The JCPOA

For anyone who might have forgotten, the JCPOA was The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which started as a US agreement with Iran and was passed as a UN Security Council Resolution, so it should have been binding on all member states of the UN.

However, it was a plan concocted by Obama and Hillary, so Trump declared that he was taking the US out of the agreement after he won the 2016 election.

And now some say his negotiations with Iran are just a return to JCPOA

Before President Trump ordered all US troops out of Syria, and none left, and before we saw that President Biden wasn't sure where he was or who he was, many of us thought the person called President of the US was the executive running the US government. Now all we know is that we don't know.

Whoever was really running the US government under Clinton imposed a blockade on Iraq, and at least half a million died from lack of food and medicines. Clinton's Secretary of State, Albright, said the deaths were well worth it for what they achieved. Clinton promised Iraq an end to sanctions if they had UN inspectors verify that Iraq had no Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). And, as soon as those inspectors verified that Iraq had no WMD, Bush, Jr and associates like Powell said they had irrefutable proof that Iraq had WMD and were planting some in the US, planning to kill millions of Americans, so the US War on Iraq started, killing many more Iraqis and executing all the senior members of the Iraqi government.

Then whoever was running the government under Bush, Jr imposed sanctions on Libya, and, when those UN inspectors verified no WMD, whoever was really running the government had Obama and Hillary order that Gaddafi be killed, the Libyan government dismantled, and all the US oil that Libya had been stealing went back to the US (but the US shared 10% with the UK and 10% with France for helping recover that stolen US oil). Many think Obama really was the one running the US government when he was president, and that he continues to run things, that it was Obama who chose Biden to wander about and fall down for four years. But we cannot know for certain. All we know for certain is that Obama signed the JCPOA and had the US delegate to the UN vote to make it a Security Council Resolution.

But the JCPOA appeared to be an Obama-Hillary plan, where, as soon as those UN inspectors said that Iran had no WMD, Hillary would be the one to announce that she'd found those WMD and then she'd  order the attack that would have liberated all the US oil located in Iran, stolen first by Mosaddegh, then returned to the US by the Shah, then stolen by that same Shah, so the US had him replaced by Khomeini who not only failed to return the oil, he also allowed his supporters to take the staff of the US Embassy in Tehran hostage and would not release the oil or the hostages (but then Reagan paid him enough to get all the hostages released, but not the oil).

In the latter days of the Obama presidency, when it looked like Hillary would succeed him, it looked like Obama and Hillary had worked out a way to get all that oil back from Iran, but Trump was having nothing to do with an Obama-Hillary plan, so he pulled out.

So now what? There isn't time for years of sanctions that kill off millions of Iranians. Oops, the US has had the harshest sanctions on Iran since 1980, but Iran can still grow enough food and make enough medicine to prevent mass deaths. The sanctions did shrink the Iranian economy to less than half what it was in '79 before the blockade, but they still had enough food and medicine to prevent mass deaths like we saw in Iraq.

But then, in 2021, a huge fleet of oil tankers showed up in Iran. From 1980 until 2020, every year or so we read about an oil tanker that tried to sneak out of Iran full of oil, and all were stopped by the US Navy patrol that stopped all Iranian oil traffic. Only the 2021 fleet was accompanied by a huge naval fleet, much more powerful than the tiny fleet enforcing the US blockade, so the US Navy could do nothing but pull away and watch as the oil tankers all filled up and left Iran (and left behind payment in full, so the Iranian economy has more than doubled from what it was in 2020).

And now Trump wants to reclaim all that Iranian oil, and hopes to do it with threats of military action on Iran rather than actual military action on Iran. Trump is bombing the Yemen, and claims Iran are providing AnsarAllah in the Yemen with all the ordinance they have used to stop all Red Sea traffic.

AnsarAllah have also been shelling (without any noticeable effect) the US Aircraft Carrier that is launching all the planes bombing the Yemen and many of the drones targeting the Yemen.

Iran have launched several attacks on Israel, and Israel have launched several attacks on Iran. But reports of results are contradictory: one version is that all the Iranian bombs were shot down by Israel and Israel's allies, doing absolutely no damage to Israel, while Israeli bombs have done major damage to legitimate Iranian war targets; the other version is pretty much the opposite: most of the Iranian rockets and drones fired at Israel were decoys, all the real ones got through and did severe damage, while the Israeli attacks on Iranian military targets accomplished nothing (but one attack did kill many of the mourners at a memorial service for General Suleimani).

So we have no idea what Trump will do about Iran (if it is Trump making the decisions, or what the persons actually in charge will do).

But we're pretty sure Trump won't let anyone call anything he does a JCPOA. New acronym, anyone? One Trump can live with?