Former Israeli and American intelligence chiefs this week said the deal US President Barack Obama and other Western leaders struck with Iran last week in Geneva had essentially allowed the Islamic Republic to become a “nuclear threshold state.”

More accurately, former Israeli military intelligence chief Amos Yadlin said that the West had failed for decades to adequately confront the Iranian nuclear threat, and so had finally given up and signed a bad deal.

“The fact that Iran is a nuclear threshold state does not derive from this agreement, but because the Iranians have developed capabilities for years, and no one can stop them,” Yadlin said at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv. “Iran is on the verge of producing a bomb. It’s sad, but it’s a fact.”