The word "temporarily" is out of favor nowadays.  I noted it skipped in the paragraph on Obama's 2015 Iran nuclear deal in an article on Biden's newly appointed point person on Iran, Robert Malley: "the White House's chief negotiator, alongside Secretary of State John Kerry, for the 2015 nuclear agreement with Tehran and several other nations that capped Iran's nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief."

It would have been far more accurate to word this sentence differently: "2015 nuclear agreement with Tehran ... temporarily (until 2030) capped Iran's nuclear program in exchange for permanent sanctions relief and international legitimacy of Iran's nuclear development after that date."  That's what the "deal" did — it granted legitimacy to Iran's nuclear project in exchange for a fifteen-year hiatus in production of the actual weapon.  The "deal" bought Obama quiet on the Iran front for the rest of his administration at the expense of Iran's unimpeded ability to make a bomb afterward.  Yet trying to make lemonade out of lemons, Obama advertised his surrender to ayatollahs — the surrender that all but guaranteed a nuclear arms race across the Middle East — as a great triumph of his diplomacy, the signal foreign policy achievement of his administration that halted Iran's nuclear progress, period.

I ran a search for "truth in advertising" and got the following definition: "requirement by the Federal Trade Commission as well as various state and local government agencies, that advertisements not make misleading, false, or deceptive claims."  Just like Obama six years ago, Biden's State Department is clearly not guided by any "truth in advertising" requirement.  Hence, the misleading omission of the word "temporarily" from its own advertising of Obama's Iran "deal" I just heard in NPR's interview with the present-day foreign policy advertiser-in-chief, secretary of state Antony Blinken.  At 5 minutes, 30 seconds, he says, "JCPOA was very effective in cutting off all of the pathways that Iran than had to produce fissile material for a nuclear weapon."  The word "temporarily" was not uttered anywhere in the interview.

Clearly, Mr. Blinken does not want us to hear it: it would ruin the idyllic picture of the power of American diplomacy (and would instead highlight the power of Iranian diplomacy — which got from Obama an incredible bargain, exchanging something of no value, something ephemeral and transient — 15 fleeting years of time — for something unbelievably valuable: the legitimacy of Iran's nuclear project and, therefore, a nuclear bomb), so it is not surprising that Secretary Blinken yet again avoided the fatal word "temporarily," choosing to mischaracterize the so-called "deal" as a workable solution to Iran's nuclear ambitions.

Obama managed to sell the Iran "deal" in 2015 by downplaying the word "temporarily."  Will Biden and Blinken manage to do it again, six years later, using the same trick?  I hope not.  I hope we won't forget this time around the word that hangs on the Iran deal like an albatross, forever accusing its authors of treachery and lies.

Image: CristianIS via Pixabay, Pixabay License.