Iran has been a bugbear for successive sessions of Congress ever since the Iranians booted out Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi for (in popular opinion) being the catspaw of the United States, engaging in torture, etc (Feb 1979). The taking of American hostages in November of the same year was, of course, traumatizing to anyone who loves their fellow countrymen; and for those who believe in America’s Manifest Destiny, exceptionally offensive. I was just coming of age during the Iranian Hostage Crisis, and I do recall the shock of screaming anti-American crowds, the overwhelming of the guards, and then the long crisis, the failed rescue raid, and finally the almost silent release of the prisoners as Ronald Reagan succeeded Jimmy Carter.
Since then, simply pulling various memories of Iran out of my head, I recall the Iran-Iraq War, including the reports of the horror of gas warfare, the sacrifice of the youth of both nations for the egos of the leaders, and all the other horrors that go along with quasi-religious wars; I remember the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of the Iranian Revolution, and the shocking way his death was mourned (for those who are not aware, as I recall the videos, his body was manhandled by mobs who carried it over their heads, before he was finally buried), which really brought home the idea that some people are really different and are truly heartbroken when a leader dies (I was already quite cynical about such matters); the execution of one of the initial leaders of the revoluion, a large jawed chap who had served as a news announcer during the crisis – I regret to say I do not recall his name.
The Iranian nuclear program began in the 1950s during the reign of the aforementioned Shah, went dormant when the Revolution took place, and was quietly revived in the 1990s. This became public in 2002, and ever since there’s been dispute about the nature of their nuclear program; a short history is here.
Thus, concern about the Iranian nuclear program is understandable, and not entirely unmerited; since Pakistan and India, long term enemies, became nuclear powers and thus able to seriously damage, if not completely obliterate each other, not to mention seriously damage their neighbors, the jitters surrounding any other power regarded with not only suspicion, but outright paranoia, will certainly lead to a certain amount of disturbance.
However, the GOP’s reaction to a deal being assembled by a Democratic Administration can strain credulity to the breaking point. Here’s a survey of some opinions, minus the well known Bachmann broadside.
Time gives a summary of the deal here.
“Some think we should either fight with the world or surrender to other powers,” he said. “We believe there is a third option. We can coöperate with the world.”
Thomas Friedman at the New York Times reports,
President Obama invited me to the Oval Office Saturday afternoon to lay out exactly how he was trying to balance these risks and opportunities in the framework accord reached with Iran last week in Switzerland. What struck me most was what I’d call an “Obama doctrine” embedded in the president’s remarks. It emerged when I asked if there was a common denominator to his decisions to break free from longstanding United States policies isolating Burma, Cuba and now Iran. Obama said his view was that “engagement,” combined with meeting core strategic needs, could serve American interests vis-à-vis these three countries far better than endless sanctions and isolation. He added that America, with its overwhelming power, needs to have the self-confidence to take some calculated risks to open important new possibilities — like trying to forge a diplomatic deal with Iran that, while permitting it to keep some of its nuclear infrastructure, forestalls its ability to build a nuclear bomb for at least a decade, if not longer.
Politico reports Saudi Arabia is giving cautious support. Peter Beinart at The Atlantic writes in “What’s the Alternative to Obama’s Iran Deal?”
Benjamin Netanyahu insists that opposing Thursday’s framework nuclear deal with Iran doesn’t mean he wants war. “There’s a third alternative,” the Israeli prime minister told CNN on Sunday, “and that is standing firm, ratcheting up the pressure until you get a better deal.”
There are three problems with this argument. The first is that even some of Netanyahu’s own ideological allies don’t buy it. …
The second problem with Netanyahu’s argument is that it’s based on bizarre assumptions about Iranian politics. According to Netanyahu, if the United States walks away from the current deal, Iran’s desperation to end global sanctions will lead it to scrap its nuclear program almost entirely. But Iran’s nuclear program is decades old and enjoys broad public support. Even Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the leader of the reformist Green Movement, declared in 2009 that if elected, “we will not abandon the great achievements of Iranian scientists. I too will not suspend uranium enrichment.” … Rouhani’s hardline opponents, who benefit politically and economically from the sanctions, fiercely oppose such a deal. Netanyahu thinks a more aggressive American posture, coupled with a demand for near-complete Iranian capitulation, will make Tehran accept terms that today not even Iranian doves accept.
Finally, there’s a third, less well-appreciated flaw in Netanyahu’s argument. He assumes that after walking away from the current deal, the United States can “ratchet up the pressure on Iran.” In fact, the pressure will likely go down.
Yes, Congress can pass additional sanctions. But more American sanctions alone won’t have much effect. After all, the United States began seriously sanctioning Iran in the mid-1990s. Yet for a decade and a half, those sanctions had no major impact on Iran’s nuclear program. That’s largely because foreign companies ignored American pleas to stop doing business with the Islamic Republic.
Assuming the facts are as presented, this refutes Netanyahu without addressing the virtues of the deal itself.
Ben Caspit, an Israeli columnist, comments for the AL Monitor:
On the evening of April 2, when Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and the European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini faced the press, Jerusalem was shocked into silence.
First, the very fact that a framework agreement had been reached ran counter to all Israeli assessments, according to which the deadline would be postponed once again to the end of June (the original deadline). Second, the principles of the agreement surprised Israeli officials and especially the political echelon. No, there isn’t a single person around Netanyahu or Defense Minister Moshe (Bogie) Ya’alon who will concede that the agreement is a good one, but several of its elements make it anything but the “bad agreement” that Israel has insisted all along would be produced.
AL Monitor talks to Maj. Gen. (Res.) Amos Yadlin, formerly the head of Israeli military intelligence:
“It depends on how you look at it,” he said. “If we aspire to an ideal world and dream of having all of Israel’s justified demands fulfilled, then of course the agreement does not deliver. It grants Iran legitimacy as a nuclear threshold state and potential to eventually achieve nuclearization. It leaves Iran more or less one year away from a nuclear weapon, and Israel will clearly not like all of this.
“But there’s another way to look at it that examines the current situation and the alternatives. In this other view, considering that Iran now has 19,000 centrifuges, the agreement provides quite a good package. One has to think what might have happened if, as aspired to by Netanyahu and Steinitz, negotiations had collapsed. Had that happened, Iran could have decided on a breakout, ignored the international community, refused to respond to questions about its arsenal, continued to quickly enrich and put together a bomb before anyone could have had time to react. And therefore, with this in mind, it’s not a bad agreement.”
The Israeli Prime Minister, Netanyahu, remains unhappy, however.
Over at The American Conservative, W. James Antle III opines
How do you say trust but verify in Persian? For the truth is, the framework for a nuclear deal with Iran is only partly about the technical details. It is also a matter of trust.
Assuming a final agreement really resembles what the State Department outlined publicly, it will have its weaknesses. Iran will remain a nuclear threshold state. The Islamic republic will be allowed to maintain a vast nuclear infrastructure, and the deal’s success depends on the ”P5+1″ group’s ability to detect and penalize Iranian cheating in a timely fashion. …
The deal has to be evaluated against plausible alternatives, not an ideal outcome. It was in the absence of any deal that Iran went from having a little over 16o [sic] centrifuges in 2003 to 3,000 in 2005, 8,000 by the beginning of Barack Obama’s presidency and 22,000 by 2013.
This seems fairly reasonable to me, acknowledge there are problems, but this is progress and we should appreciate it. He goes on to comment on the alternative,
Critics of the deal don’t like it when it is suggested that the failure of diplomacy makes war more likely. They borrow one of Obama’s favorite catchphrases and call it a “false choice.”
This would be more convincing if leading Iran hawks weren’t already calling for bombing Iran or saying war is our best option.
But …
Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates has been quoted as saying, “If you think the war in Iraq was hard, an attack on Iran would, in my opinion, be a catastrophe.”
CNBC is not happy:
The agreement significantly reduces the number of Iranian centrifuges and other nuclear infrastructure, but only limits Tehran’s ability to quickly “break out” from these restrictions and accumulate enough fissionable material to create a nuclear weapon in less than one year. Theoretically, we are told that is enough time for the West to detect Iranian violations and respond — but it is not.
The National Interest’s Zalmay Khalilzad is not happy.
… there are four reasons why this agreement is flawed and poses significant risks:
First, using the so-called fatwa by Iran’s Supreme Leader Khamenei as an indicator of Iran’s true intentions— present and future—is a mistake.
Second, even if President Obama is correct that the agreement puts Iran one year away from producing enough fissile material for one nuclear weapon, it entails substantial risks.
Third, the president is counting on the efficacy of inspections—believing that Iranian efforts to cheat or deceive will be discovered and exposed in a timely manner, allowing the United States and its partners to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
Fourth, the framework agreement assumes that if Iran violates the deal, the sanctions that were lifted can be re-imposed—or can snap back into place.
Mr. Khalilzad has some significant experience with Middle East affairs, having been Ambassador to Iraq, and should perhaps be taken a trifle more seriously.
The Washington Free Beacon, relying mostly on unnamed arms control experts, believes the deal is unsustainable:
Despite promises by President Obama that Iranian cheating on a new treaty will be detected, verifying Tehran’s compliance with a future nuclear accord will be very difficult if not impossible, arms experts say.
“The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action will not be effectively verifiable,” said Paula DeSutter, assistant secretary of state for verification, compliance, and implementation from 2002 to 2009.
But David Corn at MotherJones has the temerity to roundup a number of named experts who think this is sustainable:
Anthony Cordesman, the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a former national security aide to Sen. John McCain, and a former director of intelligence assessment in the Office of the Secretary of Defense: “[T]he proposed parameters and framework in the Proposed Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action has the potential to meet every test in creating a valid agreement over time…It can block both an Iranian nuclear threat and a nuclear arms race in the region, and it is a powerful beginning to creating a full agreement, and creating the prospect for broader stability in other areas. Verification will take at least several years, but some form of trust may come with time. This proposal should not be a subject for partisan wrangling or outside political exploitation. It should be the subject of objective analysis of the agreement, our intelligence and future capabilities to detect Iran’s actions, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) capabilities to verify, and enforcement provisions if Iran should cheat. No perfect agreement was ever possible and it is hard to believe a better option was negotiable. In fact, it may be a real victory for all sides: A better future for Iran, and greater security for the United States, its Arab partners, Israel, and all its other allies.”
Kori Schake at FP writes an article entitled “I’m a Republican and I Support the Iran Nuclear Deal”:
1. The inspection provisions are solid. According to the details of the agreement that have been released so far, the deal provides for continuous inspection of all of Iran’s declared nuclear facilities. It also challenges inspections of any suspect facilities, and calls on Iran to sign up for the IAEA Additional Protocol, which increases short-notice inspections and IAEA access to establish greater confidence in an absence of cheating. If these are all carried out, they would amount to a robust verification regime. The inspection provisions would dramatically increase the United States’ ability to know what is happening in Iran’s nuclear programs, to judge the extent of their militarization efforts, and to anticipate “breakout” toward a nuclear weapons.
William Kristol at the conservative The Weekly Standard writes an editorial, “Kill the Deal“:
But it’s important not to lose sight of the whole, even as one goes after its most vulnerable parts. The whole of the deal is a set of concessions to an aggressive regime with a history of cheating that will now be enabled to stand one unverifiable cheat away from nuclear weapons. In making these concessions, the U.S, and its partners are ignoring that regime’s past and present actions, strengthening that regime, and sending the message that there is no price to be paid for a regime’s lying and cheating and terror and aggression. …
It is now up to the members of Congress to do their duty, on this delicate and momentous occasion. It is up to members of Congress to refuse to accede to this set of concessions made by our current executive magistrate, concessions that would put one of the world’s most dangerous regimes further along the road to acquiring the world’s most dangerous weapons.
Fox News publishes “What Saddam Hussein tells us about the Iran nuclear deal“:
President Barack Obama correctly has pointed out that the impending Iran nuclear deal depends for success upon United Nations inspections. He also said, incorrectly, that “…Iran has also agreed to the most robust and intrusive inspections and transparency regime ever negotiated for any nuclear program in history.”
The President seems not to remember the inspection regime for Iraq following the 1991 Kuwait war. And that inspection regime did not work, for reasons that included both Saddam’s behavior and that of the U.N. Security Council.
It’s not entirely clear to me how the one paragraph relates to the other; I also recall the Iraq War, and the belated discovery that Iraq indeed did NOT possess Weapons of Mass Destruction, despite the assurances that he did — all over the repeated assertions of UN inspectors that he did not. So if the deal is even more robust than the Iraq deal, I find it hard to get upset.
Finally, the indictment of Democratic Senator Menendez, a critic of the deal, has drawn some conspiracy theories out of the woodwork like salt draws water out of beef, this one from conservative Breitbart.com:
“If you had written this in a ‘House of Cards’ script, it would have been thrown out. The idea that the president’s most powerful democratic critic of the Iran deal goes down, indicted just before the deal is announced, nobody is suggesting a connection, but it sure does have an impact and it will it will be harder for Republicans to get a veto-proof majority to challenge the deal.”
The above quote from Jon Karl.
And, as an addendum, Egberto Willies at the Daily Kos chimes in with a quote from Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson:
I am not one to go immediately to war. I would go to some sort of containment policy. And try to do something about it through that policy rather than going to war. But I know what my political party wants. My political party, at least some of them—the 47 for example who signed the letter to the Ayatollah—they want war.
I have been unable to find a second source for the above quote, but it does fit the pattern of the good Republican Colonel speaking his mind, not his ideology.
