The last time we got involved in negotiations with Iran I was left wondering what we got out of it. It looked at the time like the serial bumbler John Kerry was willing to agree with anything Iran wanted just to get a deal. The eventual agreement was billed as a way to slow down the Iranian regime’s nuclear weapons program. But with the Iranians able to determine which facilities were monitored and when, the entire deal was pretty much just words in the wind. Here is a summary that encapsulates all that was wrong with the agreement:

The deal, President Obama told the nation, “is not built on trust, it is built on verification.” Yet, one critical provision of the JCPOA puts unexpected limitations on inspectors’ access to certain facilities by requiring them to notify Iran first if they suspect a site might be being used for illicit nuclear activity and then undergoing a long process in order to gain entry to that site.

There were probably a lot of other things that the general public wouldn’t agree with, but we never got a chance to know about them. Even though most of the deal was unclassified, much of it was hidden from public view and treated as top secret.

Scattered around the U.S. Capitol complex are a series of Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facilities, or SCIFs, which are typically used to hold Top Secret information.

But today in these deeply secure settings are a series of unclassified documents—items dealing with the Iran nuclear deal that are not secret, but that the Obama administration is nevertheless blocking the public from reading.

It really makes you wonder what they were hiding. To a lot of people it looked very much like the entire thing was just a way to get Iran out from under the sanctions that had been put into place. In other words it was just smoke and mirrors from our side, and a big giveaway to Iran. President Obama got to say that he made a deal preventing nuclear war, and the mullahs got their money.

Reports are out today that the administration is on track to repeat the failures of the past. US representatives are meeting with the Iranians in Austria on Tuesday:

The United States and Iran said Friday that they would begin indirect talks with other major world powers to try to get both countries back into an accord limiting Iran’s nuclear program, nearly three years after President Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of the deal.

Iran has said repeatedly that it wouldn’t even start talks without first relaxing the sanctions against it. The change of heart may be due to the 7 billion dollars that Biden coaxed out of the South Koreans to hand over. But even during these indirect talks, Iran has made their stance clear. The Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif stated that the aim of the Vienna session would be “rapidly finalize sanction-lifting & nuclear measures for choreographed removal of all sanctions, followed by Iran ceasing remedial measures.” That sounds pretty unequivocal to me.

It looks like the US Administration is once again willing to capitulate to the Iranians for more words and empty promises. If history is a judge, they will be doing this while selling it to the American people as a triumph.