Iran never signed the nuclear deal, State Department admits it is non-binding

 We are just now learning of an interesting little twist in Barack Obama’s much ballyhooed nuclear deal with Iran–Iran has not signed the deal and it turns out the deal is non-binding.

  Here is more:

President Obama didn’t require Iranian leaders to sign the nuclear deal that his team negotiated with the regime, and the deal is not “legally binding,” his administration acknowledged in a letter to Representative Mike Pompeo (R., Kan.) obtained by National Review. “The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is not a treaty or an executive agreement, and is not a signed document,” wrote Julia Frifield, the State Department assistant secretary for legislative affairs, in the November 19 letter.

“The success of the JCPOA will depend not on whether it is legally binding or signed, but rather on the extensive verification measures we have put in place, as well as Iran’s understanding that we have the capacity to re-impose — and ramp up — our sanctions if Iran does not meet its commitments,” Frifield wrote to Pompeo.

  I am not sure how the “extensive verification measures” will produce anything if the agreement is non-binding and Iran has not signed it, and I am even less sure the threat of reimposing sanctions on Iran is going to have that country shaking in its boots. Especially after you read Iran’s justification for not signing the agreement:

 Iranian President Hassan Rouhani discouraged his nation’s parliament from voting on the nuclear deal in order to avoid placing legal burdens on the regime. “If the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action is sent to [and passed by] parliament, it will create an obligation for the government. It will mean the president, who has not signed it so far, will have to sign it,” Rouhani said in August. “Why should we place an unnecessary legal restriction on the Iranian people?”

  Clearly Iran feels as if there is no legal restrictions on the country regardless of the deal, this was not lost on Representative Mike Pompeo of Kansas who began this inquiry:

“This is not a mere formality,” Pompeo wrote in his September 19 letter. “Those signatures represent the commitment of the signatory and the country on whose behalf he or she is signing. A signature also serves to make clear precisely who the parties to the agreement are and the authority under which that nation entered into the agreement. In short, just as with any legal instrument, signing matters.”

  No signatures means no legal commitment, it certainly seems as if this deal was nothing but a show with nothing behind it to make it anything but that and yet we are told this was the only way to insure Iran does not get a nuclear weapon? I am not sure how that is supposed to work…

malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium