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Contents:
A Bad Deal Gets Worse: Lee Smith, Weekly Standard, Dec. 1, 2014— As we go to press, the White House has reportedly offered Iran a deal regarding its nuclear program, a framework agreement with details to be worked out in the coming months.
Obama’s Coming War With Congress Over Iran: Eric R. Mandel, Jerusalem Post, Dec. 8, 2014— In order to win the elections that have been foisted upon him, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu must run a focused campaign against Israel's bona fide foes, not against the novice and petty politicians with whom he has been squabbling.
Iran Cheats, Obama Whitewashes: Bret Stephens, Wall Street Journal, Nov. 24, 2014 — Does it matter what sort of deal—or further extension, or non-deal—ultimately emerges from the endless parleys over Iran’s nuclear program?
A Western Tourist Hasn’t a Chance in a Persian Bazaar: Dr. Mordechai Kedar, Breaking Israel News, Dec. 1, 2014— There are two kinds of markets in the world today: the Western store and the Eastern bazaar.
Report: Iran Cheating on Nuclear Sanctions: Daniel Halper, Weekly Standard, Dec. 8, 2014
Iran Extension Foreshadows a Bad Nuclear Deal: Emanuele Ottolenghi, RealClearWorld, Nov. 30, 2014
U.S. Accuses Iran of Secretly Breaching U.N. Nuclear Sanctions: Colum Lynch, Foreign Policy, Dec. 8, 2014
Iran Remains the Greatest Challenge in U.S.-Israel Relations: Maj. Gen. (res.) Yaacov Amidror, JCPA, Nov. 30, 2014
Lee Smith
Weekly Standard, Dec. 1, 2014
…The White House has made it clear it wants a deal more than the Islamic Republic does. Under the circumstances, why wouldn’t Tehran wait to see how many more U.S. concessions it can extract? There appears to be compromise on a number of major issues, like the number of centrifuges Iran will be able to keep (around 5,000). Other details, like the pace of sanctions relief and addressing the possible military dimensions of the program, seem to be where the Iranians are trying to force the administration to bend. All we know for certain is that the Obama White House is a long way from where it was a year ago, and not in a good sense.
Back then the administration told Congress not to worry about oversight—it was going to get a good deal or walk away from the table. No deal at all was better than a bad one. Last year, the slogan was “stop, shut, and ship,” which meant the Iranians would have no choice but to cease their weapons program once and for all. Now, the deal would compel the Iranians only to disconnect centrifuges, which would leave them in a position to restart activities promptly—and, without a proper verification regime, secretly. The administration is said to be happy to have bargained Iran down to around 5,000 centrifuges—a number low enough that the international community would have approximately six months’ notice if Iran tried to break out. This assumes transparency—that Washington and its allies can accurately assess the state of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. However, the revelation over the last decade of secret Iranian facilities—at Natanz, then Fordow—is evidence that our window into Iranian nuclear activities is cloudy. It assumes further that if we could forecast a breakout, the international community would have the will to stop Iran, that it would be possible, for instance, to get a resolution through the United Nations Security Council in a timely fashion. It assumes therefore not only the acquiescence of allies, like Germany, already eager to do business with a post-sanctions Iran, but also the agreement of Russia and China, who in fact would be certain to stall, if not block, action at the U.N.
Moreover, it is worth noting that the preceding conditions are applicable only in a best-case scenario, in which the White House might really have six months to act. It is much more likely that the administration will have no margin of error—which is to say, if we are talking about activities at a clandestine facility, the breakout time will be measured not in months but in weeks. As David Albright, founder and president of the Institute for Science and International Security, explains, one of the major issues dividing the two sides is the issue of how PMDs (the term of art for possible military dimensions) affect the verification regime. The International Atomic Energy Agency, Albright said on a conference call last week organized by the Israel Project, needs to know the history of Iran’s nuclear program. Without that, he said, “we simply cannot understand if Iran . . . has hidden parts of [a] past nuclear weapons program, perhaps even nuclear material. And so the IAEA simply cannot give the assurance that there’s not some secret part there unless they understand the history and know who did what, where it was done, and then have assurance that those people and those activities at those facilities have stopped, and they’ve not been moved someplace else.”
In other words, if Iran can already undermine the organization responsible for verifying compliance with the agreement, then it can certainly do so in the future as well. Indeed, as Albright explains, “it would be a lot easier in the future, when there are no . . . major economic and financial sanctions that can leverage Iran to cooperate.” Presumably, this is the item the Iranian side is most eager to see the White House concede: to hollow out the verification regime and thereby help Iran keep aspects of its program out of the spotlight of IAEA inspectors. Maybe the Obama administration was simply naïve to have believed that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei would give newly elected president Hassan Rouhani a lot of room to maneuver in nuclear talks. Perhaps the White House was arrogant to think that sanctions relief would get Rouhani, as some administration officials put it, “addicted to cash” and force him to make concessions on the nuclear program in order to revive the Iranian economy.
If it wasn’t simply naïveté and arrogance, then the White House misled the American people and their representatives in Congress as well as U.S. allies. Either way, the end result is an empowered Islamic Republic and a further crumbling of the American-brokered order in the Middle East. The White House prides itself on the notion that its nuclear negotiations with Iran will have prevented an other-wise inevitable war. The truth is the opposite. In lifting sanctions and yielding repeatedly to an expansionist Iran, the Obama administration has brought America and its allies to this pass: Either Iran will get a nuclear bomb, or war will be the only way to stop it. Worse, the administration has increased the chances we might get both outcomes at once.
OBAMA’S COMING WAR WITH CONGRESS OVER IRAN
Eric R. Mandel
Jerusalem Post, Dec. 8, 2014
What does Democratic New York Senator Charles Schumer’s attack on President Barack Obama’ Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) have to do with Iran? If you missed it, Schumer said Democrats “blew the opportunity the American people gave them” by focusing “on the wrong problem – health care.” The politically savvy Schumer, who is adept at reading tea leaves, knows that for 2016 and beyond, very few Democrats will want to hitch their re-election prospects to the Obama legacy. Moderate Democrats in the House and Senate are distancing themselves from an unpopular Democratic president in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. The president has chosen to ignore the shellacking his party sustained in the midterm election, and instead has decided to go on the offensive. He does not see the defeat as a call from the American people for compromise and humility; he sees it as a call for unilateral executive action. It is a policy that scares Democrats who are up for re-election in 2016 because it is farther to the left than where they would like to position themselves before the presidential primaries, which begin in just over a year.
The surprising strong attack by a leader of the Democratic Party, who also was a leading supporter and defender of ObamaCare, has direct implications for the upcoming inevitable confrontation between Congress and the president over Iran. Inevitable because the administration is desperate to sign a deal – any deal – and call it a victory. If Senator Schumer could attack the sacrosanct Accountable Care Act, then he and other Democratic allies may be willing to confront the president on his major foreign policy initiative, concluding the Iranian nuclear negotiations. When it was politically safe to defend the president’s misguided opposition to additional sanctions, Schumer was more than happy to defend the president to a very skeptical pro-Israel community. Never mind that those additional sanctions might have created enough pressure on the authoritarian theocratic regime to actually force it to negotiate in good faith.
Schumer continued to defend Obama when the president mind-bogglingly agreed to Iranian enrichment in the interim deal, which contradicted six UN Security Council resolutions, and also agreed to sunset all Iranian obligations over time. Politics mattered more than what was right for America. However, with a lame duck president and the political winds changing, Schumer now realizes that the America people still fear a nuclear Iran, sympathize with Israel, and have concluded that the administration’s incoherent foreign policy has weakened American security interests and prestige abroad. Schumer will now do what most politicians do: “whitewash” his record and expect his constituents to develop amnesia and forget how his leadership undermined our security interests in the region by weakening our allies, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. If Schumer and some moderate Democrats want to confront the president and his aides over their handling of the Iran negotiations, they will not have to look far for ammunition. All they need to do is expose the broken promises of the administration from last fall, when both the White House and State Department agreed to work with Congress on new sanctions legislation if a treaty were not completed by July 2014.
The president knows he can outflank Congress because the proposed multi-party treaty between the P5+1 and Iran does not require Congressional approval. So what can the Republican Congress and their new Democratic allies do before a deal or framework agreement is signed this winter or spring? Pass new sanctions to become effective if: Iran is allowed to keep the Arak plutonium reactor; Iran is not required to dismantle Fordow, Natanz and Parchin; Centrifuge R&D is not completed halted; The parties agree to a sunset provision of less than 50 years; The treaty allows for more than 1,000 centrifuges or, indeed, any centrifuges other than IR-1M’s…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
IRAN CHEATS, OBAMA WHITEWASHES
Bret Stephens
Wall Street Journal, Nov. 24, 2014
Does it matter what sort of deal—or further extension, or non-deal—ultimately emerges from the endless parleys over Iran’s nuclear program? Probably not. Iran came to the table cheating on its nuclear commitments. It continued to cheat on them throughout the interim agreement it agreed to last year. And it will cheat on any undertakings it signs. We knew this, know it and will come to know it all over again. But what’s at stake in these negotiations isn’t their outcome, assuming there ever is an outcome. It’s the extent to which the outcome facilitates, or obstructs, our willingness to continue to fool ourselves about the consequences of an Iran with a nuclear weapon.
The latest confirmation of the obvious comes to us courtesy of a Nov. 17 report from David Albright and his team at the scrupulously nonpartisan Institute for Science and International Security. The ISIS study, based on findings from the International Atomic Energy Agency, concluded that Iran was stonewalling U.N. inspectors on the military dimensions of its program. It noted that Tehran had tested a model for an advanced centrifuge, in violation of the 2013 interim agreement. And it cited Iran for trying to conceal evidence of nuclear-weapons development at a military facility called Parchin. “By failing to address the IAEA’s concerns, Iran is complicating, and even threatening, the achievement of a long term nuclear deal,” the report notes dryly.
These are only Iran’s most recent evasions, piled atop two decades of documented nuclear deception. Nothing new there. But what are we to make of an American administration that is intent on providing cover for Iran’s coverups? “The IAEA has verified that Iran has complied with its commitments,” Wendy Sherman, the top U.S. nuclear negotiator, testified in July to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “It has done what it promised to do.” John Kerry went one better, telling reporters Monday that “Iran has lived up” to its commitments. The statement is false: Yukiya Amano, the director general of the IAEA, complained last week that Iran had “not provided any explanations that enable the Agency to clarify the outstanding practical measures” related to suspected work on weaponization. Since when did trust but verify become whitewash and hornswoggle? That’s a question someone ought to ask Mr. Kerry or Ms. Sherman at their next committee appearance, especially since it has become clear that the administration has a record of arms-control dissembling. To wit, the State Department under Hillary Clinton had reason to know that Russia—with which the U.S. was then in “reset” mode—was violating the 1987 treaty on Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces. Yet it didn’t disclose this in arms-control reports to Congress, nor did it mention the fact prior to the Senate’s 2010 ratification of the New Start treaty on strategic weapons.
“We’re not going to pass another treaty in the U.S. Senate if our colleagues [in the administration] are sitting up there knowing somebody is cheating.” That was then-Sen. John Kerry in November 2012, complaining about the coverup. The administration only came clean about the Kremlin’s breaches last summer, presumably after it had finally given up hopes for its Russian reset. Why the spin and dishonesty? Partly it’s the old Platonic conceit of the Noble Lie—public bamboozlement in the service of the greater good—that propels so much contemporary liberal policy-making (cf. Gruber, Jonathan: transparency, lack of). So long as the higher goal is a health-care bill, or arms control with Russia, or a nuclear deal with Iran, why should the low truth of facts and figures interfere with the high truth of hopes and ideals? But this lets the administration off too easily. The real problem is cowardice. As a matter of politics it cannot acknowledge what, privately, it believes: that a nuclear Iran is undesirable but probably inevitable and hardly catastrophic. As a matter of strategy, it refuses to commit to the only realistic course of action that could accomplish the goal it professes to seek: The elimination of Iran’s nuclear capabilities by a combination of genuinely crippling sanctions and targeted military strikes.
And so—because the administration lacks the political courage of its real convictions or the martial courage of its fake ones—we are wedded to this sham process of negotiation. “They pretend to pay us; we pretend to work,” went the old joke about labor in the Soviet Union. Just so with these talks. Iranians pretend not to cheat; we pretend not to notice. All that’s left to do is stand back and wait for something to happen. Eventually, something will happen. Perhaps Iran will simply walk away from the talks, daring this feckless administration to act. Perhaps we will discover another undeclared Iranian nuclear facility, possibly not in Iran itself. Perhaps the Israelis really will act. Perhaps the Saudis will. All of this may suit the president’s psychological yearning to turn himself into a bystander—innocent, in his own eyes—in the Iranian nuclear crisis. But it’s also a useful reminder that, in the contest between hard-won experience and disappointed idealism, the latter always wins in the liberal mind.
A WESTERN TOURIST HASN’T A CHANCE
Dr. Mordechai Kedar
Breaking Israel News, Dec. 1, 2014
There are two kinds of markets in the world today: the Western store and the Eastern bazaar. In the West, stores have fixed prices for merchandise, with the cost visible on each item by law. Everyone pays the same amount for his purchases, whether he really wants what is for sale or can manage perfectly well without it. Westerners are used to this kind of shopping, which is why many of them spend a good deal of time and effort to find the stores with the best prices. The price is objective and based on the merchandise, not on the personality of the seller or the identity of the buyer. You will not find someone arguing about a price in a store in the United States and anyone who dares to do so is regarded like a creature from Mars, a barbarian from another culture.
In contrast, in the Middle East, bazaar culture is the rule and the relationship between buyer and seller is based on totally different cultural norms. The price varies from minute to minute depending on various factors: how badly the seller needs the money he can get from the sale; how much the buyer wants the merchandise; whether the seller is afraid the buyer will leave him and look for another seller; how many other traders are offering the same item. When the seller needs cash and the buyer can live without the merchandise, when there are other traders with similar items and the buyer can get to them easily – the price goes down. If the seller is not in need of the money, the buyer really wants the merchandise and especially if he says he is willing to pay anything for it, and if there are no others selling the same thing or it is hard to get to them – the price will be high. This is where market forces play a central role in determining the price of merchandise.
In the Middle Eastern bazaar culture there is another, very important factor, the personal one. The buyer and seller want to see one another, touch one another, talk to each other and feel each other. The interpersonal contact, smile, handshake, words of welcome, questions and answers, familiarity, body language, all are part of the negotiations on the price. A deal is not just an economic act, it is an event, almost like a wedding. Factors involved here have nothing to do with economics: if the seller is someone the buyer is not willing to talk to because he is, for example, a Jew, Christian, Shiite, Sunni, Kurd, Persian, Turk or member of any group the buyer does not like, he will not buy from him even if the item is practically free of charge. Someone from the West – let’s say a tourist, for our purposes – who enters a Middle Eastern bazaar, gets high from the odors, confused by the scenes, dizzy from the colors, excited by the music, disgusted by the crowding, and then buys whatever he sees because the prices are low, only to discover that night, at his hotel , that he overpaid, the paint is peeling off and the merchandise is falling apart or rotten. Besides, some of it is made in China and can be bought on the internet for half of what he paid. Why does this happen? Because the tourist didn’t know the rules of the bazaar and the traders realized that from a mile away. They don’t mind cheating him because he is a Christian, an American, a stranger who pays what he is asked and doesn’t understand the rules. They also know that he is part of a group of tourists with a limited amount of time to shop in the bazaar and is therefore running from one stand to another in order to manage to buy as many items as possible. He doesn’t bargain because he hasn’t got the time and is not used to doing that at home in the USA. He thinks it is demeaning to try to bargain down prices.
The negotiations taking place over the last sixteen years between Iran and the West are a perfect example of the cultural abyss between the Western negotiators and their Iranian counterparts, experts at trading in the bazaar where hiding information and cheating are basic principles of their Shiite culture. The differences between the norms of a tourist and the culture of the Persian bazaar brought about the bitter outcome that gave the Iranians the object they needed the most – time. They paid the price of a few sanctions, but now they see those disappearing, and most important: they have provided very little in terms of limiting their military nuclear plans. The Iranians played the role of the seller throughout, the seller who doesn’t need to be rid of his merchandise and who has all the time in the world. They sold damaged goods over and over in the form of agreements that they did not keep, and the West did not come to the obvious conclusion: they are professional charlatans, inveterate liars and brilliant prevaricators. The reason is that they are the only sellers in the market, and the West – at least that is how its leaders feel – must reach an agreement with Iran at any price. The Iranians have never felt that the West wants to or is able to give them – to the Ayatollahs, that is – one good blow that will send them flying from the bazaar to hell so that another trader can take their place. Why, then, should they behave any differently?
The West played the role of the dumb tourist as it shopped in the Iranian bazaar; the leaders of world powers sent distress signals about deadlines, because they had to come to their voters with proof that they had achieved a peace deal “in our time”. The Iranians felt the pressure and raised the price, lowered the quality and sold the West agreements they had no intention of keeping. They wore down the Western negotiators, a familiar tactic: they offered a little bit, some kind of concession, the West jumped at it only to discover that is was unconnected to the issue at hand. Most important, crucially important, were the smiles on Rouhani’s face. They just loved to be able to say that he is not Ahmadinejad, that this is a new, nice , friendly man and cannot possibly be putting one over on us because he is not an extremist. He is one of us because he speaks English, surfs the web and uses a smartphone. Zrif continued to leave a similar impression on them.
The Iranian bazaar was a resounding success, and the Western tourist – who doesn’t know the rules – lost once again: he paid the price of granting the Iranians more time and did not get the merchandise he wanted, because he does not have an agreement and it is not certain that he will ever get one as Iran will have the bomb before then – in another seven months. The West does not understand the most basic fact: there is only one thing that can pressure Iran and the West is not willing to do it: that is, threatening the continuation of Ayatollah rule. The West has never used that card to get its way, so why should the Ayatollahs pay for an agreement that they do not want? Worst of all is that there were those that warned the Western powers that they would fall into the Iranian bazaar’s pit. One of them was Binyamin Netanyahu, even before he became Prime Minister of Israel. Harold Rhode wrote about it clearly and so did the writer of this article. The problem with those who negotiated with the Iranians is that they thought they knew how Iranians behave, believed the lies of the consummate liars, and the deceptions of the professional deceivers. History will sadly ridicule the story of how a wayward and stubborn country could pull the wool over the eyes of intelligent and well educated, powerful negotiators who were psychologically incapable of using their power, and ensnare them in a Persian bazaar trap where only someone who learns the rules can survive.
Report: Iran Cheating on Nuclear Sanctions: Daniel Halper, Weekly Standard, Dec. 8, 2014—Foreign Policy reports that the U.S. believes Iran is cheating on U.N. nuclear sanctions.
Iran Extension Foreshadows a Bad Nuclear Deal: Emanuele Ottolenghi, RealClearWorld, Nov. 30, 2014—The deadline for a nuclear deal came and went Monday with no agreement – just a seven-month extension of the interim agreement.
U.S. Accuses Iran of Secretly Breaching U.N. Nuclear Sanctions: Colum Lynch, Foreign Policy, Dec. 8, 2014—The United States has privately accused Iran of going on an international shopping spree to acquire components for a heavy-water reactor that American officials have long feared could be used in the production of nuclear weapons-grade plutonium.
Iran Remains the Greatest Challenge in U.S.-Israel Relations: Maj. Gen. (res.) Yaacov Amidror, BESA, Nov. 30, 2014 —In recent days, following the impolite and inappropriate personal attack against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the American press, from the mouths of high-ranking officials in Washington, relations between Israel and the U.S. have deteriorated to an all-time low. It is time to put things back in proportion, in light of the severity of the American remarks.
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