“An Opportunity Of Historic Significance”: Breakthrough: Iran’s Nuclear Concessions Vindicate Obama’s Diplomatic Strategy
As outlined by President Obama at a news conference this afternoon, the tentative nuclear agreement reached with Iran appears to include significant concessions that will achieve the most important metric demanded by the United States and its diplomatic partners — namely, to extend the “breakout” period required for Tehran to develop a single nuclear weapon. The full deal is complex and yet to be completed, but the highlights seem to answer the most pressing concerns about a sustainable and verifiable non-proliferation regime.
According to the president and negotiators in Lausanne, Switzerland, where the talks had continued into the early hours today, the government of Iran has agreed to cut its uranium-enriching centrifuges from 19,000 to 6,000, greatly reducing its capacity to rapidly produce weapons-grade material. For the next 10 years, only about 5,000 of those centrifuges will actually operate at all. The excess centrifuges and related machinery will be held in storage monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency, to be used only for replacement parts — and Iran will construct no new uranium-enrichment facilities for the duration of the agreement.
Taken together, these changes are expected to extend the “breakout” period from a few months to at least one year.
Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif also agreed that his country would not enrich uranium over 3.67 percent for the next 15 years and will slash its present inventory of more than 20 tons of low-enriched uranium to well under a ton for the same duration. Moreover, Zarif and his team conceded that Iran will ship all the spent fuel from its heavy-water reactor at Arak, which might have been reprocessed into bomb-ready plutonium, to other countries for reprocessing — a sticking point earlier in the talks. The Arak facility itself will undergo a reconstruction process — including the destruction of the reactor’s original core — that will make production of plutonium there impossible, and Iran will construct no further plants capable of producing plutonium for at least 15 years.
The deal provides for continuous IAEA monitoring of all Iranian nuclear reactors and programs — described by Obama as the most intensive ever undertaken — and for sanctions relief that will only begin when Iran has met all of its initial commitments to restructure and dismantle its weapons-related equipment and programs. It also includes restrictions on certain kinds of conventional weapons and technology.
As the president said with his usual lucidity, these negotiations — and their ultimate success — are an opportunity of historic significance to reduce the risks of war and proliferation.
But the Iran talks also represent a chance to promote peaceful change in that unfortunate country, whose people desperately hope that the Rouhani government can progress toward normal relationships with Western countries, especially the United States. The best guarantees of peace and security — for the world, the U.S., the Mideast region, and yes, Israel — will be realized by strengthening the forces in Tehran that seek to transcend Iran’s status as diplomatic and economic pariah.
Partisan efforts to scuttle the nascent bargain have long been underway, and will now intensify. The perpetrators are almost exclusively “experts” who were wrong about very similar issues concerning the supposed nuclear ambitions of Iraq — and led us into a pointless war that cost many thousands of lives and trillions of dollars. The American people support President Obama’s use of internationally backed sanctions to encourage a negotiated agreement rather than armed conflict — and his approach is proving more effective than the belligerent attitude promoted by his critics over the past decade. Let us hope that he and Secretary of State John Kerry, both of whom deserve enormous credit for their moral courage and pertinacity, will be able to bring forth a signed agreement by the next deadline in late June.
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, The National Memo, April2, 2015
“Presidents Negotiate Arms Agreements”: Cotton And The War Caucus Count On Constituents’ Ignorance
When a Man’s fancy gets astride on his Reason; When Imagination is at Cuffs with the Senses; and common Understanding, as well as common Sense, is Kickt out of Doors; the first Proselyte he makes, is Himself. Jonathan Swift, 1704
As near as I can determine, Senator Tom Cotton’s biggest worry about Iran is that its government is as bellicose and fanatical as he is.
The good news is that based on the Islamic Republic’s response to the condescending, adolescent tone of the “open letter” he and 46 Republican senators addressed to Iran’s leaders, that seems unlikely. Judging by their measured responses, Iranian politicians appear to understand that they weren’t its real audience.
Rather, it was a grandstand play directed at Cotton’s own constituents among the GOP’s unappeasable Tea Party base. Its actual purpose was to express contempt and defiance toward President Obama, always popular among the Fox News white-bread demographic — basically the same motive that led Cotton to repeat Obama’s name 74 times during a 2014 election debate with Senator Mark Pryor.
That big doodyhead Barack Obama’s not the boss of them.
Except that particularly with regard to foreign policy, he is. But hold that thought.
Javad Zarif, the American-educated Iranian foreign minister involved in intense negotiations with Secretary of State John Kerry, observed that the senators’ letter has “no legal value and is mostly a propaganda ploy.”
The Persian diplomat pointed out that the agreement’s not being hashed out between the U.S. and Iran, but also among Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China. Any deal would be put before the UN Security Council and have the force of international law.
A future U.S. president could renounce it, but at significant political cost unless Iran clearly violated its terms.
Slate’s Fred Kaplan points out chief executives from FDR and Reagan to George W. Bush have negotiated arms control deals negotiated in ports of call from Yalta to Helsinki. “In other words,” Kaplan writes, “contrary to the letter writers, Congress has no legal or constitutional role in the drafting, approval, or modification of this deal.”
Presidents negotiate arms agreements, not raw-carrot freshman senators.
Iran’s crafty old “Supreme Leader” Ayatollah Khamenei lamented “the decay of political ethics in the American system,” but added that he stood by the process. “Every time we reach a stage where the end of the negotiations is in sight,” Khamenei said, “the tone of the other side, specifically the Americans, becomes harsher, coarser and tougher.”
Los Angeles Times columnist Doyle McManus reported the score: “Qom Theological Seminary 1, Harvard Law 0. When an ayatollah sounds more statesmanlike than the U.S. Senate, it’s not a good sign.”
Bargaining is practically the Persian national sport. They’re inclined to see a my-way-or-the-highway type like Tom Cotton as unserious and immature.
As if to confirm that impression, the Arkansas senator took his newfound notoriety to CBS’s Face the Nation, where he complained about Iran’s growing “empire.”
“They already control Tehran, increasingly they control Damascus and Beirut and Baghdad and now Sana’a as well,” Cotton said. “They do all that without a nuclear weapon. Imagine what they would do with a nuclear weapon.”
You read that correctly. Arkansas’ brilliant Harvard law graduate complained about Iran’s control of Tehran — the nation’s capital since 1796.
As for Iran’s alleged “control” of Baghdad, you’d think an Iraq veteran like Cotton would have some clue how that came about. Hint: President George W. Bush invaded Iraq. The Bush administration deposed Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein, whose invasion of neighboring Iran led to an eight-year war killing roughly a million people. They installed as prime minister Nouri al Maliki, a Shiite nationalist who’d spent 24 years exiled in, yes, Iran.
How Iranian-armed Shiite militias came to be leading the fight against ISIS terrorists west of Baghdad is that the Iraqi government begged for their help. It’s in Tehran’s national interest to defeat ISIS even more than in Washington’s. Can this possibly be news to Cotton?
Probably not, but he can count on his constituents’ ignorance. It would be astonishing if 20 percent of Arkansas voters could locate Iran on a world map, much less grasp that if Iran looks stronger, it’s because the U.S. keeps attacking its enemies. “Like all the Iran hawks before him,” Daniel Larison writes in American Conservative, “Cotton claims to fear growing Iranian influence while supporting policies that have facilitated its growth.”
For President Obama, a verifiable agreement preventing the Iranian regime from developing nuclear weapons they say they don’t want could be a diplomatic triumph, reshaping the entire Middle East without firing a shot.
To the War Party, that would be a bad thing. Meanwhile, Tom Cotton gave his first speech in the U.S. Senate, prating about “global military dominance” and “hegemonic strength” like the villain in a James Bond movie.
It was a performance calculated to make him a star.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, March 18, 2015
“The Ultimate Slap”: How Obama Can Stick It To Netanyahu
Benjamin Netanyahu says he’s definitely coming to Washington to deliver a speech about Iran to a joint session of Congress. He’ll almost certainly oppose a nuclear deal whose details aren’t public yet. The whole “tawdry and high-handed stunt,” as Senator Patrick Leahy put it, will be correctly read as an insult to the president.
So how best for Obama to make his displeasure known? He’s already denied Netanyahu an audience. But if Obama really wants to stick it to the Israeli prime minister, he should fight to ink a deal with Iran before the March speech on Capitol Hill. That would dare Netanyahu to come and forcefully denounce a major global foreign policy achievement.
Democrats, at least, will be loathe to turn their backs on Obama. The speech already faces stiff opposition from the party—fifteen members of the House and three senators are on board for a boycott. Even some right-leaning pro-Israel groups, if the current rifts among the Israel lobby are any indication, might not openly revolt against a deal.
What Obama has going for him is the ability to correctly cast this an issue of avoiding a confrontation with Iran rather than seeking one. It worked last year when Obama beat back a sanctions bill that would’ve quashed talks, and it will work this time. Imagine Netanyahu declaring, as he did after the interim deal with Iran, that an comprehensive accord limiting Iran’s nuclear program is a “historic mistake” when Obama has half the American body politic at his back.
What’s more, the international community is on Obama’s side, too, and Netanyahu knows it. In his statement yesterday, affirming the trip amid all the pressure, Netanyahu mentioned his “profound disagreement with the United States administration and the rest of the P5+1”—referring to the US’s international partners in Iran talks. Last week, Netanyahu vowed to “stand up to Iran and the international community.”
The most onerous maneuvering for Obama, then, isn’t managing politics, domestic or international, but getting the deal itself. This, however, might not be as difficult as it sounds. Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif hinted this week at how close the sides came to an agreement when he said at a security conference in Munich that the last extension of talks in November wasn’t “necessary or useful.”
The extension, though, was useful for Obama: whereas in November his party was coming off a beating in midterm elections, today the economy is in better shape and Obama seems to be feeling his oats. The sort of swagger he showed in the State of the Union address will only serve to help the president sell an agreement.
Ironically, the most detailed information the public has about a potential nuclear deal comes through Israeli officials, who are informed by the United States and its negotiating partners about talks, then go leak it to the press. Even if the Israelis are releasing accurate information about the negotiations—something they have a spotty record on—the fear-mongering about the likely outcome doesn’t capture its complexity.
Luckily for Obama, as things are lining up opponents of a deal aren’t themselves much interested in nuance and complexity. Aside from a few hardline pro-Israel Democrats, most of the opposition will come from Republicans and hawks in the Bill Kristol mode—in other words, those who, like Netanyahu himself, have poor records on matters of war and peace.
When the administration comes out and focuses on how opponents of a deal are pushing the United States to war, the hawks will object that they are being labeled warmongers. The administration isn’t quite making the “warmonger” argument, but the salient point is that killing a deal would bring us closer to confrontation. That’s why inking a deal ASAP would be good policy, and why it’s the high road to delivering the ultimate slap to Netanyahu.
By: Ali Gharib, The Nation, February 11, 2015
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