia and Putin to negotiate a deal with Iran in the first place? Were they really that naive? If that was the case, Biden would break off the Iran talks immediately and insist that neither Russia or China take part. Rather than naïveté, this looks like plain ol’ stupidity. That’s a clear pattern in this White House, too.
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