Obama isn’t Chamberlain. He doesn’t mean well. Kerry isn’t making honest mistakes. They negotiated ineptly with Iran because they are throwing the game. They meant for America to lose all along.
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The last time a feeble leader of a fading nation came bearing “Peace in our time,” a pugnacious controversial right-winger retorted, “You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor, and you will have war.” That right-winger went on to lead the United Kingdom against Hitler.
The latest worthless agreement with a murderous dictatorship is being brandished by John Kerry, a man who instinctively seeks out dishonor the way a pig roots for truffles.
John Kerry betrayed his uniform and his nation so many times that it became his career. He illegally met with the representatives of the North Vietnamese enemy in Paris and then next year headed to Washington, D.C. where he blasted the American soldiers being murdered by his new friends as rapists and murderers “reminiscent of Genghis Khan.”
Even before being elected, Kerry was already spewing Communist propaganda in the Senate.
Once in the Senate, Kerry flew to support the Sandinista Marxist killers in Nicaragua. Just as Iran’s leader calling for “Death to America” didn’t slow down Kerry, neither did the Sandinista cries of “Here or There, Yankees Will Die Everywhere.”
Kerry revolted even liberals with his gushing over Syria’s Assad. Now he’s playing the useful idiot for Assad’s bosses in Tehran.
For almost fifty years, John Kerry has been selling out American interests to the enemy. Iran is his biggest success. The dirty Iran nuke deal is the culmination of his life’s many treasons.
It turns America from an opponent of Iran’s expansionism, terrorism and nuclear weapons program into a key supporter. The international coalition built to stop Iran’s nukes will instead protect its program.
And none of this would have happened without Obama.
Obama began his rise by pandering to radical leftists on removing Saddam. He urged them to take on Egypt instead, and that’s what he did once in office, orchestrating the takeover of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and across the region. The Muslim Brotherhood was overthrown by popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, but Obama had preserved the Iranian regime when it was faced with the Green Revolution. Now Iran is his last best Islamist hope for stopping America in the Middle East.
Obama and Kerry had both voted against designating Iran’s IRGC terrorist ringleaders who were organizing the murder of American soldiers as a terrorist organization while in the Senate. Today they have turned our planes into the Air Force of the IRGC’s Shiite Islamist militias in Iraq.
Throughout the process they chanted, “No deal is better than a bad deal.” But their deal isn’t just bad. It’s treason.
Obama isn’t Chamberlain. He doesn’t mean well. Kerry isn’t making honest mistakes. They negotiated ineptly with Iran because they are throwing the game. They meant for America to lose all along.
When Obama negotiates with Republicans, he extracts maximum concessions for the barest minimum. Kerry did the same thing with Israel during the failed attempt at restarting peace negotiations with the PLO. That’s how they treat those they consider their enemies. This is how they treat their friends.
A bad deal wasn’t just better than no deal, it was better than a good deal.
Obama did not go into this to stop Iran from going nuclear. He did it to turn Iran into the axis of the Middle East. After his failures in the rest of the region, this is his final act of spite. With the fall of the Muslim Brotherhood and the decline of Islamists in Turkey, supporting Iran is his way of blocking the power of his successors in the White House to pursue a more pro-American foreign policy.
Obama made this deal to cripple American power in the Middle East.
Iran get to keep its nuclear facilities, its reactors, including the hidden underground fortified Fordow facility which Obama had repeatedly stated was, “inconsistent with a peaceful program.”
The deal gives Iran a “peaceful” nuclear program with an equally peaceful ballistic missile program. It puts into place a complicated inspection regime that can be blocked by Iran and its backers. It turns Iran into the new North Korea and the new Saddam Hussein, lavishing money on it while running future administrations through a cat and mouse game of proving violations by the terrorist regime.
And Obama made sure the Iran deal was written to make the proof as hard to obtain as possible.
The United States and other world powers will help to teach Iran how to thwart and detect threats to its nuclear program, according to the parameters of a deal reached Tuesday to rein in Iran’s contested nuclear program.
Under the terms of a deal that provides Iran billions of dollars in sanctions relief, Iran and global powers will cooperate to help teach Iran how to manage its nuclear infrastructure, which will largely remain in tact under the deal.
Senior Iranian officials, including the country’s president, celebrated the deal as a victory for the country. Iran’s state controlled media quoted President Hassan Rouhani as saying that the deal will “remove all sanctions while maintaining [Tehran’s] nuclear program and nuclear progress.”
In what is being viewed as a new development, European countries and potentially the United States agreed to “cooperate with Iran on the implementation of nuclear security guidelines and best practices,” according to a copy of the agreement furnished by both the Russians and Iranians.
This will include “training courses and workshops to strengthen Iran’s ability to prevent, protect and respond to nuclear security threats to nuclear facilities and systems as well as to enable effective and sustainable nuclear security and physical protection systems,” according to the text.
Additional “training and workshops” would work to “strengthen Iran’s ability to protect against, and respond to nuclear security threats, including sabotage, as well as to enable effective and sustainable nuclear security and physical protection systems,” the text states.
The language was viewed as disturbing by analysts and experts who said such cooperation could help protect Iran against efforts by the Israelis or other countries to sabotage the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program in the future.
“The United States and its partners have just become the international protectors of the Iranian nuclear program. Instead of rolling back the Iranian nuclear program, we’re now legally obligated to help the Iranians build it up and protect it,” said one Western source present in Vienna and who is apprised of the details of the deal.
In addition to teaching Iran how to protect its nuclear infrastructure, world powers pledge in the agreement to help Iran construct next-generation centrifuges—the machines that enrich uranium—at its once-secret nuclear site in Fordow, where Iran has been suspected of housing a weapons program.
Fordow is an underground and fortified military site that is largely immune from air strikes by those seeking to eradicate Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.
While Iran will not be permitted to enrich nuclear material with these centrifuges, the know-how gained from operating these advanced centrifuges could help it advance clandestine nuclear weapons work, experts say.
The Obama administration had once vowed that Iran would have to fully dismantle its centrifuge program. However, this demand was walked back as the Iranians demanded greater concessions over the past months.
“Now the international community will be actively sponsoring the development of Iranian nuclear technology,” Omri Ceren, an analyst from the Israel Project (TIP), wrote in an email to reporters. “And since the work will be overseen by a great power, it will be off-limits to the kind of sabotage that has kept the Iranian nuclear program in check until now.”
Meanwhile, Iranian President Rouhani celebrated the deal in a speech that detailed how the country received everything it was looking for from the United States.
This includes the full rollback on sanctions on Iran’s financial, energy, and banking sectors, as well as others, and the suspension of international resolutions banning the sale of arms to Tehran.
Iran will also move forward with work on its advanced centrifuges and also “continue its nuclear research and development,” according to Rouhani’s comments. “All our goals materialized under the deal,” Rouhani said, according to Fars.
Iran’s nuclear reactors in Arak—which could provide with a second pathway to a nuclear weapon—also will continue to operate under the deal. It will continue in conjunction with the nuclear enrichment plants located in Fordow and Natanz.
Rouhani went on to say that Iran “will scrutinize implementation of the agreement” to ensure that the United States and other world powers uphold their end of the bargain.
Vice 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.
(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.
(It’s worse than Munich. At least Chamberlain was working in a context of military weakness; Obama has been operating in a context of military strength, which he has declined to use. — DM)
The big news of the day is the announcement of the deal with Iran by President Obama and Secretary Kerry. The Washington Post provides the text and video of Obama’s announcement here.
Listening to President Obama this morning, without access to the text of the agreement, I found key concessions made against his previously announced minimum criteria concealed in pleasing formulations presented as great accomplishments. ‘Twas a famous victory.
The deal must be the worst ever entered into by the United States. It is certainly “an historic mistake.” Based in part on Obama’s statement itself and in part on previous news accounts, I think the following summary provided by Omri Ceren provides a useful guide.
(1) The Iranian nuclear program will be placed under international sponsorship for R&D – A few weeks ago the AP leaked parts of an annex confirming that a major power would be working with the Iranians to develop next-generation centrifuge technology at the Fordow underground military enrichment bunker. Technically the work won’t be on nuclear material, but the AP noted that “isotope production uses the same technology as enrichment and can be quickly re-engineered to enriching uranium.” The administration had once promised Congress that Iran would be forced to dismantle its centrifuge program. The Iranians refused, so the administration conceded that the Iranians would be allowed to keep their existing centrifuges. Now the international community will be actively sponsoring the development of Iranian nuclear technology. And since the work will be overseen by a great power, it will be off-limits to the kind of sabotage that has kept the Iranian nuclear program in check until now.
(2) The sanctions regime will be shredded – the AP revealed at the beginning of June that the vast majority of the domestic U.S. sanctions regime will be dismantled. The Lausanne factsheet – which played a key role in dampening Congressional criticism to American concessions – had explicitly stated “U.S. sanctions on Iran for terrorism, human rights abuses, and ballistic missiles will remain in place under the deal.” That turns out to have been false. Instead the administration will redefine non-nuclear sanctions as nuclear, so that it can lift them. The Iranians are boasting that sanctions against Iran’s Central Bank, NIT Co., the National Iranian Oil Company, and 800 individuals and entities will be lifted. That’s probably exaggerated and a bit confused – CBI sanctions are statutory, and will probably not be getting “lifted” – but the sense is clear enough.
(3) The U.S. collapsed on the arms embargo – Just a week ago General Dempsey told the Senate Armed Services Committee that “under no circumstances should we relieve pressure on Iran relative to ballistic missile capabilities and arms trafficking.” Now multiple outlets have confirmed that the embargo on conventional weapons will be lifted no later than five years from now, and that the embargo on ballistic missiles will expire in 8 years. No one in the region is going to wait for those embargoes to expire: they’ll rush to build up their stockpiles in anticipation of the sunset.
(4) The U.S. collapsed on anytime-anywhere inspections – The IAEA will get to request access to sensitive sites, the Iranians will get to say no, and then there will be an arbitration board that includes Iran as a member. This concession is particularly damaging politically and substantively because the administration long ago went all-in on verification. The original goal of the talks was to make the Iranians take physical actions that would prevent them from going nuclear if they wanted to: dismantling centrifuges, shuttering facilities, etc. The Iranians said no to those demands, and the Americans backed off. The fallback position relied 100% on verification: yes the Iranians would be physically able to cheat, the argument went, but the cheating would be detected because of an anytime-anywhere inspection regime. That is not what the Americans are bringing home.
(5) The U.S. collapsed on PMDs – This morning the Iranians and the IAEA signed a roadmap for a process that would see Tehran eventually providing access for the IAEA to clear up its concerns. This roadmap differs in no significant way from previous commitments the Iranians have made to the agency, except now Tehran will have received sanctions relief and stabilized its economy. Administration officials will have to look at lawmakers and nonetheless promise that this time the Iranians will give the IAEA what it needs.
UPDATE: The Islamic Republic of Iran has posted the English text of the deal here. What a relief! “Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons.”
The new Iranian demand to lift the United Nations arms embargo is getting a lot of talk, and probably a bit more than it deserves. It’s not that the concession wouldn’t be devastating – it would light up the region in so many different ways that they’re difficult to catalogue – but it just doesn’t seem possible that the Americans can give ground on this.
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As we remain on the final countdown to the full catastrophe taking place in Vienna, Omri Ceren helps us keep track of the details. In his second email update this morning, Omri draws attention to Andrew Bowen’s Daily Beast column Give the mullahs ballistic missiles?” (quoted below). Omri writes:
The last few hours have been a flurry of bilateral and trilateral meetings – Kerry/Zarif, Kerry/Zarif/Mogherini, Hammond/Lavrov, Lavrov/Zarif, etc – and a full P5+1/Iran meeting will probably take place this evening. That plenary is presumably supposed to serve as something of a final meeting: the negotiators will send the deal text back to the capitals, they’ll get pro forma approval, and in the morning there will be a formal announcement.
In the meantime, the new Iranian demand to lift the United Nations arms embargo is getting a lot of talk, and probably a bit more than it deserves. It’s not that the concession wouldn’t be devastating – it would light up the region in so many different ways that they’re difficult to catalogue – but it just doesn’t seem possible that the Americans can give ground on this. What’s the sales pitch to Congress going to be? “Not only are we giving Iran $150 billion to bolster its military, but we’re also lifting arms restrictions to make it easier for them to buy next-generation cruise missiles they’ll use against the U.S. military and our allies.”
But just for the sake of argument, because some pro-Iran voices have taken to publicly suggesting otherwise, yes of course lifting the arms embargo would detonate American national security:
Rather, the real threat from increased Iranian military might lies elsewhere. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)… does not hesitate to remind the world through its harassment of commercial shipping, military exercises, and frequent rhetoric that it can control or shut the Strait of Hormuz, through which 30 percent of the world’s petroleum supplies passes. Keeping the Strait open depends on the U.S. Navy being able to keep up with effective counter measures against improved Iranian cruise missiles… and so Tehran has invested in weapons such as cruise missiles, mines, submarines, and even swarming armed speedboats to specifically target U.S. naval vulnerabilities… Lifting the conventional arms embargo would allow Russia or China to sell Iran the latest generation cruise missiles and drones, which only increase Tehran’s ability to frustrate or harass America’s protectorate of this vital waterway… Moreover, Iranian ballistic missiles outfitted with Russian or Chinese quality precision-guidance munitions could be devastating for U.S. and GCC naval and air bases if there are further relaxations on Iran’s acquisition of missile technology.
The article is by Andrew Bowen, the Director of Middle East Studies at the Center for the National Interest. He goes on to list several other ways Iran would exploit lifting the arms embargo, including by providing advanced missiles to terror proxies to use against U.S. allies such as Israel and Jordan.
The demand is so delusional that some people are speculating the Iranians just brought it up to gain leverage. Whether that’s true or not, the stunt will make it more difficult for the Obama administration to justify the deal to Congress. If Kerry agrees to drop the arms embargo, it’s difficult to see Congress accepting the agreement. If Kerry gets the Iranians to give up on the the demand, Congress will want to know what he had to trade away to do it.
Omri Ceren continues his series of reports by email from Vienna:
Good Monday from Vienna, where we’re now into day 17 of the current round of negotiations and yet summer continues to surprise us.
The JPOA is again set to expire at midnight after having been extended a few days ago. Just about everyone is saying that another short-term extension is not being considered. Of course the parties always say that, until they don’t, but this time the comments feel a little bit different. The Europeans could not be more frustrated – they don’t understand why the Americans and the Iranians can’t get their nonsense together – and the Russians and Chinese actually have things they need to take care of. Rouhani was even scheduled to speak on TV today, though the Iranians are now saying he’ll wait until there’s a formal announcement.
The conventional wisdom is that negotiations will wrap up today and a ceremony will be held tomorrow.
As for what the parties are still talking about: Reuters has been saying all week that sanctions remain unresolved, and today the wire piled on with “among the biggest sticking points in the past week has been Iran’s insistence that a United Nations Security Council arms embargo and ban on its ballistic missile program dating from 2006 be lifted immediately… Other problematic issues are access for inspectors to military sites in Iran” [1]. The Associated Press report from this morning also identified those two areas as key disagreements, and added that there are complications due to a new Iranian demand “that any U.N. Security Council resolution approving the nuclear deal be written in a way that stops describing Iran’s nuclear activities as illegal” [2].
As far as the UNSCR gambit goes, it seems like a not-very-sophisticated attempt to craft language that would later be used to undermine the IAEA’s authority to inspect Iranian facilities. The Iranians have successfully pulled off similar tricks throughout the talks: they inserted vague language into Geneva that they interpreted as a right to enrich, and they did the same thing at Lausanne so they could later claim that the arms embargo has to be lifted. U.S. negotiators have proven less than adept in detecting how and when the Iranians are laying traps for them.
As far as the arms embargo goes, there are multiple Iranian motives. The most obvious is that the Iranians are engaged in four hot wars across the region against traditional American allies, and they’re eager to purchase Russian weapons to fight in those wars. David Ignatius to MSNBC this morning: “Israel will see that as a direct threat, as it will arm the people Israel is fighting. The Sunni Arabs, as you said, will see this as a major capitulation by the U.S.” The more subtle reason has to do with how the Iranians conduct their illicit nuclear trade. The Iranians have an interest in weakening international restrictions against arms transfers in in general, because they then use newly-legitimized procurement channels to violate whatever restrictions remain. I’m [linking] below an article published yesterday by Benjamin Weinthal – a Berlin-based fellow for Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) – on how Iran has been violating UNSC nuclear sanctions over the last few months:
While U.S.-led world powers hold talks with Iran in Vienna to curb Tehran’s illicit nuclear weapons program, the Islamic Republic’s spies have been seeking atomic and missile technology in neighboring Germany as recently as last month, according to German intelligence sources… Iran has a long history of illegally obtaining nuclear technology from within Germany and transporting it in ways that circumvent international sanctions. German companies have shown an eagerness to legally tap the Iranian market, though none are accused of abetting illegality in the latest efforts by Iran.
Of course there’s also what ought to be the major diplomatic scandal of the Iranians cheating on nuclear sanctions even as nuclear negotiations continue [reported by Benjamin Weinthal in the linked story]. But the Iranians have been caught cheating throughout the talks: they’ve violated UNSC resolutions in exactly this way and they’ve violated the JPOA by busting through oil caps, testing advanced centrifuges, and failing to convert excess enriched gas into dioxide. In literally every case the Obama administration has found a reason to publicly play Iran’s lawyer by spinning away those violations.
Why negotiations are shaping up to be a win-win for the Mullahs
The mainstream media have ignored and overlooked the Islamic Republic’s recent moves, which threatened regional security. The Islamic Republic’s search for regional hegemony has also been overshadowed by President Obama’s prioritization of signing a nuclear deal.
Iranian leaders and media outlets have given an estimate of how much they have so far gained from the nuclear talks. The Iranian leaders and state-owned media have recently boasted about receiving approximately $12 billion in assets over the period of the nuclear talks by July 7th.
The ruling clerics in the Islamic Republic and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps have also unveiled and are celebrating the deployment of a new and second long-range Ghadir radar. According to an Iranian state-owned outlet, Brigadier General Farzad Esmaili, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ (IRGC) air defense force, who unveiled the Ghadir phased-array radar, pointed out that “Discovering and tracking micro aerial vehicles (MAV)… is one of the special qualities of the Ghadir radar system.”
This is part of long-range and air defense system. The Islamic Republic is attempting to completely shield its nuclear facilities when it is close to obtaining nuclear weapons. Russia has also made a deal with the Islamic Republic to ship the S-300 advanced missile system to Iran.
The Islamic Republic also continues to receive billions of dollars due to the nuclear talks. One recent example includes a side deal that the Islamic Republic worked out at the nuclear talks with the Obama administration, which would give Tehran 13 tons of gold worth about $700 million.
The winners of these nuclear talks are primarily President Obama, the Iranian government, Shiite proxies in the region, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, President Rouhani, the Syrian government and Bashar Al Assad, and Western corporations and companies.
President Obama desires to seal and achieve his final legacy. President Obama and his administration are creating the narrative that the deal is a historic and good one.
On the other hand, the easing of sanctions creates a whole array of other winners in the Islamic Republic including the IRGC, office of the Supreme Leader, and the Quds force (elite branch of IRGC which operates in extraterritorial landscapes).
As the economic power of the IRGC and the Quds force increases, Iran’s Shiite proxies in the region will benefit from the trickling down of these funds. Al Assad can also be more assured and confident that the Islamic Republic will continue supporting his government financially, economically, militarily, and through intelligence and advisory roles.
Entities or governments which will not benefit from these nuclear talks or latest developments are countries which are threatened by extremist militia groups in the region and are concerned with Iran’s hegemonic ambitions, it’s search for regional preeminence and supremacy, Iran’s attempts to tip the balance of power in its favor.
The Islamic Republic fuels extremism in the region, gives birth to militias and is the major root of atrocities, terrorism, human rights abuses and the vicious cycle we are witnessing in the Middle East and beyond. In fact, there is a powerful correlation between the Islamic Republic’s rising military buildup and the rising power of extremism and terrorism in the region.
As Israeli Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated, the Islamic State (IS) threat is nothing in comparison to the Islamic Republic’s threat.
The Iranian government is also scoring further victories with regard to the nuclear talks. When we comprehensively and meticulously look at the deal, the agreement will not only maintain Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but it will create whole new security and geopolitical concerns in the region. The agreement is not final but temporary, broadly speaking. After 10 years, economic sanctions will have lifted, Iran’s breakout capacity will be nearly complete, and Iran can reinitiate its program with full speed.
As a result, Iranian leaders will have it both ways.
President Obama is treating the Islamic Republic completely differently from groups such as the Islamic State. He calls Iran a successful regional player.
Obama fails to recognize the fact that any victory or military capability that the Islamic Republic gains is a step towards more militarization, terrorism, violence and regional insecurity. As Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu stated, “Obviously no one thinking with a clear mind would consider giving Islamic State nuclear weapons,” and he adds, “But in the negotiations taking place now with Iran, this extreme state that spreads terrorism around the world is being given the ability to develop a nuclear weapons arsenal with many nuclear bombs, together with the means to deliver them… We should not strengthen one at the expense of the other…We need to weaken both and prevent the aggression and military buildup of both of them.”
It is the time to pay closer attention to the Islamic Republic’s covert military buildup and treat it the same way the international community treats the Islamic State, not as a successful regional player.
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