Specific Chemical Materials

Is David Sanger of the New York Times playing a Michael Gordon/Judith Miller role in building up a case for hostility to Iran? Massive story in which Sanger shares a byline with the Yedioth Ahronoth analyst Ronen Bergman, reporting Israel's raid last January of an Iranian storage facility stealing documents from 2003, which Prime Minister Netanyahu himself reported last April as part of his personal effort to push Emperor Trump into abandoning the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on Iran's nuclear activities, which paid off a few days later when Trump indeed left. The documents reveal that the Iran nuclear weapons program was more advanced in 2003 than somebody or other thought it was, though it's also clear that Iran totally dismantled it that year, as they claimed.

Why is The Times reporting it now, six months after the raid and three months after the news? Because the Israeli government invited them over for a junket, pumped up with thrilling detail about the bravura of Mossad in the break-in:

TEL AVIV — The Mossad agents moving in on a warehouse in a drab commercial district of Tehran knew exactly how much time they had to disable the alarms, break through two doors, cut through dozens of giant safes and get out of the city with a half-ton of secret materials: six hours and 29 minutes.

The morning shift of Iranian guards would arrive around 7 a.m., a year of surveillance of the warehouse by the Israeli spy agency had revealed, and the agents were under orders to leave before 5 a.m. to have enough time to escape. Once the Iranian custodians arrived, it would be instantly clear that someone had stolen much of the country’s clandestine nuclear archive, documenting years of work on atomic weapons, warhead designs and production plans.

The agents arrived that night, Jan. 31, with torches that burned at least 3,600 degrees, hot enough, as they knew from intelligence collected during the planning of the operation, to cut through the 32 Iranian-made safes. But they left many untouched, going first for the ones containing the black binders, which contained the most critical designs.

One Billion Dollars

From March 2017, via The Wrap.

Trump over the weekend, as reported by The Hill, seemed to be letting an awfully big cat out of his bag:

President Trump said late Saturday that North Korea must “denuke” before any talks with the U.S.

“Now we are talking and they ... called up a couple of days ago. They said that ‘we would like to talk.’ And I said, ‘So would we, but you have to denuke, you have to denuke,’ ” Trump said at the annual Gridiron Club dinner in Washington, D.C., Reuters reported.

“We will be meeting and we’ll see if anything positive happens,” he said.

“I won’t rule out direct talks with [North Korean leader] Kim Jong Un. I just won’t.”

He took a phone call from North Koreans? They discussed entering formal talks and he made a proposal? Actually no, it seems this did not happen. As explained by an unnamed National Security Council official and confirmed by the White House and noted in Newsweek, the president misspoke:

Jack Kennedy was a (distant) friend of mine, and you, sir...

From Joseph Simms, 1873, Nature's Revelations of Character, Or, The Mental, Moral and Volitive Dispositions of Mankind, as Manifested in the Human Form and Countenance.

Shorter Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street ("The Missiles of August"):

No reason to worry, Trump is basically John Fitzgerald Kennedy: disgusting, but not really dangerous.

Yes,

a reckless, lecherous U.S. president obsessed with his own vigor and out of his depth on foreign policy faced off against a thirtysomething dictator armed with nukes. If we survived the Cuban missile crisis without a thermonuclear war, there’s probably a way to get through this one, too.

I don't think it's quite right to describe Trump as "lecherous", though he'd probably like that himself. My sense, especially from the famous Billy Bush tape, is that he's less interested in having lots of intercourse with many different women than in assault, peeping, and especially getting his presumed exploits talked about. It's hard to imagine JFK calling the New York Post under an assumed identity to get them to write about how much sex he was having.

Kim Jong-don

Image by @DannyDutch.

My first order as President was to renovate and modernize our nuclear arsenal. It is now far stronger and more powerful than ever before....

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 9, 2017

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is it true that President Trump's first order was to renovate and modernize the US nuclear arsenal, so that it's now far stronger and more powerful than ever before?

Answer: In principle, yes, but:

• first of all, the order (Memorandum of January 27, on "Rebuilding the U.S. Armed Forces") was actually asking the Secretary of Defense and OMB manager to produce not a renovated nuclear arsenal but a number of documents, including an overall Readiness Review of the armed forces, a National Defense Strategy, a Ballistic Missile Review, and a Nuclear Posture Review to assess how far "United States nuclear deterrent is modern, robust, flexible, resilient, ready, and appropriately tailored to deter 21st-century threats and reassure our allies";
• second of all, you'd probably have to wait until after the last review is issued—it's supposed to come out at the end of this year—to get a sense of whether or not it's going to lead to a renovation and modernization beyond the 30-year trillion-dollar modernization program laid down by the Obama administration;
• third of all, because the Trump review hasn't been completed, it's really hard to see how it could have done anything already to make the US nuclear arsenal stronger and more powerful than previously, unless they're planning to install time travel to build a better past; and
• fourth of all, it wasn't the first order (that was an executive order of January 20 directing the IRS not to enforce the requirement that tax filers show they have health insurance so that the government won't be able to collect the tax penalties from those who don't, and begging Congress to repeal and replace the PPACA—on the first, nobody was sure by April 18 what they were required to do, and tax preparers were advising everybody to comply with the Obama law as written; on the second, his congressional appeal has of course crashed) but the eighth memorandum, and overall 12th or 13th (15th according to the Rude One).

Bret Stephens Solves North Korea

Image via Sizzle.

Shorter Bret Stephens, "On North Korea, Trump's on the Right Track", July 7 2017:

All the boring and conventional thinkers are trying to get Trump to take a path in the middle between the usual two extreme options for dealing with North Korea's nuclear weapons program—more sanctions or military strikes. Because how can more sanctions accomplish what fewer sanctions have failed to accomplish? And military strikes are off the table because of something I think Michael O'Hanlon probably says at some point in this very long piece, though I haven't found it yet. What they really want him to do is split the difference and put more diplomacy into it. But all these people are seeing the problem wrong. We don't need to get rid of the nukes, we need to get rid of the regime. This always works. How do we change the North Korean regime? All we have to do is persuade the Chinese government to cut off fuel supplies to the country and put Kim Jong-un under permanent house arrest in Beijing when he comes over to complain. Then everybody in Pyongyang will breathe a sigh of relief and be normal and keep their nukes to themselves instead of using them to upset everybody and probably selling them to Iran and so on. How do we get the Chinese to do this? Sanctions on Chinese banks, of course, and frightening them by selling more arms to Taiwan. Which is exactly what Trump is doing, I think. Now all they need is a grand strategic reason for doing it, and looks like I just took care of that myself!

Swear to God:

Don't panic, Tom!

Breakfast in Korea. To the surprise of one Vice reporter, it's what's for dinner!

Seems like a long time since he's hit one out of the Friedmanian lunacy park like this:

Solving the Korea Crisis by Teaching a Horse to Sing

And the exotic (not that exotic) dateline:

SEOUL, South Korea — Some stories have to be experienced to fully grasp — the Korea crisis is one of them. I arrived in Seoul on the evening of May 28. As I was dressing for breakfast the next morning, I was jarred by a news alert ringing on my phone: North Korea had just fired a short-range ballistic missile that had landed in the sea off its east coast.

Grammar salad in the first clause ("stories" is the subject of passive "be experienced" but not the active "grasp" that follows it, and when you're trying to parse it you start wondering if stories have to be experienced like Jimi Hendrix—"Has this story ever been experienced, well I have"—and you're in a state of collapse before you get to the first dash), and the implication, because we do know what he means, that he doesn't expect us to understand the story he's about to tell.

Outmatch them at every pass: Postscript

By the way, I'd like to make just one protest against the meme going around according to which President Obama himself is actively working to beef up the US nuclear deterrent force even as he keeps talking about bringing it down:

Contrary to Mr. Obama’s own conciliatory nuclear posture, and concrete steps in that direction, his administration has also embarked on a sweeping modernization of the American nuclear arsenal that may cost up to $1 trillion over three decades. It features new factories, refurbished nuclear arms and a new generation of weapon carriers, including bombers, missiles and submarines. The bombers are to carry a new super-stealthy cruise missile meant to slip through enemy air defenses.

It's not a great idea, but it doesn't really affect the MAD balance of power (the way George W. Bush's dreadful decision to abrogate the ABM treaty in 2001 did, maybe the single most damaging US action in US-Russia relations since the end of the Cold War).

More importantly, this story skips a really important step. It wasn't the administration that did the embarking, in 2010, but Congress, and specifically 13 Republican Senators, who forced the modernization on Obama as their bribe for providing the necessary two thirds majority for ratifying the New START Treaty, the most significant step in US nuclear weapons policy in 30 years:

Outmatch them at every pass

The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 22, 2016

It's just amazing, really, how willing people are to try to make an interpretation of the daily Trumpism, as if it were an oracle from the lips of the Pythoness high on laurel fumes or the Cumaean Sibyl, how they keep guessing how you could translate his gnomic utterance into their own technical language, looking for a clue as to what he might have in mind to do as president:

West of Eden: Trolling from the Times

Image via All Hat No Cattle.

The good news is that the more educated Iran trolls, such as the New York Times's David Sanger and Michael Gordon (remember him?), have finally pretty much acknowledged that the JCPOA deal will prevent Iran from building a nuclear device over the next 15 years; they don't quite come out and say it, but they've pretty much stopped suggesting it won't. The bad news is that they're doubling down on the "problem" of what might happen in 2031:

the flip side is that after 15 years, Iran would be allowed to produce reactor-grade fuel on an industrial scale using far more advanced centrifuges. That may mean that the warning time if Iran decided to race for a bomb would shrink to weeks, according to a recent Brookings Institution analysis by Robert J. Einhorn, a former member of the American negotiating team.

Critics say that by that time, Iran’s economy would be stronger, as would its ability to withstand economic sanctions, and its nuclear installations probably would be better protected by air defense systems, which Iran is expected to buy from Russia.

Critics are wrong:

West of Eden: Note

Kosher pizzeria in the Jewish compound of Isfahan. Photo by Larry Cohler-Esses.

Not feeling snarky or clever for the last day or two, sorry. Very pleased, though, about my congresscritter.

Jerrold Nadler, New York Congressman, to Endorse Iran Nuclear Deal http://t.co/X6JU8VGCeU So proud Jerry Nadler is my congressman

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) August 21, 2015

If you want to communicate with your representative on the subject of Iran, in a large-scale physical way, MoveOn.org is organizing a series of encounters  on Wednesday. Check it out here.

Meanwhile, if you haven't been reading the extraordinary reporting by Larry Cohler-Esses in the Forward, "A Jewish Journalist's Exclusive Look Inside Iran", you should be. Even more the latest installment, on the lives of the 9000 Jews still living in the Islamic Republic:

Jews’ place in Iranian society is perhaps vouchsafed most by the Jewish community’s own willingness to fight for its right to that place. Its leaders do so while avoiding any challenge to the fundamental legitimacy of Iran’s regime. But it is not a quiet or quiescent Jewish leadership.

Also in the Forward, in the editorial pages, a remarkable piece on "How Anti-Obama Zealots Have Gone Off the Rails on Iran Deal" including a little snark at the expense of war criminal Elliott Abrams:

Abrams was perturbed at Obama’s claim at [American University] that “many of the same people who argued for the war in Iraq are now making the case against the Iran nuclear deal.” Obama warned that if there’s no deal, they’ll soon be calling for war against Iran. Abrams was incensed. He had every right to be. He was one of the most prominent people arguing for war in 2003 and opposing the Iran deal now. Who better than he to deny the charges?

And Juan Cole for the horrifying story of the three times Netanyahu and his then defense minister Ehud Barak almost went to war against Iran in 2010-12, fortunately blocked by the cabinet. (When people wonder how not signing the Iran nuclear deal could lead to war, you could point out how many times it almost did already.)

Parchin

Updated 8/22/2015

These people know what they're doing. Image via Nima Shirazi.

Just a quicky backgrounder on the Iran scandale du jour—

#IsraeltheRegion #Iran #Parchin #Irannucleardeal UN to let Iran inspect its own alleged nuclear activity site http://t.co/6JUEhpWHUn

— Israel News (@IsraelNewsNow) August 19, 2015

—based on information posted last Sunday at the Arms Control Law blog from Dr. Yousaf Butt, nuclear physicist and senior scientific advisor to the British American Security Information Council (BASIC) in London:

1. The alleged research IAEA wants to check out at the Parchin site, involving the testing of conventional, not nuclear, explosives, was done if it was done at all before 2005; so the fear that the Iranians are suddenly hustling to clean it up is not quite realistic, and if it's about nuclear research that would be nuclear research that they gave up 12 or 13 years ago, not any active program.

Losers

Louis Wohlheim in Sam Taylor's Tempest (1928). Via MoviesSilently.

Here's world-famous military historian David Brooks with his analysis of the agreement between Iran and the P5 + 1 powers, as a defeat for the allies on a par with the worst US defeats of the past half century:

The purpose of war, military or economic, is to get your enemy to do something it would rather not do. Over the past several years the United States and other Western powers have engaged in an economic, clandestine and political war against Iran to force it to give up its nuclear program....

There have now been three big U.S. strategic defeats over the past several decades: Vietnam, Iraq and now Iran.

Well, now, for starters, I think we can recognize that definition, as coming from Major-General von Clausewitz: war is "an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfill our will", and I think we need to note very clearly that this applies to the aggressor, not to those who oppose an aggressor. And I can assure Mr. Brooks that if the governments of Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and China had understood that they were supposed to be carrying on a Clausewitzian war against Iran they would have objected very strongly and let it be known, because it's, um, illegal, according to chapter VII of the United Nations Charter.

West of Eden: Eight Heritage fails—OK, seven and a half

The Heritage Foundation, Washington, D.C. (Nah, it's a set design for The Fall of the House of Usher. by Mluisa Paci at Béhance).

Oh dear Flying Spaghetti Monster, here's a clickbait listicle from the Heritage Foundation,

8 Things Obama Got Wrong on the Iran Deal

bylined Michaela Dodge, "specializes in missile defense, nuclear weapons modernization and arms control as policy analyst for defense and strategic policy in The Heritage Foundation’s Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies". I'll bet she does, and what you got, Michaela?

1. The president stated that, “Between now and the congressional vote in September, you are going to hear a lot of arguments against this deal, backed by tens of millions of dollars in advertising.”

This assertion is flat out wrong.

Note on Yemen

Image by Noa Angel, via Digital Journal.

Emptywheel noted yesterday:

Eid Mubarak. Today Ramadan ends, a big celebration in the Muslim community.

Saudi Arabia chose to celebrate by doing what they’ve been doing for over a hundred days: bombing Yemen....

That’s particularly notable given that according to the formal readouts, every conversation the President has had with Gulf allies about the Iran deal has also included some discussion of Yemen... 

Given the way the Obama Administration has tied some solution to Yemen with the Iran deal, I think it fair to ask whether there has been some kind of understanding that even as Obama pursues this deal, the US will continue to facilitate Saudi Arabia’s efforts to extend its hegemony at the expense of Shias (in Yemen, but also in Syria).

I think it's certainly fair to ask what the administration is offering KSA (and Israel) in the effort to persuade them to shut up about the agreement having "worse consequences than the failed agreement with North Korea" according to Prince Bandar, and so on, if you also note that it certainly hasn't worked until now.

But if she thinks Obama is giving KSA Yemen like a new pony ("C'mon, Dad, Iran got one, am I adopted or something?"), then she's certainly misreading the situation.

If Iran the zoo

Wicked Persian fanatics plotting the breakout time for their nuclear device, scheduled for sometime during the Malia Obama presidency. Photo by Atta Kenare via Negar Mortazari.

David Sanger shakes his head, warning against excessive complacency:

Mr. Obama will be long out of office before any reasonable assessment can be made as to whether that roll of the dice paid off. The best guess today, even among the most passionate supporters of the president’s Iran project, is that the judgment will be mixed. Nothing in the deal announced on Tuesday eliminates Iran’s ability to eventually become a nuclear threshold power — it just delays the day. 

That is, we won't know for at least 16 years what happens after 15 years are up. And whoever's president in 2030 might be a Muslim, or an opponent of all international negotiations, or suddenly struck with paralysis and hence unable to do anything about it. That Obama is such a weakling! Why can't he control what happens when he's not around?

Similarly, old George H.W. Bush should never have signed that START treaty in 1991, because it had an expiration date, forcing the US and Russia to negotiate a new treaty in 2010, which they might not have done, given the difficult relationship between the two countries, although in fact they did. What a mistake that could have been if it had been a mistake, which it wasn't!

And Start II still might fail—we won't be sure till 2021, or 2026 if the parties go for the extension option. That old George totally made the world a more dangerous place with his heedless peacemaking!

It's like a Dick Cheney theory of diplomacy: you should never come to an agreement if there's a 1% chance it won't work out the way you expect. Much better to have a war, because that always gets you what you want.

Loud Speaker

Don't know why they gave Israel a bishop, or a pawn down there among the Marsh Arabs. Via Gordon Campbell Plans to Bomb Iran's Nuclear Facilities. No, he didn't really, and it was 2009.

So BooMan gave his readers a challenge: to read what Mr. Speaker Boehner said this morning about the ongoing negotiations between Iran and the P5+1—

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) on Friday said he hopes the Obama administration fails to reach a deal on Iran’s nuclear program.

Boehner said he did not believe Iran would ever live up to its side of a bargain that would lift U.S. sanctions on Tehran.

“I’ve never been optimistic that we’d get to an agreement, a real agreement that would stop the nuclear threat from Iran and I don’t think the Iranians have any intention of giving up their desire for a nuclear weapon,” Boehner told Fox Business Channel’s “Opening Bell with Maria Bartiromo.”

Asked whether he’s expecting an agreement, Boehner said: “I would hope not.”

“I don’t think we can get to agreement with people who have no intention of keeping the agreement,” he added.

—and then answer a question:

If Iran the Circus

Persian of the Circus. Jack Butler Yeats, via.

Amos Yadlin and Avner Golov in the New York Times:

But it would be dangerous to think that Iran’s proposal for negotiations alone would pave the way for a deal. What matters is not the talks but the outcome.

Classic Israeli diplomatic strategy: Never enter negotiations unless you can predetermine how they come out.*

the enrichment of uranium from a low level (3.5 percent to 19.75 percent) to weapons-grade level (90 percent) is only one of three dimensions of Iran’s nuclear strategy. A second dimension is [jump]

Graphic language

In breaking news, it turns out there are people, possibly in Iran itself, in any case people who can type in Persian, who have inexplicably acquired the capacity to draw graphs.

The undated diagram that was given to the AP by officials of a country critical of Iran's atomic program allegedly calculating the explosive force of a nuclear weapon _ a key step in developing such arms. The diagram shows a bell curve and has variables of time in micro-seconds and power and energy, both in kilotons _ the traditional measurement of the energy output, and hence the destructive power of nuclear weapons. The curve peaks at just above 50 kilotons at around 2 microseconds, reflecting the full force of the weapon being modeled. The Farsi writing at the bottom translates "changes in output and in energy released as a function of time through power pulse" (AP Photo)

And not just any kind of graphs, either—graphs that apparently describe things that occur in time and involve energy: things like turning on the television, opening a can of Diet Pepsi, and nuclear explosions, to name only a few.

In a story datelined from spooky Vienna (remember Harry Lime?), George Jahn writes,

Iranian scientists have run computer simulations for a nuclear weapon that would produce more than triple the explosive force of the World War II bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, according to a diagram obtained by The Associated Press.

You can see for yourself! (Except for the Iranian, scientist, computer simulations, and nuclear weapons parts. But that number at the top of the bell curve, 50 kilotons, is totally three times the explosive force of Little Boy! Approximately.) And what do you suppose that country critical of Iran's atomic program is? Obviously somebody who knows a nuclear weapon when they see one.

Do not trust this man.

For further information see Wide Asleep in America and Tikun Olam.

The Mysterious Affair of the Leaping Red Line

Haaretz's intrepid security reporter Amos Harel (via Richard Silverstein) reports a shocking-shocking finding:

[Israeli] defense sources say Israel has received additional information that reinforces the IAEA's conclusion that Iran is using enriched uranium for medical purposes.

The report, which the Israeli intelligence community considers highly reliable, states that on a number of occasions in the recent past, Iran has allocated uranium enriched to 20 percent for another purpose: the manufacture of fuel rods for a research reactor in Tehran, where isotopes can be manufactured for cancer treatment. 

Wonder what that additional information might be? Maybe they read it in the New York Times on September 27? No, what's most likely is that the angel Gabriel whispered it into the prime minister's ear.

The Red Line. By Lozha at Deviant Art.

That's what made the red line jump, you see. One day the red line was practically right here, and it looked as if Netanyahu and Barak were going to have to go bomb Iran all by themselves by Halloween, and the next day it had slid way back down to next June or so, and Netanyahu was able to assure President Obama that there would be no bombing until after everybody's elections were over. Whew, that was a close one!

In other words, Netanyahu was having a hard time explaining why he had decided not to have this war, after months of screaming about how necessary it was, and people were starting to talk: and what they were starting to say was that Obama made him do it, and we can't have that! So instead Netanyahu told a story about how how he scared the Iranians into depriving themselves of all that 20% uranium.

But what really happened, I figure (because it's what I've been saying all along), is that the Iranians were telling the truth in the first place. They aren't building a nuclear weapon. And that's the measure of how desperate Netanyahu is to save face, that he needed to speak something like the truth.

Red Line, by Gene Davis, 1952 . From Wikipaintings.

Red line district (addendum)

Updated 9/28/2012

From Wide Asleep in America. And read his post!

Prime Minister Netanyahu drew his red line!

He drew it on his own personal copy of Iran's nuclear bomb design, produced by Acme Mass Destruction Products, Ltd., of Monument Valley, Arizona, and brought it into the United Nations General Assembly for show and tell, so we could see how serious the situation was.

If this reminds you of General Colin Powell at the United Nations, keep in mind that the general's pictures were of actually occurring objects that simply happened, as it turned out, not to be mobile biological weapons labs, although if any mobile biological weapons labs existed they would probably look quite a lot like that. Whereas Prime Minister Netanyahu's picture is of an obviously fictional object, because what he is trying to persuade us of is not the empirical truth but the moral truth, which is that people really need to pay more attention to him and that line is really red. Not green, or thin and blue, or what have you.

#Netanyahu has drawn literal 'red line' on his diagram. Powerful message. Powerfull moment. #UNGA
— Tom Rogan (@troganthinks) September 27, 2012

What I'm saying. If he'd just drawn a figurative red line, what kind of impact would that have? Not powerfull, in any case. Just full. Of it.

Update 9/28

Bibi's use of that chart was one of the most effective, gripping, uses of a chart I've ever seen. Is the world listening??
— Ari Fleischer (@AriFleischer) September 27, 2012

If the world's not listening, then "effective" is hardly the word you want; if the world is laughing, as seems to be the case, that wasn't the effect the PM was aiming at. It certainly didn't convince anybody to take the "threat" more seriously, whether they took it seriously at all in the first place or not. However "gripped" Ari Fleischer may have personally felt.

More interesting is the Times reading, that

the substance of his speech suggested a softening of what had been a difficult dispute with the Obama administration on how to confront Iran over its nuclear program.

This by putting some praise for Obama into the speech (maybe not a big thing, but not that easy for Netanyahu to push past his lips), and by an interesting feature of that red line, which is that although it is drawn on the cartoon bomb, it can move around on the calendar, and has now slipped over to next April, so that we can stop worrying about his Iran attack coming before the election. Which I interpret to mean that in the famous September 11 phone call Netanyahu lost the game of chicken, and that is extremely good news.

(The Times also mentions by the bye that

Right now, Iran does not possess enough [medium-enriched] fuel to make a single weapon. In fact, its stockpile of it has declined in recent months, as it has converted some for the research reactor.

Although it is also noted that they've got at least six years' worth of fuel for the medical reactor at this point, so I have to admit that as an excuse it is starting to wear a little thin.)

The only really regrettable thing is the suffering of ordinary Iranian people under sanctions imposed to placate this fool and keep him from causing any greater damage. And there may be a big element of bluff there, too, as I have sometimes imagined. That is, the suffering of Iranians may be caused less by the sanctions than by Ahmedinejad's economic mismanagement. They certainly don't seem to be having much trouble selling oil; I heard somewhere that they are producing less oil than they can sell, in the hope of jacking up the price, but Dr. Google can't seem to find me a citation. Here, in any case, is some evidence:

Iranian supply fell by 50,000 bpd to 2.80 million bpd, matching July's rate, the survey found. Output in July was Iran's lowest since 1988, according to figures from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Output from Iran is down sharply this year due to U.S. and European sanctions on the country over its nuclear program. The embargo bars EU insurance firms from covering Iran's exports, hindering imports by some non-EU buyers.

Some sources expected a small recovery in Iranian exports this month as some customers, including South Korea, returned. But some buyers say Iran's tanker fleet has been struggling to meet delivery schedules, slowing down exports.

"There is clearly a problem with the tanker issues and over the longer term it's probably going to get more and more difficult," said one industry source, who estimated Iranian exports in September were on a par with August's.

See what I mean? The authors of this don't, but this is a weird kind of embargo ("Sorry, we're fresh out—under embargo, so naturally the stuff is selling like hot, umm, springs").

It will be many decades, perhaps, before it's possible to cut through all this multilateral bluffing to find out what was in fact going on, but I think at that point it will become clear that Obama (or the team of Obama and Clinton) was as refined and ruthless a diplomatic maneuverer as Talleyrand, and that he has prevented some pretty awful things.