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Israel Gears Up to Battle Iran Deal in Congress: Times of Israel, July 6, 2015 — Israel is preparing for the next phase of its fierce opposition to the Iran nuclear deal, by lobbying US Congressmen and women to block the emerging comprehensive agreement once it is finalized and goes to lawmakers for approval.
Strategies for Israel After Failed American Diplomacy: Louis René Beres, Arutz Sheva, July 2, 2015— Unsurprisingly, the Obama strategy of concessionary nuclear negotiations with Iran has failed.
Obama Needs to Walk Away From an Awful Deal With Iran: Kevin McCarthy, Washington Post, July 1, 2015 — When former advisers to President Obama contribute to an open, bipartisan letter outlining their collective concerns that the nuclear deal the administration is negotiating with Iran would fall very short of its own standard of a “good” agreement, something is wrong.
Why Is Obama Abandoning 70 Years of U.S. Nonproliferation Policy?: Matthew Kroenig, Tablet, June 15, 2015 — As the June 30 deadline for striking a comprehensive nuclear deal with Iran looms, discussions quickly get bogged down in debates about numbers and types of centrifuges, schedules for sanctions relief, and procedures for international inspections.
The World Stayed Silent – Iran Short Film Series #7 (Video): Youtube, June 30, 2015
U.N. Nuclear Chief Is Optimistic About Iranian Cooperation on Review: Michael R. Gordon & David E. Sanger, New York Times, July 4, 2015
Iran’s Toxic Deal is Not a Legacy Obama Should Leave: Andrew Bowen, Al-Arabiya, July 5, 2014
U.S. and Iran: the Unbearable Awkwardness of Defending Your Enemy: Louis Charbonneau, Reuters, July 5, 2015
ISRAEL GEARS UP TO BATTLE IRAN DEAL IN CONGRESS
Times of Israel, July 6, 2015
Israel is preparing for the next phase of its fierce opposition to the Iran nuclear deal, by lobbying US Congressmen and women to block the emerging comprehensive agreement once it is finalized and goes to lawmakers for approval. But some in Jerusalem fear it is a lost cause given the belief that the potential economic benefits from resuming business with Iran could significantly outweigh political considerations.
The US-led P5+1 world powers and Tehran are currently in the midst of negotiations to hammer out a deal to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions and remove crippling sanctions imposed on the Islamic Republic. On Saturday, the Associated Press reported that the powers and Iran had drawn up a draft document on the pace and timing of sanctions relief, advancing on one of the most contentious issues at their negotiations.
Israel reacted furiously to the development, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warning on Sunday that the six world powers were dangerously caving to the Islamic Republic’s every demand. “It seems that the nuclear talks in Iran have yielded a collapse, not a breakthrough,” Netanyahu said at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting. “The major powers’ concessions are growing.”
On Sunday, US Secretary of State John Kerry said that while “genuine progress” had been made and the sides “have never been closer, at this point, this negotiation could go either way. If the hard choices get made in the next couple of days, and made quickly, we could get an agreement this week.” Speaking from talks in Vienna, Kerry added: “But if they are not made, we will not.”
Assuming the final accord is submitted to Congress by July 9, US lawmakers will have a 30-day review period for any agreement during which sanctions on Iran cannot be waived. Should the deal fail to pass, President Barack Obama will have the right to veto, a power he has vowed to use. To overcome the veto, the deal will need to be rejected in a second round of voting by two thirds of Congress and the Senate.
Israel, according to a report in Ynet late Sunday, intends to use diplomatic pressure to have the deal quashed in the first round in Congress but is also gearing up to double down should that effort fail and Obama uses his presidential veto, to have the deal blocked in the next round. Sources in Jerusalem assess that the deal will likely be approved in the initial stage, with Congress fearing that any delay could harm US industry, as the other world powers rush to resume business with Iran, the Ynet report said. Others believe not all is lost and the deal can be defeated, with the right diplomatic work on Israel’s part.
France has already been gearing up for the resumption of its substantial economic dealings with Iran, under the assumption that a nuclear agreement with Tehran is likely in the near future. Around 100 French companies are reportedly planning to participate in a delegation to Tehran in September to review business opportunities in the Islamic republic. Other countries are likely to follow, assuming a deal is reached.
STRATEGIES FOR ISRAEL AFTER FAILED AMERICAN DIPLOMACY
Louis René Beres
Arutz Sheva, July 2, 2015
Unsurprisingly, the Obama strategy of concessionary nuclear negotiations with Iran has failed. Now, above all, Israel will need to reassess certain core assumptions of its national defense planning. Amid palpably expanding regional disorder, the prime minister and his security advisors will need to determine if Tehran can be expected to act "rationally" in vital matters of strategic deterrence. Among other obligations, therefore, Jerusalem must accurately predict whether the Iranians will consistently value their country's physical survival more highly than any other objective, or whether, at least in some readily identifiable circumstances, they might act according to presumptively sacred doctrines of Shiite theology.
For Israel, going forward, there can be no more indispensable planning task than working through this far-reaching prediction. Simultaneously, Jerusalem will need to evaluate certain steadily growing risks from potentially non-rational terrorist groups, especially Hezbollah and ISIS. These corollary assessments will also have to account for a still-broader regional pattern of sectarian fragmentation, and, conceivably, for an almost-primal chaos. This starkly incendiary pattern could even include unexpected alignments between traditionally enemy states.
To wit, we now already witness possibly strengthening Israeli ties with Saudi Arabia contra ISIS, and, with Egypt, against Muslim Brotherhood/Hamas. To some extent, reflecting constantly changing configurations of regional power, these unusual partnerships may proceed openly and unhidden…
Undoubtedly, Israeli planning imperatives will become more complicated. Soon, in Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv, there must also be demonstrated a more serious intellectual regard for a third logical possibility. This more opaque prospect concerns the specially bewildering threat of enemy madness, a disorienting hazard that could be exhibited at both national and sub-national (terrorist proxy) levels. Significantly, too, enemy madness could present as a threat from individual states, acting together with certain other states, or from such recognizable sub-state/sub-national adversaries as ISIS or Hezbollah.
Conceptually, in all world politics, madness must be distinguished from both rationality and irrationality. Madness, in contrast to these other two decisional dispositions, would signify abandoning any and all consistent rank-orderings of national security preferences. Madness, it follows, could prove to be the most concerning adversarial stance for Israel to confront.
An authentically mad Iranian national leadership, that is, one with a no-longer determinable ordering of preferences, would be more-or-less unpredictable. For Israel, having to face an expectedly mad nuclear adversary in Tehran, could represent the unambiguously worst case scenario. Arguably, however, such a conspicuously fearful narrative, along with its multiple terror-group impediments to Israeli nuclear deterrence, is implausible. Still, it is conceivable. In any event, Israel will have no choice in determining the mindset of its enemies. This is true whether these many foes are authoritative national leaders in Tehran, or sub-national terrorist decision-makers in Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Yemen. or elsewhere. Obviously, whether enemy decision makers will turn out to be rational, irrational, or mad must lie beyond any source of earthly power of persuasion in Israel. Nonetheless, appropriate predictions will need to be made and acted upon.
Back in 2012, Meir Dagan, speaking to CBS interviewer Leslie Stahl, stated reassuringly: "The regime in Iran is a very rational one." Then, however, the former Mossad chief was suggesting only that the Iranian regime was not mad; that it could be expected to prudently consider all pertinent decisional consequences. This suggests that Dagan's particular notion of Iranian rationality resembled the above meaning of irrationality. The Tehran regime, meant Dagan, should simply be expected to weigh the anticipated costs and benefits of all policy alternatives, and to array its expressed preferences within a predictably consistent rank-ordering. There had been no suggestion, by Dagan, that Iranian leaders would necessarily and consistently value national survival more highly than any other preference, or combination of preferences. In other words, Dagan's definition of Iranian rationality fell considerably short of the meaning used here.
Going forward, Israel must protect itself against a prospectively nuclear Iran by refining an appropriate strategy of nuclear deterrence. Among other things, this increasingly complex strategy will need to include interlocking plans for active missile defenses, a willingness to become purposefully "less ambiguous" about certain Israeli nuclear forces and doctrine, and a suitably recognizable policy for expanded sea-basing (submarines) of nuclear forces. But the successful deterrence of an already-nuclear Iranian regime should not be taken for granted. At a minimum, the resultant balance-of-terror might not adequately resemble those once-stable postures of mutual assured destruction (MAD) that had once existed between the Soviet Union and the United States…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
OBAMA NEEDS TO WALK AWAY FROM AN AWFUL DEAL WITH IRAN
Kevin McCarthy
Washington Post, July 1, 2015
When former advisers to President Obama contribute to an open, bipartisan letter outlining their collective concerns that the nuclear deal the administration is negotiating with Iran would fall very short of its own standard of a “good” agreement, something is wrong. And they aren’t the only ones who are nervous. Now that the deadline for the negotiations has passed, Obama should ignore the rhetoric that his legacy depends on an agreement and be prepared to reject a bad deal.
Decades ago, Ronald Reagan was faced with a similar dilemma in talks with the Soviet Union at Reykjavik, Iceland. Despite knowing that any agreement with the Russians would earn broad praise, Reagan walked away, only to come back to the table later and secure a better deal. Reagan understood that peace without freedom is meaningless and that knowing when to walk away from the negotiation table is just as important as knowing when to sit down.
Recent reports on the status of nuclear negotiations, combined with statements from senior Obama administration officials, give serious cause for three main areas of concern. These include the administration’s apparent willingness to allow Iran to keep its past military nuclear work secret, the potential lifting of sanctions not tied to Iran’s nuclear program and U.S. negotiators’ apparent lack of insistence on vigorous inspections as part of an eventual deal. All three reflect this administration’s unbridled quest for an agreement. But all three would guarantee a bad deal.
Only two months ago, Secretary of State John F. Kerry told PBS that the Iranian regime would absolutely have to account for potential previous nuclear weaponization activities if there’s going to be a deal. Iran’s suspected past work toward military-grade weapons undermines claims that it is pursuing a peaceful, civilian nuclear program. There is no way to accurately gauge the status of Iran’s nuclear capability without knowing what it has been hiding all these years. Considering that the history of Iran’s nuclear program is replete with efforts to obfuscate and deceive, the onus is on Iran to prove that it has nothing to hide. That hasn’t happened — but we must insist on it.
But U.S. negotiators aren’t insisting. Kerry said recently that “we’re not fixated on Iran specifically accounting for what they did at one point in time or another.” These wild vacillations only spur congressional concern over the direction of the negotiations. In regard to the second concern, Obama remarked in April that U.S. sanctions on Iran over its support for terrorism, human rights abuses and its ballistic missile program will continue to be fully enforced under a final deal. Now, according to the Associated Press, the White House is attempting to redefine all sanctions as nuclear-related so they can be lifted after a final deal is struck. What’s changed other than the administration’s increasing desperation to get a deal?
This is gravely concerning to those of us in Congress who define these sanctions as addressing a wide range of Iran’s nefarious acts. They should be lifted only if the Iranians address all of these activities. Promising Iran relief from sanctions that aren’t related to its nuclear program would remove all leverage to enforce Iranian compliance and punish the regime for abhorrent human rights abuses and global acts of terrorism.
Sanctions are what brought Iran to the table in the first place. Iran’s crude oil exports have nearly halved in three years, Iranian banks have been barred from the international financial system and extensive nuclear proliferation, missile and other arms-related sanctions have hampered Iran’s quest for regional hegemony. Any deal that explicitly or implicitly gives the Iranians sanctions relief on anything other than the country’s long-term and verifiable performance on its obligations is a bad deal.
A bad deal would also take the Iranian regime at its word that it isn’t cheating on its nuclear commitments. International inspectors must have “anywhere, anytime” access to the Iranian sites they need to visit, including military and other sensitive facilities. The United States should not grant Iran veto power over international inspectors. The Iranian regime’s refusal to submit to intrusive inspections would be a telling indicator that it intends to continue its deception.
The words of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei have done little to dispel this notion. Khamenei has vowed to reject allowing international inspectors to visit Iran’s military sites or interviewing nuclear scientists. Iran’s Parliament agreed — passing legislation that bans these types of inspections as part of any eventual deal. As negotiations continue, Congress stands ready to stand up for core U.S. national security interests — and against a bad deal with Iran. Hopefully, President Obama will see the wisdom in President Reagan’s example.
WHY IS OBAMA ABANDONING 70 YEARS
OF U.S. NONPROLIFERATION POLICY?
Matthew Kroenig
Tablet, June 15, 2015
As the June 30 deadline for striking a comprehensive nuclear deal with Iran looms, discussions quickly get bogged down in debates about numbers and types of centrifuges, schedules for sanctions relief, and procedures for international inspections. These arcane issues cause many people’s eyes to glaze over, but, in reality, the details of the ongoing negotiations are acutely irrelevant to the merits of the deal that the Obama Administration wants to strike.
Indeed, one can assess the merits of the outlined nuclear deal without any reference whatsoever to its finer points. The framework deal does not even come close to qualifying as an acceptable nuclear agreement, and the reason is simple and easy to understand: Since the beginning of the nuclear era, scientists have understood that the exact same technology could be used to produce fuel either for nuclear energy or for nuclear weapons. The two methods for producing nuclear fuel, uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing, therefore, became known as “sensitive nuclear technologies.” The United States has always opposed the spread of sensitive nuclear technologies to all states, including its own allies, and it should not make an exception for Iran.
I personally worked on nuclear issues both in and out of government (including at the Pentagon and other agencies) for over a decade, and I and many of my colleagues had always assumed that the only way to prevent nuclear proliferation in Iran would be to eliminate its uranium enrichment capability. For over a decade, U.S. policy reflected this assessment. Throughout the 2000s, the Bush Administration engaged in international negotiations with Iran, but its bottom line never changed: The only deal worth having was one that stopped enrichment in Iran. Senator and U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama also supported this goal, saying at a 2007 meeting of AIPAC, “The world must work to stop Iran’s uranium-enrichment program.”
The policy that both Democratic and Republican presidents and presidential candidates have supported for the past seven decades is a sensible compromise that encourages the peaceful uses of nuclear technology while managing its proliferation dangers: Countries can operate nuclear reactors for power or research purposes, but they are not permitted to make their own fuel. The vast majority of countries on Earth with nuclear programs do not possess sensitive nuclear facilities. Rather the fuel is provided by a more advanced nuclear power, such as Russia, France, or the United States. This eliminates the need for the spread of dangerous enrichment or reprocessing programs to new countries. Countries like Iran that insist on developing their own sensitive technologies for “peaceful purposes,” therefore, are tipping their hand and revealing a likely intention to build the bomb.
To stop determined proliferators, the United States and the rest of the international community have worked hard to halt the spread of enrichment and reprocessing technologies, a campaign that has been prosecuted with equal vigor by Democratic and Republican administrations alike. The enforcement of this policy began even before nuclear weapons were invented, when Norwegian saboteurs and allied bombing runs knocked out a heavy-water production facility necessary for the plutonium path to the bomb (and similar to Iran’s heavy-water production facility under construction at Arak) located in Nazi-occupied Norway. It continued after World War II as the United States tried to prevent the leaking of dangerous nuclear know-how. In 1946, the U.S. Congress passed the McMahon Act, which made it illegal for the United States to cooperate with any country, including its closest allies, on sensitive nuclear technologies. Even countries that had worked with the United States to invent the bomb at the Manhattan project, like Canada and Great Britain, were cut off.
Several advanced industrial countries, including Britain, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, were able to develop sensitive nuclear technologies early in the nuclear era without Washington’s assistance, but this only reinforced the United States’ understanding about the potential dangers of these dual-use nuclear technologies.
When America’s Cold War adversaries, the Soviet Union and China, began enrichment and reprocessing programs, the United States immediately interpreted these as the building blocks of a nuclear weapons program, and high-level U.S. decision makers seriously considered military strikes against these facilities to keep these countries from the bomb. (In the end, they refrained only because they feared starting a superpower war, something that has not been a concern since the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1989.)
Not even Israel, America’s longstanding security partner, was spared from America’s deep commitment to nonproliferation. When the U.S. government suspected that Israel was building a secret reprocessing plant beneath its reactor at Dimona in the early 1960s, U.S. President John F. Kennedy demanded that Israel allow inspectors on the site. Kennedy wrote a letter to Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, threatening that if Israel were not more forthcoming about an issue as important to international security as the possible existence of a secret plutonium reprocessing plant, then “America’s deep commitment to the security of Israel” could be “jeopardized.”
The United States soon understood that it would need a multilateral framework for managing the spread of nuclear weapons, and in 1968 it led the negotiations of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). All nonnuclear weapon state signatories, including Iran, agreed never to build nuclear weapons in exchange for several benefits, including the “inalienable right to peaceful nuclear technology.” Iran insists that this treaty grants it a “right to enrich,” but the NPT does not explicitly mention uranium enrichment, and the United States has never interpreted Article IV as providing an inalienable right to sensitive nuclear technologies.
To further strengthen multilateral bulwarks against the spread of sensitive nuclear technologies, then-U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger spearheaded the creation of the Nuclear Suppliers Group in 1975. This international cartel of capable nuclear supplier states places tough restrictions on the transfer of uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing technologies.
The strength of the United States’ nonproliferation approach can be seen in the vast majority of countries that never attempted to develop sensitive nuclear technologies, but when these measures were not enough, Washington went to work on a case-by-case basis to put an end to sensitive nuclear programs, even taking the gloves off in standoffs with friends. In 1975, when Germany planned to build enrichment and reprocessing plants for Brazil in the so-called nuclear “deal of the century,” Washington intervened to slow and eventually kill the deal. In the late 1970s, it also convinced France to cancel the sale of a plutonium reprocessing plant to Pakistan and in 1985 it blocked the transfer of reprocessing technology from Argentina to Libya. When U.S. allies Taiwan and South Korean began reprocessing programs in the late 1970s, the United States threatened to withdraw America’s security guarantee if the programs continued and the countries relented…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
The World Stayed Silent – Iran Short Film Series #7 (Video): Youtube, June 30, 2015
U.N. Nuclear Chief Is Optimistic About Iranian Cooperation on Review: Michael R. Gordon & David E. Sanger, New York Times, July 4, 2015—The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency said on Saturday that, with Iranian cooperation, his agency could complete an assessment on Iran’s suspected past nuclear work by December, potentially removing a major obstacle to a nuclear agreement.
Iran’s Toxic Deal is Not a Legacy Obama Should Leave: Andrew Bowen, Al-Arabiya, July 5, 2014—Naïve optimism has enveloped the “final” hours of talks between Washington and Tehran on a nuclear agreement.
U.S. and Iran: the Unbearable Awkwardness of Defending Your Enemy: Louis Charbonneau, Reuters, July 5, 2015 —It's always awkward to defend your enemies. But that's the position U.S. President Barack Obama's administration has found itself in with Iran as it pushes for an historic accord that would end a 12-year nuclear standoff.
