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Full text of Obama on Iran deal: ‘Every pathway to a nuclear weapon is cut off’

July 14, 2015

Full text of Obama on Iran deal: ‘Every pathway to a nuclear weapon is cut off,’ The Times of Israel, July 14, 2015

(Obama distorts and obfuscates the “deal.” Please see Joint comprehensive plan of action — text. — DM)

Obama-Iran-Nuclear-Ta_Horo1-e1436884995471-635x357Vice President Joe Biden listens as President Barack Obama delivers remarks in the East Room of the White House in Washington, Tuesday, July 14, 2015, after an Iran nuclear deal is reached. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, Pool)

Because of this deal we will for the first time be in a position to verify all of these commitments. That means this deal is not built on trust. It is built on verification. Inspectors will have 24/7 access to Iran’s nuclear facilities. Iran will have access to Iran’s entire nuclear supply chain, its uranium mines and mills, its conversion facility and its centrifuge manufacturing and storage facilities.

Because of this deal, inspectors will also be able to access any suspicious location — put simply, the organization responsible for the inspections, the IAEA, will have access where necessary, when necessary. That arrangement is permanent. And the IAEA has also reached an agreement with Iran to get access that it needs to complete its investigation into the possible military dimensions of Iran’s past nuclear research.

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After two years of negotiations, the United States, together with our international partners, has achieved something that decades of animosity has not: a comprehensive long-term deal with Iran that will prevent it from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

This deal demonstrates that American diplomacy can bring about real and meaningful change, change that makes our country and the world safer and more secure.

This deal is also in line with a tradition of American leadership. It’s now more than 50 years since President Kennedy stood before the American people and said, “Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.” He was speaking then about the need for discussions between the United States and the Soviet Union, which led to efforts to restrict the spread of nuclear weapons.

In those days, the risk was a catastrophic nuclear war between two superpowers. In our time, the risk is that nuclear weapons will spread to more and more countries, particularly in the Middle East, the most volatile region in our world.

Today, because America negotiated from a position of strength and principle, we have stopped the spread of nuclear weapons in this region. Because of this deal, the international community will be able to verify that the Islamic Republic of Iran will not develop a nuclear weapon.

This deal meets every single one of the bottom lines that we established when we achieved a framework this spring. Every pathway to a nuclear weapon is cut off, and the inspection and transparency regime necessary to verify that objective will be put in place. Because of this deal, Iran will not produce the highly enriched uranium and weapons-grade plutonium that form the raw materials necessary for a nuclear bomb.

Because of this deal, Iran will remove two thirds of its installed centrifuges, the machines necessary to produce highly enriched uranium for a bomb and store them under constant international supervision. Iran will not use its advanced centrifuges to produce enriched uranium for the next decade. Iran will also get rid of 98 percent of its stockpile of enriched uranium.

To put that in perspective, Iran currently has a stockpile that could produce up to 10 nuclear weapons. Because of this deal that stockpile will be reduced to a fraction of what would be required for a single weapon. This stockpile limitation will last for 15 years.

Because of this deal, Iran will modify the core of its reactor in Arak so that it will not produce weapons grade plutonium and it has agreed to ship the spent fuel from the reactor out of the country for the lifetime of the reactor. For at least the next 15 years Iran will not build any new heavy water reactors.

Because of this deal we will for the first time be in a position to verify all of these commitments. That means this deal is not built on trust. It is built on verification. Inspectors will have 24/7 access to Iran’s nuclear facilities. Iran will have access to Iran’s entire nuclear supply chain, its uranium mines and mills, its conversion facility and its centrifuge manufacturing and storage facilities.

This ensures that Iran will not be able to divert materials from known facilities to covert ones. Some of these transparency measures will be in place for 25 years.

Because of this deal, inspectors will also be able to access any suspicious location — put simply, the organization responsible for the inspections, the IAEA, will have access where necessary, when necessary. That arrangement is permanent. And the IAEA has also reached an agreement with Iran to get access that it needs to complete its investigation into the possible military dimensions of Iran’s past nuclear research.

Finally Iran is permanently prohibited from pursuing a nuclear weapon under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which provided the basis for the international community’s efforts to apply pressure on Iran.

As Iran takes steps to implement this deal, it will receive relief from the sanctions that we put in place because of Iran’s nuclear program, both America’s own sanctions and sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council.

This relief will be phased in. Iran must complete key nuclear steps before it begins to receive sanctions relief.

And over the course of the next decade, Iran must abide by the deal before additional sanctions are lifted, including five years for restrictions related to arms and eight years for restrictions related to ballistic missiles.

All of this will be memorialized and endorsed in a new United Nations Security Council resolution. And if Iran violates the deal, all of these sanctions will snap back into place. So there is a very clear incentive for Iran to follow through and there are very real consequences for a violation.

That’s the deal. It has the full backing of the international community. Congress will now have an opportunity to review the details and my administration stands ready to provide extensive briefings on how this will move forward.

As the American people and Congress review the deal it will be important to consider the alternative. Consider what happens in a world without this deal. Without this deal, there is no scenario where the world joins us in sanctioning Iran until it completely dismantles its nuclear program. Nothing we know about the Iranian government suggests that it would simply capitulate under that kind of pressure and the world would not support an effort to permanently sanction Iran into submission.

We put sanctions in place to get a diplomatic resolution and that is what we have done. Without this deal there would be no agreed-upon limitations for the Iranian nuclear program. Iran could produce, operate and test more and more centrifuges. Iran could fuel a reactor capable of producing plutonium for a bomb and we would not have any of the inspections that would allow us to detect a covert nuclear weapons program.

In other words, no deal means no lasting constraints on Iran’s nuclear program. Such a scenario would make it more likely that other countries in the region would feel compelled to pursue their own nuclear programs, threatening a nuclear arms race in the most volatile region of the world.

It would also present the United States with fewer and less effective options to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

I have been president and commander in chief for over six years now. Time and again I have faced decisions about whether or not to use military force. It’s the greatest decision that any president has to make.

Many times, in multiple countries, I have decided to use force. And I will never hesitate to do so when it is in our national security interest. I strongly believe that our national security interest now depends upon preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, which means that, without a diplomatic resolution, neither I nor a future U.S. president would face a decision about whether or not to allow Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon or whether to use our military to stop it.

Put simply, no deal means a greater chance of more war in the Middle East. Moreover, we give nothing up by testing whether or not this problem can be solved peacefully. If, in a worst-case scenario, Iran violates the deal, the same options that are available to me today will be available to any U.S. president in the future.

And I have no doubt that 10 or 15 years from now, the person who holds this office will be in a far stronger position with Iran further away from a weapon and with the inspections and transparency that allow us to monitor the Iranian program.

For this reason, I believe it would be irresponsible to walk away from this deal. But on such a tough issue, it is important that the American people and the representatives in Congress get a full opportunity to review the deal.

After all, the details matter. And we’ve had some of the finest nuclear scientists in the world working through those details. And we’re dealing with a country — Iran — that has been a sworn adversary of the United States for over 35 years.

So I welcome a robust debate in Congress on this issue and I welcome scrutiny of the details of this agreement. But I will remind Congress that you don’t make deals like this with your friends. We negotiated arms control agreements with the Soviet Union when that nation was committed to our destruction and those agreements ultimately made us safer.

I am confident that this deal will meet the national security interests of the United States and our allies. So I will veto any legislation that prevents the successful implementation of this deal. We do not have to accept an inevitable spiral into conflict. And we certainly shouldn’t seek it. And precisely because the stakes are so high this is not the time for politics or posturing. Tough talk from Washington does not solve problems. Hard-nosed diplomacy, leadership that has united the world’s major powers offers a more effective way to verify that Iran is not pursuing a nuclear weapon.

Now that doesn’t mean that this deal will resolve all of our differences with Iran. We share the concerns expressed by many of our friends in the Middle East, including Israel and the Gulf states, about Iran’s support for terrorism and its use of proxies to destabilize the region.

But that is precisely why we are taking this step, because an Iran armed with a nuclear weapon would be far more destabilizing and far more dangerous to our friends and to the world.

Meanwhile we will maintain our own sanctions related to Iran’s support for terrorism, its ballistic missile program and its human rights violations. We will continue our unprecedented efforts to strengthen Israel’s security, efforts that go beyond what any American administration has done before.

And we will continue the work we began at Camp David, to elevate our partnership with the Gulf States to strengthen their capabilities to counter threats from Iran or terrorist groups like ISIL.

However, I believe that we must continue to test whether or not this region, which has known so much suffering, so much bloodshed, can move in a different direction.

Time and again I have made clear to the Iranian people that we will always be open to engagement on the basis of mutual interests and mutual respect. Our differences are real and the difficult history between our nations cannot be ignored. But it is possible to change.

The path of violence and rigid ideology, a foreign policy based on threats to attack your neighbors or eradicate Israel, that’s a dead end. A different path, one of tolerance and peaceful resolution of conflict, leads to more integration into the global economy, more engagement with the international community and the ability of the Iranian people to prosper and thrive. This deal offers an opportunity to move in a new direction. We should seize it.

We have come a long way to reach this point: decades of an Iranian nuclear program, many years of sanctions, and many months of intense negotiation.

Today, I want to thank the members of Congress, from both parties, who helped us put in place the sanctions that have proven so effective as well as the other countries who joined us in that effort. I want to thank our negotiating partners — the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, China, as well as the European Union — for our unity in this effort, which showed that the world can do remarkable things when we share a vision of peacefully addressing conflict. We showed what we can do when we do not split apart.

And finally, I want to thank the American negotiating team. We had a team of experts working for several weeks straight on this, including our secretary of energy, Ernie Moniz. And I want to particularly thank John Kerry, our secretary of state, who began his service to this country more than four decades ago when he put on our uniform and went off to war. He is now making this country safer through his commitment to strong, principled American diplomacy.

History shows that America must lead, not just with our might, but with our principles. It shows we are stronger, not when we are alone, but when we bring the world together. Today’s announcement marks one more chapter in this pursuit of a safer and more helpful, more hopeful world.

Thank you. God bless you and God bless the United States of America.

Categories: Diplomacy, Dishonor, Foreign policy, IAEA, Ideology, Iran nuke inspections, Iran scam, Iranian nukes, Israel, Middle East, Obama, Obama's America, P5+1, Peace in our time, Sanctions
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Nowhere, no-time supervision

July 14, 2015

Nowhere, no-time supervision, Israel Hayom, David M. Weinberg, July 14, 2015

(The article was written prior to release of the “Joint comprehensive plan of action.” A link to the text of the plan, with quotes from the part about IAEA inspections, is available here. — DM)

Under the terms of the accord, it seems that IAEA inspectors will ‎have to “coordinate” their visits to suspect Iranian sites, “in consultation between Iran ‎and the world powers.” Worse still, Iran will have the right to deny and challenge U.N. ‎requests to send inspectors to suspicious sites. In these cases, an arbitration board ‎composed of Iran and the powers would decide on the issue. ‎

They call this “managed access,” which is a euphemism for nowhere, no-time ‎inspections.

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Ahead of the accord reached between the P5+1 and Iran Tuesday, The New York Times reported that it was expected to be a “political agreement,” not a “legally binding treaty.” ‎

Furthermore, Israeli sources said the two sides would “announce understandings” and ‎present a 100-page document, but not “sign” anything. It will take months ‎of additional negotiations to develop the relevant implementation documents.

All of which is meant to obfuscate the details, Israeli officials fear, and cloud the matter ‎enough to confuse or bamboozle Congress. It will also allow the Iranians to (correctly) ‎claim that they never truly “signed away” their nuclear capacities. In the meantime, U.N. ‎and other international mechanisms to lift sanctions on Iran will go into high gear.‎

However, the root corruption of the agreement is that Iran gets to keep its nuclear ‎facilities, and there will be no truly intrusive international supervision of what goes on ‎deep inside them.‎

The accord leaves Iran with all its nuclear development facilities intact, including the ‎Fordo underground center, instead of dismantling them. This allows the Iranians to ‎continue refining their nuclear skills. Even at low levels of enrichment (3.5% and 5%, which are not useful for a bomb) this provides a framework with which Tehran ‎can bypass Western restrictions and hoodwink Western inspectors.‎

After all, Iran has clandestinely crossed every “red line” set by the West over the past ‎‎20 years — putting nuclear plants online, building heavy-water facilities, refining ‎uranium, working on explosive triggers and warheads, and generally breaching all of its ‎obligations under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty — and has gotten away with it. It ‎has lied, formally and repeatedly, to the international community about its nuclear ‎efforts.‎

So any deal that scales back sanctions and allows Iran to keep operating its advanced ‎nuclear development facilities even at a low level is a fatal bargain. So warned Simon ‎Henderson of the Washington Institute and Olli Heinonen, a former deputy director ‎general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, as long as two years ago. ‎

U.S. President Obama’s response to this was to promise that he would accept nothing ‎less than a Western right to conduct “anywhere, anytime” international inspections of ‎Iran’s most secret nuclear and military facilities. ‎

Indeed, veteran investigators have testified in front of Congress literally dozens of ‎times that anywhere-anytime access is a minimum prerequisite to a verifiable deal. ‎

Alas, Obama has now backed down from that. It’s an American collapse.‎

Under the terms of the accord, it seems that IAEA inspectors will ‎have to “coordinate” their visits to suspect Iranian sites, “in consultation between Iran ‎and the world powers.” Worse still, Iran will have the right to deny and challenge U.N. ‎requests to send inspectors to suspicious sites. In these cases, an arbitration board ‎composed of Iran and the powers would decide on the issue. ‎

They call this “managed access,” which is a euphemism for nowhere, no-time ‎inspections.‎

This means that Iran will continue to play the negotiation game over every Western ‎inspection request. With lawyers and more lawyers, diplomats and more diplomats. Lots of ‎hotels and endless discussions.‎

In other words, Iran will be able to delay and delay access to true military or ‎nuclear sites, just as it has done with the Parchin military base, where it is suspected ‎to have experimented with nuclear weapons production. ‎

Only now, under the accord and after at least three years of requests (and after a ‎major Iranian cleanup effort, documented by Western satellite photos) will Iran finally ‎‎”grant” access to Parchin. Sometime soon.

Yay. What a great victory for Obama and nuclear containment of Iran.‎

 

Categories: Diplomacy, Dishonor, Foreign policy, IAEA, Ideology, Iran nuke inspections, Iran scam, Iranian nukes, Israel, Obama, Obama's America, P5+1, Sanctions
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Addicted to self-deception

July 13, 2015

Addicted to self-deception, Israel Hayom, Dr. Reuven Berko, July 13, 2015

There is an Arab proverb that says, “What is written on the brow will inevitably be seen by the eye,” meaning that one will inevitably meet one’s destiny.

But the eyes of the West do not see the writing. The negotiators responsible for the talks between Iran and the world powers see the sights and hear the voices, but ignore reality and engage in the wishful thinking of those who sent them to Vienna.

Like failed psychologists, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and his team are managing the negotiations with the unquestionably stubborn Iranians as if they were therapy sessions. The Iranians, following the directives of a cynical ayatollah whispering to them from the wings, are deliberately displaying manic personality shifts, up and down, playing the West like a marionette between hope and despair.

The West watches eagerly as Iran continues to develop its missiles and its nuclear program, as the centrifuges constantly whirl throughout this period of intentional procrastination. World leaders hear the threats of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his band of clerics, who shun the deal and preach the destruction of Israel, while declaring that the Iranian nation’s struggle against the “boastful” United States will continue and that there will be no access to the sites where the bomb is being developed. If that is what the leader thinks, then the masses will follow. And indeed, the Iranian media, defense establishment, and the crowds in the streets of Tehran parade their zealous hatred and their anti-Western incitement as they demand that sanctions be lifted while American and Israeli flags go up in flames.

It appears the leaders in the talks are using “denial” and “repression” as psychological tricks to delude themselves, and not, God forbid, as negotiation tactics to achieve the desired deal from the enemy. These masters of self-deception respond to threatening declarations from Iran’s supreme leader that his country will never giver up its nuclear achievements by saying that it is his way of preparing the masses in Iran for the concessions to come. This is like saying that the harsh and radical comments repeatedly made are simply a way to “vent” the feelings of rage in the Iranian public and are a sign “from above” of the concession of the nuclear project.

Those who have eyes in their heads understand that things are not going well. Lifting the sanctions will swell Iran’s purse, which funds global terrorism, particularly in Syria, Yemen, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq, and seeks urgently to import Chinese and Russian weapons. Can the leaders of the negotiations admit that they were mistaken and were led astray by the masters of Iranian diplomacy? Will they be able to take a step back and admit that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was right to call the deal a disaster? Since we are dealing with deception, it appears that Kerry and his staff are trapped in cognitive dissonance of the same sort as a person who buys a beautiful car and then discovers that he has been deceived and the engine is burned out, yet still takes comfort in the fact that the horn works just fine.

From a psychological perspective, this is the line between the impulse for a collective Shiite suicide mission in the name of Allah and the megalomaniacal desire to control the world at the cost of the lives of everyone who opposes. However, in a Persian bazaar, what you see is what you buy. Iran is declaring, planning and working toward destroying every country in the Middle East — especially Israel — with its nuclear program, and no deal with Kerry will change that. Instead of the simple solution — the complete dismantling of the Iranian nuclear program — the West has become addicted to the process of self-deception and procrastination. At least therapy is discreet.

Categories: Denial, Diplomacy, Dishonor, Foreign policy, Ideology, Iran nuke inspections, Iran scam, Iranian military sites, Iranian missiles, Iranian proxies, Israel, Kerry, Obama, Obama's America, P5+1, Red Lines, Sanctions, Self deception
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Hillary Clinton is the X-factor for the Iranian nuclear deal’s congressional survival

July 13, 2015

Hillary Clinton is the X-factor for the Iranian nuclear deal’s congressional survival, DEBKAfile, July 13, 2015

Clinton_7.15Hillary Clinton faces tough decision

“A parade of concessions to Iran,” was Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s comment on the nuclear accord expected to be announced and fully revealed later on Monday July 13 in Vienna. He underscored his point by playing back President Bill Clinton’s words upon signing the nuclear deal with North Korea 21 years ago: “North Korea will freeze and then dismantle its nuclear program,” Clinton announced then. “South Korea and our other allies will be better protected. The entire world will be safer as we slow the spread of nuclear weapons.”

Despite Bill Clinton’s pledge of carefully monitoring, Pyongyang broke through to a nuclear bomb in October 2006, twelve years later. By comparison; a ten-year limit on the period during which Iran is allowed to develop a bomb is believed to be incorporated in the Vienna accord. Its full text of100 pages plus is still to be fully disclosed.

By playing back the Clinton clip, Netanyahu aimed to place high on Washington’s agenda, the leverage in the hands of his wife, Hillary Clinton, in determining whether the deal survives the US Congress, which will have 60 days to review it.

Hillary is currently rated by the polls with a 62 percent lead in her run for the Democratic nomination in the 2016 presidential election. She tops the lists of alll declared Democratic and Republic contenders combined.

In the first week of July, she is quoted as supporting Obama’s relentless drive for a deal when she said: “I so hope that we are able to get a deal in the next week that puts a lid on Iran’s nuclear weapons program because that’s going to be a singular step in the right direction.”

Before that, she echoed Obama’s words that “no deal is better than a bad deal.”

Now that the accord is in its last stage, she has held back from judging whether it is good or bad – only in private conversations with wealthy Jewish contributors to her campaign, she has promised to be “a better friend to Israel than President Barack Obama.”

But once the final accord is in the bag – expected in the coming hours – Clinton will have to come out in the open, because she holds the key to a Senate majority for blocking it. The 54 Republican senators are committed to voting against it: Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell told Fox News Sunday: “I think it’s going to be a very hard sell, if it’s completed, in Congress. We already know it’s going to leave Iran as a threshold nuclear state. It appears as if the administration’s approach to this was to reach whatever agreement the Iranians are willing to enter into,” he said.

But the 44 Democratic senators are wobbling between being loyal to the president and their profound misgivings about the deal with Iran. It would take 13 Democrats to cross the floor and join the Republicans to achieve the necessary majority for annulling the promised presidential veto of a negative vote.

A Clinton declaration against the deal could swing those 13 senators against the accord – so painfully crafted in 13 months of agonizing bargaining led by Secretary of State John Kerry – and leave Obama in the position of a lame duck president.

Iran’s leaders, after reading the map in Washington, took the precaution of submitting to the Majlis a motion that would require a parliamentary review every few months of the US performance in complying with the accord with the power to annul it if this performance was judged unsatisfactory.

This pits the Iranian parliament against the US Senate and, by implication, puts Hillary Clinton in the driving seat in Washington versus Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Tehran.

Whatever she decides now – whether for or against the Iranian deal – will have consequences for her campaign for president. That campaign has almost a year and a half to run before the November 2016 election. If she backs the deal and lets the Democratic senators refrain from voting against it, she will be held accountable – not only by Jewish campaign donors, but, up to a point, the American voter too. Israeli and Saudi intelligence will certainly use a microscope to discover the tiniest particles of evidence of Iran’s non-compliance. They will be thrown in her face.

Republican rivals will certainly fuel their campaigns with allegations of the total surrender to Iran by Obama and Kerry – with consequences for the prospects of Obama’s former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton.
Backing Obama would therefore cast a shadow over her presidential hopes, whereas taking the lead of a   Democratic senatorial mutiny against it may well undo the deal before the year is out.  Either way, Clinton faces one of her toughest decisions since she decided to run as the first American woman president.

Categories: Clinton, Diplomacy, Dishonor, Foreign policy, Ideology, Iran scam, Iranian missiles, Iranian nukes, Israel, Kerry, Obama, Obama's America, P5+1, U.S. 2016 elections, U.S. Congress, U.S. politics
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Israeli deterrence in the eye of the hurricane

July 12, 2015

Israeli deterrence in the eye of the hurricane, Jerusalem Post, Louis Rene Beres, July 12, 2015

ShowImage (1)Map of Middle East. (photo credit:Courtesy)

Everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult.”
– Carl von Clausewitz, On War

To prevent a nuclear war amid steadily growing regional chaos, especially as Iran will soon be fully nuclear (and the grateful beneficiary of US President Barack Obama’s pretend P5+1 diplomacy), Israel will need suitably complementary conventional and nuclear deterrents.

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Left to themselves, especially as more “normal” hostilities dissolve into a full-blown regional chaos, Israel’s adversaries could drive the Jewish state toward an unconventional war. This fateful endangerment could be produced singly or collaboratively, by deliberate enemy intent or by the “collateral damage” of sectarian strife. Militarily, these Islamic adversaries of Israel, both Sunni and Shi’ite, could be either non-nuclear, or, in the future, nuclear.

They might also include certain wellarmed sub-state or terrorist forces. Already, Iranian-backed Hezbollah may have more usable missiles than all NATO countries combined.

To most effectively deal with such interpenetrating threats – including reasonably expected “synergies” and “force multipliers” – Israel’s leaders will first need to consider some largely-opaque factors. These include: 1) probable effects of regional chaos upon enemy rationality; 2) disruptive implications of impending Palestinian statehood; and 3) re-emergence of a corrosively Cold War-style polarity between Russia and the United States. Apropos of a “Cold War II,” there is already evidence of growing contact between Russia and Saudi Arabia, the world’s two largest oil producers.

In essence, Jerusalem must take all necessary steps to successfully manage an expectedly unprecedented level of adversarial complexity and weaponization. Israel’s leaders, in this connection, must take proper measures to ensure that any conceivable failures of its national deterrent would not spark biological or nuclear forms of regional conflict. To accomplish this indispensable goal, the IDF, inter alia, must continue to plan carefully around the core understanding that nuclear deterrence and conventional deterrence are inherently interrelated and meaningfully “seamless.”

Sometimes, in strategic matters, seeing requires distance. A nuclear war in the Middle East is not beyond possibility. This is a sensible assessment even if Israel were to remain the only nuclear weapons state in the region.

How is this possible? A bellum atomicum could come to Israel not only as a “bolt from the blue” enemy nuclear attack (either by a state or by a terrorist group), but also as the result, intended or otherwise, of certain uncontrolled military escalations.

Needed prudence in such narratives calls for additional specificity and precision. If particular Arab/Islamic enemy states were to launch conventional attacks upon Israel, Jerusalem could then respond, sooner or later, with calculated and more-or-less calibrated nuclear reprisals. Alternatively, if some of these enemy states were to launch large-scale conventional attacks, Jerusalem’s own still-conventional reprisals could then be met, perhaps even in the not-too-distant future, with enemy nuclear counterstrikes.

How should Israel prepare for such perilous contingencies? More than likely, Israel has already rejected any doctrinal plans for fielding a tactical/theater nuclear force, and for assuming any corollary nuclear war fighting postures. It would follow further from any such well-reasoned rejection that Israel should do whatever is needed to maintain a credible conventional deterrent.

By definition, such a measured threat option could then function reliably across the entire foreseeable spectrum of non-nuclear threats.

Still, any such strategy would need to include an appropriately complementary nuclear deterrent, a distinctly “last resort” option that could display a “counter-value” (counter-city) mission function. Si vis pacem, para bellum atomicum: “If you want peace, prepare for atomic war.”

A persuasive Israeli conventional deterrent, at least to the extent that it might prevent a wide range of enemy conventional attacks in the first place, could reduce Israel’s growing risk of escalatory exposure to nuclear war. In the always arcane lexicon of nuclear strategy, a complex language that more-or-less intentionally mirrors the tangled coordinates of atomic war, Israel will need to maintain firm control of “escalation dominance.” Otherwise, the Jewish state could find itself engaged in an elaborate but ultimately lethal pantomime of international bluster and bravado.

The reason for Israel’s obligation to control escalatory processes is conspicuous and unassailable. It is that Jerusalem’s main enemies possess something that Israel can plainly never have: Mass.

At some point, as nineteenth century Prussian military thinker Carl von Clausewitz asserts in On War: “Mass counts.”

Today, this is true even though Israel’s many enemies are in chaotic disarray. Now, amid what Clausewitz had famously called “friction” and the “fog of war,” it could become harder for Israel to determine real and pertinent differences between its allies, and its adversaries.

As an example, Jordan could soon become vulnerable to advancing IS forces.

Acknowledging this new vulnerability, an ironic question will come immediately to mind: Should Israel support the Jordanian monarchy in such a fight? And if so, in what specific and safe operational forms? Similarly ironic questions may need to be raised about Egypt, where the return to military dictatorship in the midst of surrounding Islamist chaos could eventually prove both fragile and transient.

Should President Abdel Fattah Sisi fail to hold things together, the ultimate victors could be not only the country’s own Muslim Brotherhood, but also, in nearby Gaza, Palestinian Hamas. Seemingly, however, Hamas is already being targeted by Islamic State, a potentially remorseless opposition suggesting, inter alia, that the principal impediment to Palestinian statehood is not really Israel, but another Sunni Arab terrorist organization. Of course, it is not entirely out of the question that IS’s Egyptian offshoot, the so-called “Sinai Province of Islamic State,” could sometime decide to cooperate with Hamas – the Islamic Resistance Movement – rather than plan to it.

To further underscore the area’s multiple and cross-cutting axes of conflict, it is now altogether possible that if an IS conquest of Sinai should spread to Gaza, President Sisi might then “invite” the IDF to strike on Egypt’s behalf. Among other concerns, Egypt plainly fears that any prolonged inter-terrorist campaign inside Gaza could lead to a literal breaking down of border fences, and an uncontrolled mass flight of Palestinians into neighboring Sinai.

Credo quia absurdum. “I believe because it is absurd.” With such peculiar facts in mind, why should Israel now sustain a conventional deterrent at all? Wouldn’t enemy states, at least those that were consistently rational, steadfastly resist launching any conventional attacks upon Israel, for fear of inciting a nuclear reprisal? Here is a plausible answer: suspecting that Israel would cross the nuclear threshold only in extraordinary circumstances, these national foes could be convinced, rightly or wrongly, that as long as their initial attacks were to remain conventional, Israel’s response would remain reciprocally non-nuclear. By simple extrapolation, this means that the only genuinely effective way for Israel to continually deter large-scale conventional war could be by maintaining visibly capable and secure conventional options.

As for Israel’s principal non-state adversaries, including Shi’ite Hezbollah and Sunni IS, their own belligerent calculations would be detached from any assessments of Israeli nuclear capacity and intent. After all, whatever attacks they might sometime decide to consider launching against the Jewish state, there could never be any decipherable nuclear response.

Nonetheless, these non-state jihadist foes are now arguably more threatening to Israel than most enemy national armies, including the regular armed forces of Israel’s most traditional enemies – Egypt, Jordan and Syria.

Some other noteworthy nuances now warrant mention. Any still-rational Arab/ Islamic enemy states considering firststrike attacks against Israel using chemical and/or biological weapons would likely take Israel’s nuclear deterrent more seriously. But a strong conventional capability would still be needed by Israel to deter or to preempt certain less destructive conventional attacks, strikes that could escalate quickly and unpredictably to assorted forms of unconventional war.

If Arab/Islamic enemy states did not perceive any Israeli sense of expanding conventional force weakness, these belligerent countries, now animated by credible expectations of an Israeli unwillingness to escalate to nonconventional weapons, could be more encouraged to attack. The net result here could be: 1) defeat of Israel in a conventional war; 2) defeat of Israel in an unconventional (chemical/biological/ nuclear) war; 3) defeat of Israel in a combined conventional/unconventional war; or 4) defeat of Arab/Islamic enemy states by Israel in an unconventional war.

For Israel, even the presumptively “successful” fourth possibility could prove too costly.

Perceptions are vitally important in all calculations of nuclear deterrence. By continuing to keep every element of its nuclear armaments and doctrine “opaque,” Israel could unwittingly contribute to the injurious impression among its regional enemies that Jerusalem’s nuclear weapons were unusable. Unconvinced of Israel’s willingness to actually employ its nuclear weapons, these enemies could then decide to accept the cost-effectiveness of striking first.

With any such acceptance, Israeli nuclear deterrence will have failed.

If enemy states should turn out to be correct in their calculations, Israel could find itself overrun, and thereby rendered subject to potentially existential harms.

If they had been incorrect, many states in the region, including even Israel, could eventually suffer the assorted consequences of multiple nuclear weapons detonations. Within the directly affected areas, thermal radiation, nuclear radiation and blast damage would then spawn uniquely high levels of death and devastation.

To prevent a nuclear war amid steadily growing regional chaos, especially as Iran will soon be fully nuclear (and the grateful beneficiary of US President Barack Obama’s pretend P5+1 diplomacy), Israel will need suitably complementary conventional and nuclear deterrents. Even now, at the eleventh hour, it will also require a set of residual but still-available preemption options. Under authoritative international law, actually exercising any such last-resort options would not necessarily represent lawlessness or “aggression.”

On the contrary, such strikes could readily meet the long-established and recognizable jurisprudential standards for “anticipatory self-defense.”

Going forward, Israeli nuclear deterrence – reinforced, of course, by ballistic missile defense – must become an increasingly central part of the Jewish state’s overall survival plan. Fulfilling this requirement should in no way suggest any corresponding violations of international law. After all, every state in world politics has an overriding obligation to survive.

International law is not a suicide pact.

Categories: Conventional war, Egypt, Foreign policy, Hamas, Hezbollah, Ideology, Iran scam, Iranian nukes, Iranian proxies, Islamic State, Israel, Jordan, Nucler war, Obama, Obama's America, P5+1, Sanctions, Terrorists
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Goodnight Vienna (9)

July 11, 2015

Goodnight Vienna (9), Power Line, Scott Johnson, July 11, 2015

Omri Ceren reports by email from Vienna:

Happy Saturday from Vienna, where we continue to slouch towards a deal.

The Iranians went into meetings this morning talking about progress and predicting breakthroughs. Kerry came out of his meetings later and tweeted “Met with @FedericaMog and @JZarif this AM. Still have difficult issues to resolve” [1]. That language was read by some journalists as evidence that the talks remain stalled. Other journalists are passing around rumors that R&D issues have been solved, that the Americans have collapsed on inspections, and that the Iranians have agreed to drop their new demand for ending the United Nations arms embargo. Could be anything.

For his part [U.S.] Energy Secretary Moniz tweeted this last night [2]:

CJkQa3TWoAErjWz
Ernest Moniz

Now back to business. We’re working hard to reach a good deal that is based on hard science.
11:31 AM – 10 Jul 2015

This talking point – “the deal is good because science says so!” – became a significant part of the White House’s media campaign during and immediately after Lausanne (Politico’s article headlined “White House looks to scientists to sell Iran deal” has a good overview, and the administration even managed to get articles into the Science news site [3][4]). It didn’t make much sense at the time: Lausanne was by definition a political agreement with the technical details to be filled in later, so the most relevant questions weren’t scientific. It makes a little bit more sense now, when technical details actually exist.

There are nonetheless at least a couple of reasons to question the reliability and relevance of the administration’s scientific estimates:

The most critical questions still aren’t the scientific ones – The administration’s scientists can, at best, establish that the restrictions on Iran’s uranium work would, if they held, keep Iran a year from breakout for ten years. The questions that lawmakers will be most concerned about have nothing to do with science: will the Iranians cheat, will the Obama administration continue to play Iran’s lawyer when they do cheat, will the global rush to invest in Iran prevent a realistic snapback, is it worth giving Iran $150 billion and shredding the sanctions regime just to put a few more months on the breakout clock, what about the sunset clause, what about ballistic missiles, what about Allied breakout, what about kneecapping the IAEA, what about hollowing out the NPT, etc.

The scientists with the most relevant expertise disagree with the White House – Administration scientists say that Iran can’t recover its 20% enriched scrap fast enough to make that part of the stockpile relevant for a breakout scenario. Albright, who worked with the IAEA Action Team in Iraq and has their evaluations on how Iraq was preparing to pull off a similar trick, says the opposite [10]. Administration scientists say that a 1 year breakout time would be sufficient to detect and respond to an Iranian breakout. Olli Heinonen, a 27 year IAEA veteran who sat atop the agency’s verification shop, says the opposite [11]. Administration scientists say that a verification regime to detect illicit work can be established on the basis only partial clarification of the IAEA’s concerns. William Tobey, who managed nuclear nonproliferation at the NSC specifically in the context of detecting and securing nuclear material, says the opposite [12]. And so on.

Administration scientists keep getting things wrong – The most recent example was the oxidation violation, when the State Department had to play Iran’s lawyer after the NYT predicted that the Iranians would violate the JPOA commitment to convert all of their excess enriched uranium gas into dioxide powder. That prediction was backed by analysis from David Albright’s Institute for Science and International Security. In briefing after briefing at State, Senior Advisor for Communication Marie Harf declared that the concerns were “just absurd” by hand-waving about administration scientists: “I have talked to all of the nuclear experts on this… there is not a concern,” “our technical experts, as I said, are aware of what… Iran is doing,” “our top experts… have said publicly they just don’t see this as a problem,” “our experts have… understand what technically is happening here and why,” “our experts anticipate Iran will have no problem converting the excess uranium hexafluoride,” “we and our experts anticipate Iran won’t have challenges,” “our experts anticipate they’ll be able to do so,” “I’m going to go with my nuclear experts who are out there,” and – finally – “David Albright knows quite a bit… but our experts who have been talking to the Iranians and dealing with them every single day for all of these years… their assessment is… based on technical facts, technical realities, technical capabilities, and those conversations they’re having with the Iranians” [5][6][7][8]. The administration experts were wrong and the skeptics were right. The Iranians didn’t even get close, and the administration had to retroactively redefine would count as a violation [9]. Someone should ask the White House whether any measures have been put in place, in the aftermath of their scientists’ incorrect assessments, to ensure that similar errors are not made in the future.

Administration scientists keep moving the goalposts for political reasons – This has been a bit difficult to track because the administration asserts – sometimes credibly, sometimes less so – that its scientists are justified in shifting criteria for what counts as a good deal, because when the Americans give up something over here the Iranians give up something over there, and so everything balances out. There will be an easy litmus test in the coming days, however, on whether the administration’s experts are speaking as scientists who are testing the deal, or as White House surrogates who are spinning away U.S. concessions. After Lausanne Energy Secretary Moniz told Bloombreg “we expect to have anywhere, anytime access” as part of any good deal [13]. If in the coming days he suddenly discovers that the US doesn’t need anywhere/anytime access, that will be a dramatic reversal, and will likely undermine his credibility.

The White House and its allies don’t actually seem to care about what the science says – The Obama administration’s political strategy is to put as many Democrats on the record in support of a deal as soon as possible, and then to prevent walk-backs as the agreement is subsequently scrutinized. CREDO Action, a key White House-linked organization, sent out an embargoed press release over a week ago declaring “Democrats in Congress are the only remaining obstacle to finalizing today’s historic deal… Every Democrat should go on the record right now in support of the deal.” The release was supposed to be embargoed until a deal was announced, but the Free Beacon independently obtained the text and posted it [14]. A few days later White House officials and validators held a strategy call for over 100 progressive activists to prepare for a “real war” on the deal, declaring that “the other side will go crazy… we have to be really clear that it’s a good deal” [15]). The final scientific details of the deal haven’t even been announced yet – how do they know the science will back them?

Actual deference to scientific analysis would suggest that lawmakers take a wait-and-see approach, listen to what scientists say during and around hearings, and then to make a decision once the facts are actually in.

_______________________

[1] https://twitter.com/johnkerry/status/619810812287393792
[2] https://twitter.com/ErnestMoniz/status/619544477816987648
[3] http://www.politico.com/story/2015/04/can-the-nerd-squad-sell-the-iran-deal-116667.html
[4] http://news.sciencemag.org/asiapacific/2015/04/technical-elements-iran-deal-put-brakes-nuclear-breakout
[5] http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2015/06/243104.htm
[6] http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2015/06/243134.htm
[7] http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2015/06/243193.htm
[8] http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2015/06/243249.htm
[9] http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-high-risk-negotiation-with-iran/2015/07/06/da48a756-2406-11e5-b77f-eb13a215f593_story.html
[10] http://www.isis-online.org/uploads/isis-reports/documents/Assessment_of_Iran_Nuclear_Framework_April_11_2015-final.pdf
[11] http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/experts/2107/olli_heinonen.html
[12] http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/files/Tobey_The%20Hollow%20Core%20of%20the%20Iran%20Nuclear%20Deal.PDF
[13] http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-04-20/inspectors-need-full-access-in-any-iran-nuclear-deal-moniz-says
[14] http://freebeacon.com/national-security/white-house-linked-dark-money-group-threatens-democrats-on-eve-of-nuke-deal/
[15] http://freebeacon.com/national-security/white-house-officials-plot-ways-to-pressure-lawmakers-into-supporting-iran-deal/

Categories: Appeasement, Diplomacy, Dishonor, Ernest Moniz, Foreign policy, Ideology, Iran scam, Kerry, Obama, Obama administration, Obama's America, P5+1, Sanctions, U.S. Congress
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Goodnight Vienna (8)

July 10, 2015

Goodnight Vienna (8), Power Line, Scott Johnson, July 10, 2015

July 9 was a significant date from the standpoint of the review act passed by Congress this spring. A deal presented to Congress by July 9 would have been subject to a 30-day review period. A deal presented to Congress now is subject to a 60-day review period. Omni Ceren reports by email from Vienna:

Happy Friday from Vienna, where a deadline extension wasn’t supposed to happen again, but did.

On Wednesday afternoon there were rumors that a European diplomat told journalists from his country that the deal was technically finished, and just required political will from the Americans and Iranians. On Wednesday evening there was a phone call between President Obama and his negotiating team, which produced a readout very much like the one that preceded the Lausanne announcement. On Thursday morning Iranian and Russian negotiators started announcing that a deal was impending, and one of Iran’s Twitter PR accounts started floating possible guest invites for a coming ceremony.

Then some meetings happened. Then Iran’s state-owned Fars outlet announced there would be a four-day extension of the [ineterim] JPOA. Then Secretary of State John Kerry announced that talks were being indefinitely extended, though he added that they would not be extended indefinitely.

The Iranians immediately and aggressively began briefing against the Americans. They told reporters that Washington withdrew a compromise proposal for fear of making Obama look weak, and that back home Senator Corker gave optimistic statements about the talks as a kind of quid pro quo. They more broadly accused US diplomats of trying to relitigate Lausanne, a charge that the Iranians have in the past linked to disputes over Iran’s underground enrichment bunker at Fordow.

The Iranian accusations of backsliding would be easier to take seriously if they weren’t constantly and very publicly backsliding on Lausanne. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei very publicly gave a speech just a few days before the resumption of talks in Vienna in which he laid out a series of new red lines that gutted announced understandings on uranium enrichment, the sunset clause, verification, PMDs, and a couple other issues. Zarif brought those new positions with him to Vienna, and promptly had to go back to Tehran after most of them were bounced out of the room. Then he came back and the Iranians, with Russian backing, suddenly demanded an end to the UN arms embargo – another new demand.

If negotiations do collapse – and the conventional wisdom remains that they won’t – you’ll see a sort of strange blame game take place. Each side will accuse the other side of having rejected a good deal, which is expected and normal after talks fail. But at the same time each side will claim credit for having made the hard-headed decision to walk away, which is not something you see all the time.

The Obama administration will say something like “the President had always said that he wouldn’t accept a deal that didn’t meet his basic requirements, and the Iranians refused to accept what they agreed to at Lausanne, and so he ordered our negotiators to come home.”

The Iranians spin will be something like “the Supreme Leader knew all along that the Americans couldn’t be trusted to negotiate in good faith – something that he repeated in speeches every couple of months – and he ordered the negotiations to end to protect the Revolution from Western duplicity.”

Relatedly: today is Al Quds Day in Iran. This Iranian holiday, which was founded in 1979 by Ayatollah Khomeini and occurs annually on the last Friday of Ramadan, is arguably the most prominent of the days set aside on the Iranian calendar for calling for the eradication of Israel. A few years ago Khamenei used the occasion to tweet out “Israel Is A Hideous Entity In the Middle East Which Will Undoubtedly Be Annihilated.” Every year is more or less the same. Clerics give speeches, crowds respond with chants of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel,” and mobs burn American and Israeli flags. Earlier this morning Iranian journalist Sobhan Hassanvand tweeted this picture of an American flag being torched on top of an already-burned Israeli flag, right below an earlier tweet by him suggesting that progress is being made in Vienna:

Sobhan Hassanvand

Iran Majlis speaker says good progress made in up to now, should not take U.S. gestures serious at final moments of talks

Sobhan Hassanvand

U.S. flag on fire at Quds Day rally in Tehran while Iran, U.S. negotiating at pic.twitter.com/f9zuJGyKP3
3:50 AM – 10 Jul 2015
CJimX1xVAAAkUQl

 

Sobhan Hassanvand

Iran Majlis speaker says good progress made in up to now, should not take U.S. gestures serious at final moments of talks

2:56 AM – 10 Jul 2015

Categories: Diplomacy, Dishonor, Foreign policy, Ideology, Iran scam, Kerry, Khamenei, Obama, Obama's America, P5+1, U.S. Congress
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Steven Salaita Heads to Beirut, While Malcolm Kerr Spins in His Grave

July 8, 2015

Steven Salaita Heads to Beirut, While Malcolm Kerr Spins in His Grave, Middle East Forum, Winfield Myers, July 6, 2015

1132Former Virginia Tech professor Steven Salaita maintains that Israel’s alleged excesses have transformed anti-Semitism “into something honorable.”

In 1980 Malcolm Kerr, the distinguished Middle East studies scholar who served as AUB president, wrote a gentlemanly but devastating critique of Orientalism in which he mentions almost forty excellent scholars whose work Said ignored because noting their contributions would undermine his thesis that Western scholarship on the Middle East was uniformly reductionist and racist. Four years after writing his review, Kerr was assassinated near his AUB office by members of Islamic Jihad.

********************

How utterly appropriate: Steven Salaita will be the Edward W. Said Chair of American Studies at the American University of Beirut (AUB) for the 2015/16 academic year. A supposed expert on Native Americans whose anti-Semitic attacks on Israel cost him a job at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne, Salaita will assume a chair named for the late Columbia University English professor whose 1978 book Orientalism contributed more than any other work to the systemic intellectual decadence that still characterizes Middle East studies.

Salaita is Said’s equal when it comes to producing polemical revisionist history that relies more upon postcolonial victimization studies than upon rigorous research. Although Illinois expected him to teach American Indian studies and he’ll teach American studies at AUB, all six of his books deal with modern Arab studies, Arab Americans, or Israel.

In the through-the-looking-glass historiography of Salaita and his academic allies, these disparate fields are connected by a typology of the victim that is easily transferred from antiquity to the present, so that Canaanites are Native Americans and ancient Hebrews are modern Zionists. It’s a handy way of attacking the entire history of a people or civilization without having to bother with facts, research, doubt, unanswerable questions, or the human agent at the heart of all genuine historical research.

In 1980 Malcolm Kerr, the distinguished Middle East studies scholar who served as AUB president, wrote a gentlemanly but devastating critique of Orientalism in which he mentions almost forty excellent scholars whose work Said ignored because noting their contributions would undermine his thesis that Western scholarship on the Middle East was uniformly reductionist and racist. Four years after writing his review, Kerr was assassinated near his AUB office by members of Islamic Jihad. If he could know that a chair named for Said now exists at AUB—and that next occupant will be a man as dedicated to politicized, vindictive scholarship as its namesake—he would be spinning in his grave.

Categories: Academia, American University of Beirut, Antisemitism, Ideology, Islamic supremacy, Islamism, Israel, Jews, Middle East, Palestinians
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America’s latest failure in Syria

July 8, 2015

America’s latest failure in Syria, Washington Post, The Editorial Board, July 7, 2015

(Another mild WP Editorial Board Op Ed critical of Obama’s foreign policies (please see also, The U.S. response to Iran’s cheating is a worrying omen.) This WaPo editorial does not suggest any linkage between Obama’s opposition to attacks on the Iran-supported Syrian regime and his efforts to get a nuke “deal” with Iran.– DM)

IN MAY 2014, President Obama promised a new U.S. effort to train and equip moderate Syrian rebel forces. The next month, the administration asked Congress for $500 million to fund the effort, with the aim of deploying 5,000 U.S.-backed fighters a year for three years. Numerous analysts quickly pointed out two big flaws in the plan: The new force was too small to make a significant difference on Syria’s multi-sided battlefield, and the administration was hamstringing it by insisting that it target only the Islamic State and not the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. As so often in his handling of Syria, Mr. Obama dismissed proposals for a more robust approach.

Now, once again, the president is reaping the consequences of his half-measures. On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter reported the pitiful result of the training program: After a year, he told the Senate Armed Services Committee, just 60 Syrians were enlisted. Meanwhile, Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified that Israel and Jordan “very much believe [in] the possibility” that the Assad regime could soon collapse, touching off “a foot race” of al-Qaeda and Islamic State forces “converging on Damascus.”

Since the United States has failed to train or support a moderate Syrian force capable of countering the extremists, it has no ready way to prevent that disaster. “I won’t sit here today and tell you that I have the answer to that,” Gen. Dempsey told the committee.

The latest U.S. failure in Syria is particularly striking because, as Mr. Obama emphasized in an appearance Monday at the Pentagon, the foundation of his policy in Iraq and Syria is to train local forces that the United States can support. The president conceded that “this aspect of our strategy was moving too slowly”; in fact, it has failed in both countries. According to Mr. Carter, the 3,500 U.S. personnel deployed in Iraq since last year had trained just 8,800 Iraqi army and Kurdish militia soldiers. Just 1,300 Sunni tribesmen have been recruited, though Mr. Carter said such Sunni forces were essential to retaking cities captured by the Islamic State.

Administration officials have a penchant for blaming Iraqi and Syrian Sunnis for lacking the “will” to fight, without considering why that might be. A couple of the principal reasons are the product of Mr. Obama’s policies. Sunni leaders don’t trust the United States to defend them against the Iranian-backed Shiite militias that operate in concert with the Iraqi government. They wonder why the White House still refuses to deploy Special Operations forces advisers or tactical air controllers to the front lines with Iraqi units, even though, as Gen. Dempsey testified, that “would make them more capable.”

Syrian Sunni fighters want to join a force that will take on the Assad regime as well as the Islamic State, but the Obama administration won’t even commit to defending the fighters it is training if they are subjected to the regime’s signature “barrel bomb” attacks. “That decision will be faced when we introduce fighters into the field,” Mr. Carter told the Senate panel. Unless Mr. Obama is prepared to make a more decisive commitment to training and defending U.S.-allied forces, there won’t be many of them.

Categories: Assad, Foreign policy, Ideology, Iran scam, Iraq war, Islamic State, Obama, Obama's America, P5+1, Syria war, U.S. Military
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The U.S. response to Iran’s cheating is a worrying omen

July 8, 2015

The U.S. response to Iran’s cheating is a worrying omen, The Washington Post, The Editorial Board, July 6, 2015

(The Washington Post, usually supportive of the Obama administration, speaks moderately in this Editorial Board offering. However, it manages to point out a few of the major problems with an Obama-led P5+1 “deal.” Please see also, White House Instructs Allies To Lean On ‘Jewish Community’ to Force Iran Deal. — DM)

Mr. Albright, a physicist with a long record of providing non-partisan expert analysis of nuclear proliferation issues, said on the Foreign Policy Web site that he had been unfairly labeled as an adversary of the Iran deal and that campaign-style “war room” tactics are being used by the White House to fend off legitimate questions.

*******************

IF IT is reached in the coming days, a nuclear deal with Iran will be, at best, an unsatisfying and risky compromise. Iran’s emergence as a threshold nuclear power, with the ability to produce a weapon quickly, will not be prevented; it will be postponed, by 10 to 15 years. In exchange, Tehran will reap hundreds of billions of dollars in sanctions relief it can use to revive its economy and fund the wars it is waging around the Middle East.

Whether this flawed deal is sustainable will depend on a complex set of verification arrangements and provisions for restoring sanctions in the event of cheating. The schemes may or may not work; the history of the comparable nuclear accord with North Korea in the 1990s is not encouraging. The United States and its allies will have to be aggressive in countering the inevitable Iranian attempts to test the accord and willing to insist on consequences even if it means straining relations with friendly governments or imposing costs on Western companies.

That’s why a recent controversy over Iran’s compliance with the interim accord now governing its nuclear work is troubling. The deal allowed Iran to continue enriching uranium, but required that amounts over a specified ceiling be converted into an oxide powder that cannot easily be further enriched. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran met the requirement for the total size of its stockpile on June 30, but it did so by converting some of its enriched uranium into a different oxide form, apparently because of problems with a plant set up to carry out the powder conversion.

Rather than publicly report this departure from the accord, the Obama administration chose to quietly accept it. When a respected independent think tank, the Institute for Science and International Security, began pointing out the problem, the administration’s response was to rush to Iran’s defense — and heatedly attack the institute as well as a report in the New York Times.

This points to two dangers in the implementation of any longterm deal. One is “a U.S. willingness to legally reinterpret the deal when Iran cannot do what it said it would do, in order to justify that non-performance,” institute President David Albright and his colleague Andrea Stricker wrote. In other words, overlooking Iranian cheating is easier than confronting it.

This weakness is matched by a White House proclivity to respond to questions about Iran’s performance by attacking those who raise them. Mr. Albright, a physicist with a long record of providing non-partisan expert analysis of nuclear proliferation issues, said on the Foreign Policy Web site that he had been unfairly labeled as an adversary of the Iran deal and that campaign-style “war room” tactics are being used by the White House to fend off legitimate questions.

In the case of the oxide conversion, the discrepancy may be less important than the administration’s warped reaction. A final accord will require Iran to ship most of its uranium stockpile out of the country, or reverse its enrichment. But there surely will be other instances of Iranian non-compliance. If the deal is to serve U.S. interests, the Obama administration and its successors will have to respond to them more firmly and less defensively.

Categories: Diplomacy, Dishonor, Foreign policy, Funding terrorism, IAEA, Ideology, Iran centrifuges, Iranian military sites, Iranian missiles, Iranian nukes, Iranian proxies, Obama, Obama's America, P5+1, Sanctions
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