Unlike most criticisms of the Iran deal, Lawfare is worth reading through. First comes Yishai Schwartz, who worries about a possibly poor precedent:
This debate is important, but it also misses the larger point. What happened in the IAEA negotiations with Iran was precedent setting. The IAEA demanded access to an Iranian site in order to resolve questions about weaponization of Iran’s nuclear program. Iran refused, and in large part, the IAEA acquiesced. A set of arrangements was developed–which may or may not be technically sound for each and every one of the IAEA’s purposes (for this, we must follow the debate among experts closely)–which precluded actual IAEA access to the site. …
But what of the long-term, precedential effects? Based on the Parchin agreement, we can already predict what will happen 5, 10, 20 years from now, when Iran once again chooses to explore or pursue weaponization. The IAEA will demand access to a sensitive Iranian site, and Iran will stonewall. And when the time comes to negotiate, Iran will insist that IAEA and international community has already acknowledged it doesn’t really have a right to demand full access to military sites. After all, look at Parchin! And this agreement, rather than Iran’s actual legal obligations under its safeguards agreement and additional protocol, will become the new baseline.
Iranian negotiators have a track record of pocketing what seem at the time like limited and isolated Western concessions, only to argue (successfully) that they are of much larger significance. (This is, for example, what happened when the IAEA accepted that Iran wasn’t really bound by the Additional Protocol or Modified Code 3.1) With Parchin, I worry that we have just handed them another.
In contrast, Cody Poplin criticizes what appears to be a reasonable Congressional response – legislation permitting the President to respond to Iranian transgressions forcefully:
Middle of the road Iranians might just as well see an AUMF as adding sour bellicosity to a deal ostensibly meant to avert conflict—if not also as evidence of bad faith. As for hardliners, a force authorization, however conditional, could hand politically useful cover to officials and clerics eager to cheat on Iran’s side of the deal.
The doubtful efficacy can be paired with this downside, too: A rainy day Iran authorization likely would be a tough nut to crack legislatively. Under Einhorn’s formulation, for example, the president would be required to present “evidence” that Iran had cheated, before any force authorization could kick in. But as previous debates have shown, it’s not obvious what counts as evidence and at what threshold Congress should be convinced. Given the predictable political wrangling, a conditional AUMF thus present a great risk: the worst of all possible outcomes for deterring an Iranian breakout would be one wherein an administration spent significant resources to get a preemptive authorization only to end up failing.
I leave these with no comment. However, I also received this video in email today:
To which a very simple response is necessary:
We are, after all, the Great Satan.
