Defense minister says Iran deal threatens world peace

The West has become willfully blind to Iran’s terror machine and signed a nuclear accord that will endanger world peace, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon said Wednesday evening at an army graduation ceremony.

“Iran — which for two decades and for the duration of the negotiations, cheated and swindled the international system, strives for regional hegemony by, among other things, spreading uninhibited terror, directly and indirectly — is now rewarded with a tail wind that endangers the world’s peace,” he said.

The nuclear deal reached Tuesday in Vienna keeps Iran’s nuclear facilities under inspection and rolls back its program so that it remains, on paper, at least 12 months away from a bomb. President Barack Obama said the agreement was not built on trust but on verification and stated that “put simply, no deal means a greater chance of more war in the Middle East.”

He assured Americans that, “10 or 15 years from now, the person who holds this office will be in a far stronger position with Iran further away from a weapon and with the inspections and transparency that allow us to monitor the Iranian program.”

Israeli officials assailed those claims with a rare near unanimity, with Knesset members from left and right asserting that the accord was dangerous to Israel and the region.

Former prime minister Ehud Barak, though, counseled calm, saying on Channel 2 News on Tuesday evening that “this in not 1938 Europe and not 1947 Palestine.” Still, Barak warned that Iran would likely become a nuclear power within the next decade.

On Wednesday, the director general of the Strategic Affairs Ministry, Ram Ben Barak, a former deputy commander of the Mossad and a candidate for the top spot in the clandestine organization, railed against the deal. He touched on the verification regime, which requires advance notice of several weeks of a suspected violation, and bemoaned the fact that Iran is allowed under the terms of the accord to continue to develop advanced centrifuges that can enrich uranium at a rate 20 times greater than the current one.

“Anyone who needs that sort of centrifuge is after a covert installation that he can hide, so that he requires 1,000 rather than 20,000 centrifuges,” he told Israel Radio.

Ben Barak claimed that the US was “not determined enough” in its bargaining efforts and that it, in signing the deal, had committed “a massive betrayal” against the moderate Sunni states in the region.

He at first said that “of course” Israel had also been betrayed by the agreement, but then recanted the statement.

Ya’alon on Wednesday told the graduating class of the IDF’s National Defense College that the West, “regrettably, is shutting its eyes and ignoring the terror monster” of Iran, which could yet export terror “to its doorstep.”

Calling the accord a historic mistake, he said that it “undermines and destabilizes the few stable foundations that remain in the Middle East.”

Finally, hitting a familiar note about the allures of wishful thinking, he told the graduates that “We are pursuers of peace. But we must recognize reality and not fall for fantasy.”