WarSclerotic

Abject Surrender by the United States | The Weekly Standard.

“So in truth, an Israeli military strike is the only way to avoid Tehran’s otherwise inevitable march to nuclear weapons, and the proliferation that will surely follow. Making the case for Israel’s exercise of its legitimate right of self-defense has therefore never been more politically important”

What does Israel do now?

8:50 AM, Nov 24, 2013 • By JOHN BOLTON

Negotiations for an “interim” arrangement over Iran’s nuclear weapons program finally succeeded this past weekend, as Security Council foreign ministers (plus Germany) flew to Geneva to meet their Iranian counterpart.  After raising expectations of a deal by first convening on November 8-10, it would have been beyond humiliating to gather again without result.  So agreement was struck despite solemn incantations earlier that “no deal is better than a bad deal.”

This interim agreement is badly skewed from America’s perspective.  Iran retains its full capacity to enrich uranium, thus abandoning a decade of Western insistence and Security Council resolutions that Iran stop all uranium-enrichment activities. Allowing Iran to continue enriching, and despite modest (indeed, utterly inadequate) measures to prevent it from increasing its enriched-uranium stockpiles and its overall nuclear infrastructure, lays the predicate for Iran fully enjoying its “right” to enrichment in any “final” agreement.  Indeed, the interim agreement itself acknowledges that a “comprehensive solution” will “involve a mutually defined enrichment program.”  This is not, as the Obama administration leaked before the deal became public, a “compromise” on Iran’s claimed “right” to enrichment. This is abject surrender by the United States.

In exchange for superficial concessions, Iran achieved three critical breakthroughs. First, it bought time to continue all aspects of its nuclear-weapons program the agreement does not cover (centrifuge manufacturing and testing; weaponization research and fabrication; and its entire ballistic missile program). Indeed, given that the interim agreement contemplates periodic renewals, Iran may have gained all of the time it needs to achieve weaponization not of simply a handful of nuclear weapons, but of dozens or more.

Second, Iran has gained legitimacy. This central banker of international terrorism and flagrant nuclear proliferator is once again part of the international club.  Much as the Syria chemical-weapons agreement buttressed Bashar al-Assad, the mullahs have escaped the political deep freezer.

Third, Iran has broken the psychological momentum and effect of the international economic sanctions. While estimates differ on Iran’s precise gain, it is considerable ($7 billion is the lowest estimate), and presages much more.  Tehran correctly assessed that a mere six-months’ easing of sanctions will make it extraordinarily hard for the West to reverse direction, even faced with systematic violations of Iran’s nuclear pledges.  Major oil-importing countries (China, India, South Korea, and others) were already chafing under U.S. sanctions, sensing President Obama had no stomach either to impose sanctions on them, or pay the domestic political price of granting further waivers.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s earlier warning that this was “the deal of the century” for Iran has unfortunately been vindicated. Given such an inadequate deal, what motivated Obama to agree?  The inescapable conclusion is that, the mantra notwithstanding, the White House actually did prefer a bad deal to the diplomatic process grinding to a halt. This deal was a “hail Mary” to buy time. Why?

Buying time for its own sake makes sense in some negotiating contexts, but the sub silentio objective here was to jerry-rig yet another argument to wield against Israel and its fateful decision whether or not to strike Iran. Obama, fearing that strike more than an Iranian nuclear weapon, clearly needed greater international pressure on Jerusalem. And Jerusalem fully understands that Israel was the real target of the Geneva negotiations. How, therefore, should Israel react?

Most importantly, the deal leaves the basic strategic realities unchanged. Iran’s nuclear program was, from its inception, a weapons program, and it remains one today. Even modest constraints, easily and rapidly reversible, do not change that fundamental political and operational reality.  And while some already-known aspects of Iran’s nuclear program are returned to enhanced scrutiny, the undeclared and likely unknown military work will continue to expand, thus recalling the drunk looking for his lost car keys under the street lamp because of the better lighting.

Moreover, the international climate of opinion against a strike will only harden during the next six months. Capitalizing on the deal, Iran’s best strategy is to accelerate the apparent pace of rapprochement with the all-too-eager West. The further and faster Iran can move, still making only superficial, easily reversible concessions in exchange for dismantling the sanctions regime, the greater the international pressure against Israel using military force. Iran will not suddenly, Ahmadinejad-style, openly defy Washington or Jerusalem and trumpet cheating and violations. Instead, Tehran will go to extraordinary lengths to conceal its activities, working for example in new or unknown facilities and with North Korea, or shaving its compliance around the edges.   The more time that passes, the harder it will be for Israel to deliver a blow that substantially retards the Iranian program.

Undoubtedly, an Israeli strike during the interim deal would be greeted with outrage from all the expected circles.  But that same outrage, or more, would also come further down the road.  In short, measured against the expected reaction even in friendly capitals, there is never a “good” time for an Israeli strike, only bad and worse times.  Accordingly, the Geneva deal does not change Israel’s strategic calculus even slightly, unless the Netanyahu government itself falls prey to the psychological warfare successfully waged so far by the ayatollahs. That we will know only as the days unfold.

Israel still must make the extremely difficult judgment whether it will stand by as Iran maneuvers effortlessly around a feckless and weak White House, bolstering its economic situation while still making progress on the nuclear front, perhaps less progress on some aspects of its nuclear work than before the deal, but more on others.

And what can critics of the Geneva deal, in Washington and other Western capitals, do? They can try to advance the sanctions legislation pending in the Senate over administration objections, for the political symbolism if nothing else. Unfortunately, they’re unlikely to succeed over the administration’s near-certain opposition. Tehran judges correctly that they have Obama obediently moving in their direction, with the European Union straining at the bit for still-more relaxation of the sanctions regimes.

Instead, those opposing Obama’s “Munich moment” in Geneva (to borrow a Kerry phrase from the Syrian crisis), should focus on the larger and more permanent strategic problem: A terrorist, nuclear Iran still threatens American interests and allies, and almost certainly means widespread nuclear proliferation across the Middle East. A nuclear Iran would also be essentially invulnerable, providing a refuge that al Qaeda leaders hiding in Afghan and Pakistani caves could only dream of.

So in truth, an Israeli military strike is the only way to avoid Tehran’s otherwise inevitable march to nuclear weapons, and the proliferation that will surely follow. Making the case for Israel’s exercise of its legitimate right of self-defense has therefore never been more politically important. Whether they are celebrating in Tehran or in Jerusalem a year from now may well depend on how the opponents of the deal in Washington conduct themselves.

John Bolton, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 2005-06.

Officals: Israelis in secret trip to inspect Saudi bases. Could be used as staging ground for strikes against Iran « Klein Online.

Posted on November 24, 2013 at 12:10 PM EST

By Aaron Klein

TEL AVIV — Israeli personnel in recent days were in Saudi Arabia to inspect bases that could be used as a staging ground to launch attacks against Iran, according to informed Egyptian intelligence officials.

The officials said Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan and other Arab and Persian Gulf countries have been discussing the next steps toward possible strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites.

The officials said the U.S. passed strong messages to Israel and the Saudis that the Americans control radar capabilities over the skies near Iran and that no strike should be launched without permission from the Obama administration.

It was unclear whether the purported visit to Saudi Arabia by Israeli military and intelligence officials signals any real preparation for a strike or if the trip was meant to keep pressure on the West amid Israeli fears about the current deal with Tehran.

The trip came prior to the announcement today of the deal with Western powers that aims to halt key parts of Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.

At a cabinet meeting in Jerusalem today, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu slammed what he called a “bad” and “dangerous” deal, while affirming that Israel will not allow Iran to go nuclear.

“”Israel is not obligated by this agreement,” Netanyahu said.  “I want to make clear we will not allow Iran to obtain military nuclear capability.”

“Today the world became a much more dangerous place because the most dangerous regime in the world made a significant step in obtaining the most dangerous weapons in the world,” he said.

The deal reportedly halts the installation of new centrifuges, but allows Iran to keep current centrifuges used to enrich uranium.

The agreement caps the amount and type of enriched uranium Iran can produce and opens many nuclear sites up to daily inspections.  However, Israel is warning that even the low-grade uranium allowed in the agreement can be used to eventually assemble a nuclear weapons capability.

As part of the deal, Iran agreed to halt work on key components of its Arak heavy-water reactor that could be used to produce plutonium, but the country doesn’t have to dismantle the reactor.

In response, Iran gets sanctions relief, including the freeing of $7 billion or more in frozen assets.

Hours after deal was signed, President Hassan Rouhani said the agreement recognizes Tehran’s “rights” to maintain an atomic program.

▶ Israel’s answer to Obama’s APPEASEMENT deal… – YouTube.

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Listen to what Netanyahu is saying…

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The Iran deal makes clear it pays to enrich.

By Jennifer Rubin, Updated: November 24 at 8:29 am

© The Washington Post Company

Seven loopholes favoring a nuclear Iran in deal signed by the world powers.

Iran has hundreds of these WMDs

The first preliminary nuclear deal the six world powers (US, Russia, China, UK, France and German) signed with Iran before dawn Sunday, Nov. 24, at the end of a four-day marathon, failed to address the most questionable aspects of Iran’s nuclear program, i.e. its clandestine military dimensions. The accord confined itself to aspects of uranium enrichment and stockpiles. UN inspections were expanded – but not applied, for instance, to Iran’s concealed nuclear sites – or even the Parchin military base where Iran is suspected of having tested nuclear-related explosions.

Israel, the Gulf States and others are therefore highly dubious of the deal’s capacity for freezing Iran’s nuclear program where it stands today, least of all roll it back, as President Barack Obama claimed.

debkafile’s intelligence and military sources list seven of the most glaring loopholes in the first-step accord:
1. Parchin: This long-suspected facility remains out of UN oversight. President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry boasted after the signing that daily IAEA inspections will take place at Fordo and Natanz. However, cameras are already fixed at both those facilities without an agreement, whereas Tehran’s consistent denial of IAEA access to Parchin is not addrfessed.

2. Secret nuclear locations:  Under the heading “Possible Military Dimensions,” the last IAEA report noted: “Since 2002, the Agency has become increasingly concerned about the possible existence in Iran of undisclosed nuclear related organizations, including activities related to the development of a payload for a missile.”

The watchdog has received information indicating activities “relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device.” This was further corroborated by new information obtained since November 2011.

Tehran’s non-cooperation for investigating these findings is not mentioned in the Geneva interim accord, nor was it addressed in the negotiations.

3. Dirty bombs: Iran doesn’t need a full-scale nuclear bomb or missile warhead for attacking Israel. For decades, Tehran has been working on perfecting hundreds of dirty bombs as part of its nuclear program, by adding plutonium or enriched uranium to conventional bombs. These weapons are easy to make and easy to use. In the hands of Hizballah or other Shiite terrorist organizations in Syria or Iraq, for instance, they could be used to strike Israel without leaving a trail to Tehran.
This peril too was ignored by the six powers in Geneva.
4. Rollback. While President Obama has presented the deal as a first step toward freezing or even rolling back “key aspects” of Iran’s nuclear program. The fact remains that, so long as Iran is permitted to enrich uranium, even though this is restricted to a low 5 percent grade, it is free to produce as much fissile material as it wants, whenever it wants. This seems more like roll forward than roll back.

5. Enrichment. Obama and Kerry said the new deal does not recognize Iran’s right to enrich uranium. They were contradicted by the Iranian president and senior negotiator as well as Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. So what is the truth? If Iran won recognition for this right, it blows the bottom out of the Non-Proliferating Treaty because, in no time, all the signatories may start enriching uranium with permission from the big powers. Neither is there any point in making Iran join the NPT’s Additional Protocol for snap inspections.

6. Centrifuges. Iran has undertaken not to add new centrifuges to its enrichment facilities, according to President Obama, but there is nothing to stop it from keeping up their production. In the six-month interregnum for negotiating a comprehensive nuclear deal, Tehran wins time to turn out enough centrifuges to substantially expand its production of enriched uranium.

9. A leap to breakout:  Far from being static or in freeze, as the Americans claim, Iran is free to step up centrifuge production and boost its stock of 3.5 percent enriched uranium, thereby accumulating enough material to enhance its capacity for producing enough weapons-grade uranium to break through to a nuclear bomb rapidly enough to defy detection by the IAEA or Western intelligence until it is too late.
The first loophole appeared hours after the new accord was signed: 
Iran’s lead negotiator, Deputy Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi, announced that his country’s enrichment rights had been recognized in the negotiations, after which Iranian President Hassan Rouhani praised the supreme leader’s guidelines for achieving world power recognition of Tehran’s “nuclear rights.”

However, Secretary of State John Kerry in his first appearance after the signing denied this concession had been made. He said: “The first step, let me be clear, does not say that Iran has a right to enrich uranium.”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov lined up solidly behind the Iranian version of the accord, confirming world recognition had been extended for Iran’s right to peaceful nuclear energy, including the right for enrichment.

Out of step with the celebratory mood in Geneva and Washington, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu warned that the deal would not impede Iran’s capacity to gain a nuclear weapon. He challenged President Obama’s words that the deal was a historic achievement and called it a historic mistake, which would not obligate Israel. Israel, he said stood by its right to self defense against a regime dedicated to its destruction. As prime minister, Netanyahu pledged not to allow Iran to procure a nuclear weapon.
President Obama also announced that key aspects of Iran’s nuclear program will be “rolled back” against limited sanctions relief and the release of deposits (nettng Iran $6-7 billion in revenue.) He said that no new centrifuges would be activated for the enrichment process, work would stop at the Arak heavy water reactor and UN inspections expanded to daily visits at the Natanz and Fordo enrichment plants to ensure that uranium is not enriched above the 5 percent permitted by the accord.

The core sanctions architecture will remain in place, Obama promised, pending a comprehensive solution to be negotiated in the next six months, but no new sanctions would be imposed.
Lavrov summed up the four-day conference by saying: “Considering the whole body of circumstance, there are no losers [in the Geneva deal], all sides are winners” –   a view seriously challenged by Israel, Saudi Arabia and most other Middle East governments.

Secret US-Iran Talks Set Stage for Nuke Deal – ABC News.

Switzerland’s Foreign Minister Didier Burkhalter, left, shakes hands with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad-Javad Zarif, during a meeting at the Intercontinental Hotel prior to talks about Iran’s nuclear programme in Geneva, Switzerland, Saturday, Nov. 23, 2013. (AP Photo / Keystone, Martial Trezzini)

Martial Trezzini, Keystone/AP Photo

The United States and Iran secretly engaged in a series of high-level, face-to-face talks over the past year, in a high-stakes diplomatic gamble by the Obama administration that paved the way for the historic deal sealed early Sunday in Geneva aimed at slowing Tehran’s nuclear program, The Associated Press has learned.

The discussions were kept hidden even from America’s closest friends, including its negotiating partners and Israel, until two months ago, and that may explain how the nuclear accord appeared to come together so quickly after years of stalemate and fierce hostility between Iran and the West.

But the secrecy of the talks may also explain some of the tensions between the U.S. and France, which earlier this month balked at a proposed deal, and with Israel, which is furious about the agreement and has angrily denounced the diplomatic outreach to Tehran.

President Barack Obama personally authorized the talks as part of his effort — promised in his first inaugural address — to reach out to a country the State Department designates as the world’s most active state sponsor of terrorism.

The talks were held in the Middle Eastern nation of Oman and elsewhere with only a tight circle of people in the know, the AP learned. Since March, Deputy Secretary of State William Burns and Jake Sullivan, Vice President Joe Biden’s top foreign policy adviser, have met at least five times with Iranian officials.

The last four clandestine meetings, held since Iran’s reform-minded President Hassan Rouhani was inaugurated in August, produced much of the agreement later formally hammered out in negotiations in Geneva among the United States, Britain, France, Russia, China, Germany and Iran, said three senior administration officials. All spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss by name the highly sensitive diplomatic effort.

The AP was tipped to the first U.S.-Iranian meeting in March shortly after it occurred, but the White House and State Department disputed elements of the account and the AP could not confirm the meeting. The AP learned of further indications of secret diplomacy in the fall and pressed the White House and other officials further. As the Geneva talks appeared to be reaching their conclusion, senior administration officials confirmed to the AP the details of the extensive outreach.

The Geneva deal provides Iran with about $7 billion in relief from international sanctions in exchange for Iranian curbs on uranium enrichment and other nuclear activity. All parties pledged to work toward a final accord next year that would remove remaining suspicions in the West that Tehran is trying to assemble an atomic weapons arsenal.

Iran insists its nuclear interest is only in peaceful energy production and medical research.

The diplomatic gamble with Iran, if the interim agreement holds up and leads to a final pact preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, could avert years of threats of U.S. or Israeli military intervention. It could also prove a turning point in decades of hostility between Washington and Tehran — and become a crowning foreign policy achievement of Obama’s presidency.

But if the deal collapses, or if Iran covertly races ahead with development of a nuclear weapon, Obama will face the consequences of failure, both at home and abroad. His gamble opens him to criticism that he has left Israel vulnerable to a country bent on its destruction and that he has made a deal with a state sponsor of terrorism.

The U.S. and Iran cut off diplomatic ties in 1979 after the Islamic Revolution and the storming of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, where 52 Americans were held hostage for more than a year. But Obama has expressed a willingness since becoming president to meet with the Iranians without conditions.

At the president’s direction, the United States began a tentative outreach shortly after his inauguration in January 2009. Obama and Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, exchanged letters, but the engagement yielded no results.

That outreach was hampered by Iran’s hardline former president, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, whose re-election in a disputed vote in June of that year led to a violent crackdown on opposition protesters. The next month, relations seemed at another low when Iran detained three American hikers who had strayed across the Iranian border from Iraq.

Ironically, efforts to win the release of the hikers turned out to be instrumental in making the clandestine diplomacy possible.

Oman’s Sultan Qaboos was a key player, facilitating the eventual release of the hikers — the last two of whom returned to the United States in 2011 — and then offering himself as a mediator for a U.S.-Iran rapprochement. The secret informal discussions between mid-level officials in Washington and Tehran began.

Officials described those early contacts as exploratory discussions focused on the logistics of setting up higher-level talks. The discussions happened through numerous channels, officials said, including face-to-face talks at undisclosed locations. They included exchanges between then U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, now Obama’s national security adviser, and Iran’s envoy to the world body, the officials said. National Security Council aide Puneet Talwar was also involved, the officials said.

The talks took on added weight eight months ago, when Obama dispatched the deputy secretary of state Burns, the top aide Sullivan and five other officials to meet with their Iranian counterparts in the Omani capital of Muscat. Obama dispatched the group shortly after the six powers opened a new round of nuclear talks with Iran in Almaty, Kazakhstan, in late February.

At the time, those main nuclear negotiations were making little progress, and the Iranians had little interest in holding bilateral talks with the United States on the sidelines of the meeting out of fear that the discussions would become public, the U.S. officials said.

So, with the assistance of Sultan Qaboos, officials in both countries began quietly making plans to meet in Oman. Burns, Sullivan and a small team of U.S. technical experts arrived on a military plane in mid-March for the meeting with the Iranians.

The senior administration officials who spoke to the AP would not say who Burns and Sullivan met with but characterized the Iranian attendees as career diplomats, national security aides and experts on the nuclear issue who were likely to remain key players even after the country’s elections this summer.

The goal on the American side, the U.S. officials said, was simply at that point to see if the U.S. and Iran could successfully arrange bilateral talks — a low bar that underscored the sour state of relations between the two nations.

Beyond nuclear issues, the officials said the U.S. team at the March Oman meeting also raised concerns about Iranian involvement in Syria, Tehran’s threats to close the strategically important Strait of Hormuz and the status of Robert Levinson, a missing former FBI agent who the U.S. believes was abducted in Iran, as well as two other Americans detained in the country.

Hoping to keep the channel open, Secretary of State John Kerry then visited Oman in May on a trip ostensibly to push a military deal with the sultanate but secretly focused on maintaining that country’s key mediation role, particularly after the Iranian election scheduled for the next month, the officials said.

Rouhani’s election in June on a platform of easing sanctions crippling Iran’s economy and stated willingness to engage with the West gave a new spark to the U.S. effort, the officials said.

Two secret meetings were organized immediately after Rouhani took office in August, with the specific goal of advancing the stalled nuclear talks with world powers. Another pair of meetings took place in October.

Burns and Sullivan led the U.S. delegation at each of those sessions, and were joined at the final secret meeting by chief U.S. nuclear negotiator Wendy Sherman.

The Iranian delegation was a mix of officials the Americans had met in March in Oman and others who were new to the talks, administration officials said. All of the Iranians were fluent English speakers.

U.S. officials said the meetings happened in multiple locations, but would not confirm the exact spots, saying they did not want to jeopardize their ability to use the same locations in the future. But at least some of the talks are believed to have taken place in Oman.

The private meetings coincided with a public easing of U.S.-Iranian discord. In early August, Obama sent Rouhani a letter congratulating him on his election. The Iranian leader’s response was viewed positively by the White House, which quickly laid the groundwork for the additional secret talks. The U.S. officials said they were convinced that the outreach had the blessing of Ayatollah Khameni, but would not elaborate.

As negotiators continued to talk behind the scenes, public speculation swirled over a possible meeting between Obama and Rouhani on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly, which both attended in September in New York. Burns and Sullivan sought to arrange face-to-face talks, but the meeting never happened largely due to Iranian concerns, the officials said. Two days later, though, Obama and Rouhani spoke by phone — the first direct contact between a U.S. and Iranian leader in more than 30 years.

It was only after that Obama-Rouhani phone call that the U.S. began informing allies of the secret talks with Iran, the U.S. officials said.

Obama handled the most sensitive conversation himself, briefing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a Sept. 30 meeting at the White House. He informed Netanyahu only about the two summer meetings, not the March talks, in keeping with the White House’s promise only to tell allies about any discussions with Iran that were substantive.

The U.S. officials would not describe Netanyahu’s reaction. But the next day, he delivered his General Assembly speech, blasting Rouhani as a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” and warning the U.S. against mistaking a change in Iran’s tone with an actual change in nuclear ambitions. The Israeli leader has subsequently denounced the potential nuclear agreement as the “deal of the century” for Iran.

After telling Netanyahu about the secret talks, the United States then briefed the other members of the six-nation negotiating team, the U.S. officials said.

The last secret gatherings between the U.S. and Iran took place shortly after the General Assembly, according to the officials.

There, the deal finally reached by the parties on Sunday began to take its final shape.

At this month’s larger formal nuclear negotiations between world powers and Iran in Geneva, Burns and Sullivan showed up as well, but the State Department went to great lengths to conceal their involvement, leaving their names off of the official delegation list.

They were housed at a different hotel than the rest of the team, used back entrances to come and go from meeting venues and were whisked into negotiating sessions from service elevators or unused corridors only after photographers left.

Israel Hayom | Netanyahu: Nuclear deal with Iran a ‘historic mistake’.

In wake of Geneva nuclear deal, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tells cabinet: Israel not obligated by the agreement • PMO official: This is a bad deal • Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman calls deal Iran’s “greatest diplomatic triumph” since 1979.

Israel Hayom Staff and Reuters

Israel Hayom | A tale of two deals.

David. M. Weinberg

U.S. and Israeli perspectives on the accord signed in Geneva last night could not be more different. The sharp divergence between Washington and Jerusalem on this “temporary” (six-month-long) accord sets the two governments up for an even bigger clash over the next round of negotiations on a longer-lasting accord.

From the American perspective, the P5+1 agreement with Iran is a “victory” for the West since it “temporarily freezes” Tehran’s nuclear program. The Iranians have agreed to convert or dilute their fuel stocks that are closest to weapons grade. This “enlarges the breakout time” that Iran would need to develop fissile material for a nuclear device. Secretary of State John Kerry says that it “puts time on the clock.”

Furthermore, says Kerry, the accord does not recognize Iran’s “right” to enrich uranium, even though the accord allows the Iranians to continue to enrich uranium at low levels and does not require them to dismantle any centrifuges or other components of their bomb-making apparatus. Finally, the Americans declare, this accord lays the foundation for a more sweeping deal with Iran, which is Washington’s strategic goal.

From Israel’s perspective, the accord is a strategic defeat for the West, since it legitimizes Iran’s status as a nuclear threshold state. The Iranians themselves are trumpeting the fact that, in practice, the West has accepted their “right” to enrich uranium, and officials in Washington have commented on record to the effect that it is not “realistic” to expect, even in a further accord, that Iran will agree to zero enrichment. Israel’s position is that Iran should not be allowed to enrich even one more gram of uranium, and that its enrichment capabilities must be dismantled — as numerous U.N. Security Council resolutions have demanded.

Israel further comments critically that this accord will, in practice, bring about a complete collapse of the sanctions regime against Iran, stripping the West of any ability to effectively pressure Iran when it comes to negotiating a further accord. As such, this accord increases, not decreases, the likelihood and necessity of military action.

In terms of the accord’s details, Israel points to significant lacunae. The Iranians, says Jerusalem, are giving up nothing, while getting sanctions relief. The Iranian commitment not to enrich uranium to 20 percent for the next six months is no Iranian concession since the Iranians have already been careful not to cross Netanyahu’s red line of 220 kilos of such uranium. The Iranian commitment not to operate the heavy water reactor in Arak for the next six months is similarly “a joke,” Israel says, since Iran anyway can’t do so. The reactor is still under construction, and will be so for at least another 12 months.

Israel is similarly dismissive of the agreement on supposedly more “intrusive” U.N. nuclear inspections in Iran. The U.N. has missed every major Iranian nuclear advancement over the past twenty years, and been very slow to recognize and call-out the Iranians when it did find evidence of Iranian misdoing.

To Israel, it is clear that Iran is following the North Korean model. Over the past 24 years, Pyongyang has shown Tehran how to cheat its way to a nuclear bomb, signing accord after accord with the West, each hailed as “historic and transformative” by Washington, only to violate the accords within months and move forward with its nuclear bomb program without any real repercussions. It is not lost on Israel that the administration official who negotiated several of these sham accords with North Korea is none other than Wendy Sherman, today’s U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs, in charge of the talks with Iran.

Behind the scenes, there lurks an even deeper disagreement between Washington and Jerusalem.

The Obama administration sees the election of Iranian President Hasan Rouhani as a historic turning point; a transformative, not-to-be-missed opportunity to strike a grand civilizational deal between American and Iran after more than 30 years of intense hostility. The administration seeks not only (or perhaps, not mainly) to block Iran’s incipient weaponization, but rather to mend fences and strike a strategic partnership with Iran.

The columnist Tom Friedman of The New York Times, widely viewed as a spokesman for U.S. President Barack Obama’s views, made this strategy plain last week. America has “more important” and comprehensive goals in mind, he wrote, than “just” halting the Iranian nuclear program; and a complete halt is neither a realistic goal nor the main goal. A grand American deal with Iran is “worth” some acceptance of Iran’s nuclear status.

Israel, on the other hand, views the election of Rouhani and the current negotiations as nothing more than yet another round of “Iranian deception.” It views the American outreach to Iran as willful “self-delusion.” Israel senses that Obama is planning to use his politically invulnerable last three years in office to ram through transformative policies that will yank America’s place in the world and Israel’s place in the Middle East from their current foundations, and accord the theologically motivated, revolutionary regime in Iran legitimacy and unprecedented sway in the Persian Gulf and beyond.

It is incredible to Israeli officials that none of the American-Iranian talks until now have focused on Iran’s “bad” behavior in the region, from supporting Hezbollah and Syria’s Assad, to its subversive activities in Egypt and Jordan, to its genocidal statements with regard to Israel. It seems to Israel that everything is being swept under the carpet in a dangerously enthusiastic rush to craft a new deal with Iran; a deal that may last long enough for Obama to serve out his presidential tenure without having to confront the Iranians.

In this context, Israel now clearly understands that the Obama administration has no intentions of striking the Iranian nuclear military complex, ever, under any circumstances. The residual, ritual American incantations of the diplomatic formula that “all options remain on the table” — to wit military action could still be contemplated if the Iranians don’t follow through on their new commitments — ring totally hollow. Far too many administration spokesmen have explained over and over again in recent weeks that war with Iran is not an acceptable option.

This leads to a full-blown crisis of confidence in U.S.-Israel relations. The credibility of Obama and Kerry on the Iranian file is shot through so badly in Israeli eyes that, alas, almost nothing either of these American leaders can say will allay Israeli fears (and one gets the sense, the fears of Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries, too).

Israel Hayom | Advantage, Iran.

Dr Reuven Berko

During the Cold War, at the border crossing between East and West Berlin, police would stop a laborer returning home every evening from work to the impoverished eastern side of the city. They would search through the box of sand he carried on his bicycle and find nothing. Eventually, when they had given up, police promised the worker that they would stop their searches if he told them what he is smuggling in the box of sand. The worker agreed and confessed that each evening he smuggled a bicycle into east Berlin.

The P5+1 group, led by the United States, is now conducting negotiations with representatives of the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to remove sanctions on Iran in exchange for Iran’s ceasing to develop its bomb. Khamenei has described the United States as the “great Satan.” The West, surprisingly, is acting in accordance with the maxim that the “devil is in the details.”

In the beginning, the U.S., Baroness Catherine Ashton and her friends were in a hurry to sign an agreement, but found themselves, willy-nilly, in pointless discussions of devilish subclauses. The Iranians are insisting on their right to enrich uranium, operate centrifuges, operate the heavy water reactor in Arak as well as the facility in Parchin, enrich uranium and continue to develop ballistic missiles. Representatives of the West are anxiously studying the “good cop and bad cop” dynamics in internal Iranian politics, lest the Iranians, God forbid, get angry and leave the negotiating table.

Thus the West has prepared in advance a plaster of semantics that will suffice to cover up the expected outrageous agreement.

Everyone knows that Iran is a country with no enemies threatening its existence, nor does it need nuclear energy as it is blessed with sufficient oil for its own energy needs as well as for export.

So what are they smuggling over there in Arak? Khamenei studied the Quran, as opposed to nuclear physics, and yet declared with expertise that enriching uranium was a “red line” for Iran. This declaration should have been enough for the Western powers to look for the bicycle. Iran’s foreign minister tries to allay fears by saying that the negotiators have to iron out certain “conceptual differences as well as wording differences.” Indeed, despite his careful study of the Quran, Khamenei managed to curse Israel’s prime minister in colloquial Iranian as “a rabid dog” and declared Israel as “a country that will collapse.”

Khamenei’s “wording” troubles Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The threat to destroy Israel has become so trite and habitual that it does not even merit an apology or a cessation of talks.

Not one of the participants, not even Baroness Ashton, would continue talks in Geneva if their own country were threatened with destruction. This is a grave matter because the P5+1 has already caught Iran smuggling nuclear weapons on its bicycle under everyone’s nose. For now, the West is in denial. This denial could ultimately descend into a nuclear arms race, and chaos.

The problem is that U.S. President Barack Obama, who has many failures under his belt, longs for an achievement for his administration. He is not interested in a military showdown with Iran on his watch. Perhaps he believes that the Russians, who brought about the dismantlement of Syrian chemical weapons, will do the same for a nuclear Iran?

The Iranians are feeling pressure, but not enough. The Iranian foreign minister, who “desires trust and dialogue,” discerned Western weakness and eagerness to “close the deal,” and therefore refuses to discuss demands to stop enriching uranium and stop operations of the heavy water reactor in Arak, the facilities in Parchin, the centrifuges and the missile development sites on the claim that these are basic Iranian rights.

On the other hand, Iran categorically demands the right to enrich uranium while expecting the revocation of banking and oil sanctions, and even threatens to abandon the discussions.

A famous producer of animated films, Leon Schlesinger, who happened to be Jewish, created the character of Bugs Bunny, a “rascally rabbit” who is continually taunting the clumsy, stupid, fat, rifle-toting American, Elmer Fudd. Sometimes Fudd wears a policeman’s uniform, sometimes he is a hunter, but his stupidity always leads to tragedy: Fudd falls into an abyss while Bugs Bunny continues to insouciantly chomp on a carrot.

The results are foreordained. Despite Netanyahu’s warnings, the U.S. at this very moment is rushing headlong into a deal while still hovering over an abyss along with Baroness Ashton and her friends. But like in the cartoons, these hasty actors will crash only when they look down and see the depth of the abyss beneath them. With or without sanctions, the Iranian nuclear bomb is being completed.

Israel Hayom | The devil is in the deal.

he only thing left was to iron out the differences on the language of the deal — that is what the sources kept feeding us, the flocks of journalists who had descended on Geneva for the farcical nuclear talks. The Iranians insisted that any interim deal must recognize their right to enrich uranium, even if the level of purity would be capped at 5%.

The most the West was willing to offer was to silently acknowledge this right by mentioning Article IV of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty; although there are so many problematic aspects in Iran’s nuclear program, the world chose to focus on the language of the agreement.

The past four days could serve as a teachable moment, on four different dimensions. First, the sanctions may have worked, but they apparently fell short because Iran has yet to buckle. This is the only reason why Iran was not willing to fully accept the West’s demands.

Second, Iran’s civilian nuclear program is not really designed to serve civilian purposes. Otherwise the Iranians would have not been so stringent in their demands. Why did Iran want to enrich uranium, or build a plutonium-producing heavy water reactor in Arak or limit the scope of inspections? There is only one explanation for that — they want a nuclear bomb.

Third, the smiling Iranian delegation was not authorized to talk about ending the nuclear program. Its mission was limited to getting sanction relief, nothing more.

Fourth, ratcheting up the pressure on Iran would have forced Iran to accept the West’s demands and fully dismantle its nuclear program. That would have been the only course of action that could have effected such a change.

Fifth, the world subscribes to hypocrisy when it comes to Israel. (That is hardly a new phenomenon.) It was business as usual on Wednesdays; the Western negotiators continued smiling at their Iranian counterparts, just hours after Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei talked about Israel being wiped off the map. (How? Through the use of the Iranian nuclear program? He did not specify.) The Western negotiators should have scorned the Iranians, faulting them for what their leader had said. But they stayed silent.

Sixth, the difficulties encountered on the way to the agreement show that the contours from two weeks ago were more than bad, they were terrible. Just imagine what would have happened if France had not slammed the brakes during the first round of talks? After meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif and European foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton on Saturday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry left for the Geneva city center to buy chocolate for his wife. It is a pity he didn’t buy Iran a clock that would show the approaching deadline for the talks.

The Geneva talks prove one thing: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was right all along: the whole world has been fooled by Iran. The Islamic republic, using both smiles and curses, misled the powers. The Geneva talks could qualify as a Shakespearean tragedy, but even Monty Python would have had a field day with all of this.