Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is not entirely happy with the nuclear deal, reports AL Monitor‘s Arash Karami in an interview with the IRGC’s head, Mohammad Ali Jafari:
“For me, as a military official, what is more important than anything else … is the protection and promotion of Iran’s defensive abilities.”
On the agreement that the Security Council voted on, Jafari said, “Some points included in the draft [are] clearly contrary to and a violation of the red lines of the Islamic Republic of Iran, specifically of Iran’s arms capabilities and will never be accepted by us.” He continued, “Any resolution that contradicts our country’s red lines, there is no validity, and we are hopeful that the [UN Security Council] does not waste its time to pass a draft like this.”
Jafari did not say that how he or the IRGC would oppose the aspects of the nuclear deal that he objects to.
While the IRGC does not have a formal responsibility to sign or repudiate the deal, they remain a major force in Iranian political life and could scuttle the agreement.
In Israel, a political opponent of current Prime Minister Netanyahu, former Labor Party Minister Ephraim Sneh, happens to agree with his opponent that this is a bad deal, in another AL Monitor interview:
It is full of holes. First of all, the inspection protocols are very problematic, because they give the Iranians 24 days to prepare. That’s enough time to hide and conceal what they have been doing. After all, they are masters of deception. They’ve spent years deceiving the entire world, so they don’t need more than 24 hours to hide any accumulated evidence. In other words, the inspections aren’t real inspections.
Second, the nuclear project was not dismantled. It was put on hold. It was frozen, and anything frozen can be unfrozen. The Iranians don’t see their strategy in terms of winning the next elections. They look at it in generational and historical terms. They consider domination of the region and of the entire world for that matter as a historic objective, rather than some concrete objective in the here and now. In that sense, another 10 or 15 years is not a lot of time.
The third thing is that the clause regarding the restoration of punitive measures will become impractical in the new reality that will emerge the moment sanctions are lifted. Why? Because who will be the first people to go running to Tehran to do business there? Large corporations. Once they have contractual ties with the Revolutionary Guards or some proxy for the Revolutionary Guards, their government will not take any steps against Iran, because doing so would involve money and jobs. It would involve economic interests. That is why that whole argument is untrustworthy.
Masters of deception, eh? This argument has the ring of speciousness about it, no doubt due to the hyperbolic rhetoric. They may be devious, but the West has decades of monitoring experience – and a very bloody history of our own.
The second argument has a similar rhetorical problem – dominate the world? Secondly, he ignores the very important fact that knowledge is dependent on the scientists. A frozen nuclear project will, in fact, and if you’ll pardon the pun, decay as the scientists stop working on it and go on to other things, retire, and die. Even the physical infrastructure will decay. There is more to unfreezing a high-tech project than simply snapping your fingers.
The third argument is also dubious, although somewhat less so. But I do feel that Iran will be protectionist, so the number of large corporations with large investments will initially be close to zero; as time passes, this will become less true, but we’ll have gained experience with the Iranians, and they with us. I think we can hope as the two sides settle into the agreement, they will each appreciate the positives of a peaceful relationship, and the negatives of slinging nuclear explosives at each other.
Nonetheless, Sneh knows a lot more about his corner of the world than do I.
Longtime Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt has this to say, as reported by the Daily Star of Lebanon:
“The nuclear deal between Iran and world powers is the result of the invasion and occupation of Iraq… and the corpses of the Syrian people,” the party chief said in his weekly column in Al-Anbaa online newspaper. “It was signed with the blood of the hundreds of thousands who fell in [the process] of paving of the road for the agreement.”
However, the report goes on to say Lebanese officials welcome the deal. AL Monitor brings more flavor to Jumblatt’s statement:
For Jumblatt, the nuclear deal between Iran and the West is akin to Sykes-Picot of 100 years ago that intended to carve the Ottoman-Arab lands with the decision of two Western colonial powers, the United Kingdom and France. The deal now reached between the West led by the United States and non-Arab Iran might have a similar effect on the Middle Eastern chessboard.
Wikipedia enlightens us as to Sykes–Picot:
The Sykes–Picot Agreement, officially known as the Asia Minor Agreement, was a secret agreement between the governments of the United Kingdom and France,[1] with the assent of Russia, defining their proposed spheres of influence and control in the Middle East should the Triple Entente succeed in defeating the Ottoman Empire during World War I. The negotiation of the treaty occurred between November 1915 and March 1916.[2] The agreement was concluded on 16 May 1916.[3]
The agreement effectively divided the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire outside the Arabian peninsula into areas of future British and French control or influence.[4] The terms were negotiated by the French diplomat François Georges-Picot and Briton Sir Mark Sykes. The Russian Tsarist government was a minor party to the Sykes–Picot agreement, and when, following the Russian Revolution of October 1917, the Bolsheviks exposed the agreement, “the British were embarrassed, the Arabs dismayed and the Turks delighted.”[5]
But this time around the Turks may not be so happy:
The first Turkish official reaction to the nuclear deal reached in Vienna on July 14 came from Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu. He said, “Iran should be constructive, attaching importance to political dialogue. … Particularly, it [Iran] should reconsider its role in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon.”
The spirit of his words obviously reflected the uneasiness of Turkey from the potential of Iran re-emerging as an international political actor that may overshadow its ambitious western neighbor.
“Constructive” and “attaching importance to political dialogue” can easily be interpreted as “talk to us, talk to Turkey, so we could feel as important ourselves.” As for the second part of his reaction, Cavusoglu means, “Turkey and Iran are pitted against each other from the Gulf to the Mediterranean, in Mesopotamia and the Levant. An Iran strengthened by the West will further undermine Turkey’s regional standing.”
