WarSclerotic

Seeking to persuade the US President Donald Trump to drop his demand for improving the “nuke deal” with Iran, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have insisted on one shibboleth: No better deal is possible!

(In political circles of Paris and Berlin the Macron-Merkel tandem is now known as Macromel!)

French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel chat in Berlin on May 15, 2017. (Photo by Michele Tantussi/Getty Images)

However, the Franco-German claim, subtly backed by the British and echoed by President Hassan Rouhani in Tehran, suffers from at least one logical defect: We won’t know whether or not an improvement is possible unless we give it a try.

Tried for two years, the “deal”, concocted out by former President Barack Obama, has proven unworkable.

Iran has been unable, not to say unwilling, to fulfill its part of the bargain on key issues.

These include the shipping out of Iran’s stockpiles of enriched uranium; less than half has been sent to Russia for “safe-keeping”. As for disposing of stockpiles of plutonium, Iran has been unable to find a client, although intermittent negotiations to that effect are under way with China. Iran has also dragged its feet on inspections. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has been granted access to 22 of the 32 “sites of interest”. But the two sides have failed to reach an accord on the modalities of a long-term process of inspection. Iran has reduced the number of its centrifuges, needed to enrich uranium, but installed new machines with higher productivity which, according to Behruz Kamalvand, spokesman for Iran’s Atomic Energy Agency, maintains productive capacity “fully intact.”

It remains a mystery why Iran needs to enrich any uranium.

Iran has just one nuclear power station, built by Russians, who also provide the uranium needed as fuel for its life-span of 38 years. The uranium that Iran is enriching is of a different code, not suitable for use in the nation’s only nuclear power station. Iran also needs a small quantity of uranium for its sole reactor, at Amirabad, which is used for medical and scientific purposes. But Amirabad uses higher grade uranium enriched to 20 per cent which Iran has imported without any trouble since the late 1950s. The uranium that Iran is enriching at just over 5 per cent is of no use in Amirabad.

In other words, Iran’s nuclear project, hugely costly in both economic and political terms, makes no sense unless it is aimed at creating a threshold capacity to produce nuclear weapons at some as yet unspecified date.

The beauty of all this, if one might use such a term for an ugly deception, is that the Islamic Republic has been pursuing that goal since 1989 after a three-year interruption of the project launched under the Shah in the late 1950s.

There is of course nothing illegal about enriching uranium or producing nuclear weapons or even using them. The only thing is that you cannot be a signatory of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), as Iran has been from the start, and violate it at the same time.

Regardless of Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu’s latest live-on-TV “revelations”, Iran’s overall nuclear project has never been really secret.

Iran – both under the Shah and under the mullahs – has used what one might call “the purloined letter” method spelled out in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story of that name. In that story, a letter has been stolen from the salon of a high class lady by a devious politician who intends to use it for blackmail. Extensive searches fail to locate the letter because it has been on a desk in plain public view. Only detective Auguste Dupin knows that the best way to hide something is to put it on public display.

In the case of Iran it must be clear that no sane leader would spend so much money and effort, not to mention suffering huge economic and diplomatic damage, to enrich uranium and stockpile plutonium just for the fun of it. Thus, if the project has absolutely no obvious civilian use, it must be intended for something else. This, of course, does not mean that Iran is making the bomb; the mullahs may well be engaged in all their shenanigans just for fun.

The Europeans are certainly informed enough to know all that. However, it is in their short-term interest to pretend that they don’t see the purloined letter.

Since the Obama deal was unveiled, British exports to Iran have risen to $1.1 billion a year, an increase of 168 percent. French exports have topped $1.8 billion, a rise of 85 percent while Germany has done even better with exports of $2.6 billion, a 77 percent rise.

And that is all for starters. Currently Iran is the largest market still kept outside the global system. If re-admitted, it would be worth $300 billion a year for key exporting nations, among them the European trio.

Just as Iran has been cheating in plain sight, the European trio has also reneged on promises in the “deal.” They still refuse to give Iran access to banking and capital market services, and have suspended export-guarantees for trade with the Islamic Republic.

In other words the “deal” is propped up as a great diplomatic achievement by those, on Iranian as well as the European side, that have no intention of implementing it.

That the Europeans don’t care much about the substance of the issue is indicated by Macron and Merkel insisting that “signatures” be honored. The fact, however, is that no one signed the “deal” which lacks a legal status.

The Obama “deal” is bad for Iran, bad for Europe and bad for the Middle East. It keeps Iran under never-ending sanctions with just enough relief to keep its dying economy half-alive in the short-term interest of European and Chinese exporters. At the same time it keeps the clock ticking towards the “threshold” moment when the mullahs, if their regime survives, decide to go full shebang for “the ultimate weapon.”

Trump has two options: The first is to let the charade continue by “suspending” the implementation of the “deal” without formally denouncing it; in other words by adding a new layer of fudge to the thick layer inherited from Obama. The other option is to seek an improved deal, improved both for Iran and for the rest of the world, through a clear legal framework. To be sure, that kind of serious diplomacy won’t get Trump a Nobel Peace Prize. But it might, just might, remove the spectre of war from a region that has had its full share of wars.

Amir Taheri was the executive editor-in-chief of the daily Kayhan in Iran from 1972 to 1979. He has worked at or written for innumerable publications, published eleven books, and has been a columnist for Asharq Al-Awsat since 1987.

The picture of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu standing before two displays, one of file folders and one of compact discs, symbolizes possibly the greatest coup in the history of espionage: the Mossad’s acquisition of the archive of Iran’s program to create nuclear weapons. A runner up for that title might be the advance information about Operation Overlord, the Allied landing in France at the end of World War II, supplied by Elyesa Bazna from Ankara and Paul Fidrmuc from Lisbon.

Nazi Germany failed to act on that information about the intended landing site on D-Day. Instead, it fell victim to false information provided by a supposed spy who was working for the Allies. The parallel to that failure is the present rush of politicians and so-called experts who pretend that the Mossad’s coup tells us nothing new and merely proves that the deal is more justified than ever. They claim, in particular, that before the deal was agreed the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) already knew the broad details of what the new information reveals.

What the assorted apologists for the Iran nuclear deal have failed to grasp is a simple distinction: the difference between suspicions and confirmation. The IAEA based its assessments on “over a thousand pages” of documents; now we have a hundred thousand.

Moreover, these are in effect a hundred thousand signed confessions of the Iranian regime that it intended to create nuclear weapons and load them on missiles manufactured by itself. The miniature minds of the apologists are simply incapable of grasping the historic magnitude of the Mossad’s discovery.

Pictured: Two images from Iran’s secret nuclear archive, as presented publicly by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu on April 30, 2018. In possibly the greatest coup in the history of espionage, Israel’s Mossad acquired over 100,000 documents from the archive of Iran’s program to create nuclear weapons. (Photo by Israel GPO)

Apart from Netanyahu himself, the most significant individual who understands that magnitude is President Trump. In February 2018, Trump informed the three European countries involved in the Iran deal about the defects that he wanted corrected in order to continue to certify the deal. As Reuters reported at the time:

“Trump sees three defects in the deal: its failure to address Iran’s ballistic missile program; the terms under which international inspectors can visit suspect Iranian nuclear sites; and ‘sunset’ clauses under which limits on the Iranian nuclear program start to expire after 10 years. He wants all three strengthened if the United States is to stay in the deal.”

The Mossad’s coup has turned Trump’s three proposals into three imperatives, not just to the Europeans but also to the two other states involved in the deal: Russia and China. (Russia, in particular, must grasp that major Russian cites are within missile range from Iran.) That is, if the deal is to survive, the sunset clauses must be cancelled, the IAEA must have freedom to inspect whatever it demands, and Iran’s long-range missile capacity must be curtailed. This is because the Mossad has also supplied us with a hundred thousand signed confessions that the Iranian regime will resume and complete its plans for nuclear-armed missiles as soon as the deal permits it — indeed authorizes it — to do so.

Malcolm Lowe is a Welsh scholar specialized in Greek Philosophy, the New Testament and Christian-Jewish Relations. He has been familiar with Israeli reality since 1970.