peacefare.net

Straw men

Michael Makovsky, CEO of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), sent me a fund-raising letter today. As a supporter of the Iran nuclear deal, I won’t be responding with money (I’ve sent that on to J-Street, which is lobbying in favor). But I would like to examine Michael’s arguments against the deal. Obama’s deal, he says,

• Does not deprive Iran of nuclear weapons capability – as President Obama promised he would do during the last election – but legitimizes Iran as a nuclear power.

• Depends heavily upon a woefully inadequate inspections regime – indeed, Iran gets to inspect some of it’s own sites!

• Does not require Iran to close ANY of its nuclear facilities.

• Allows Iran to continue operating a significant number of centrifuges – devices essential to producing the high-grade fissionable material required to make bombs.

• Ignores Iran’s program to develop ballistic missiles that will be able to deliver nuclear warheads to the United States.

Let’s examine these assertions one by one.

1. Iran has nuclear capabilities, but so far as anyone knows it has no nuclear weapons capability, unless you regard being able to enrich uranium as conferring it. But that would mean non-nuclear weapons countries like Australia, Brazil, Argentina, Germany, India, Iran, Japan, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, and Spain also have nuclear weapons capability. There is no international prohibition on enriching uranium. Nor do I know of any way to get a country to unlearn uranium enrichment. JINSA might prefer that Iran not do it, but wishing won’t make it so. Nor will rejecting the agreement.
2. The international inspections regime Iran has accepted in the nuclear deal is the most intrusive ever imposed on any state. The claim that Iran will inspect its own sites is based on a leaked, draft document whose authenticity the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has denied. No state has ever developed nuclear weapons with materials monitored by the IAEA. It isn’t likely under an unprecedented, full fuel cycle inspection regime like the one Iran has accepted.
3. Closure of nuclear facilities is not required, but the number of centrifuges Iran is allowed is cut by two-thirds, its stockpile of enriched uranium by even more and its heavy water reactor will be completely redesigned to produce less plutonium.
4. A lot of things are essential to producing fissionable material, but under the agreement no high-grade fissionable material is allowed. Nor is the uranium and plutonium metallurgy required to make nuclear weapons. That prohibition is permanent.
5. That’s right: an agreement on the nuclear weapons program does not directly address the missile program, though sanctions against selling missiles or missile technology to Iran will continue for five to eight years. Had we introduced missiles into the negotiation, we would likely have gotten less on nuclear technology. Is that what JINSA would have preferred?

What people don’t say is often as important as what they do. Michael’s letter claims the deal is “a threat to Israel and a threat to America.” But he fails to argue how either Israel or America would be better off without the deal. He offers no alternative at all.

But the consequences of rejecting the deal are clear enough. Either Iran will

a) likewise reject the deal, continue to accumulate centrifuges and highly enriched uranium, and complete a plutonium-producing reactor, as they did for the ten years before the P5+1 opened the negotiation with Tehran, or

b) uphold its end of the bargain in exchange for European, Chinese and Russian lifting of sanctions, thus reducing American leverage and gaining resources for more trouble-making in the region, just as they will with the nuclear deal.

Yes, the US could try to impose “secondary” sanctions on the Europeans, Chinese and Russians who do business with Iran, but that will not be 100% effective and will not improve relations with countries whose cooperation we need on other issues (Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya–just to name a few).

Note that Iran, not the US, will determine which option is taken. That alone should make the advocates of a strong America hesitate about rejection of the deal.

Democratic members of both houses of Congress, who are JINSA’s principal lobbying objective, appear to be rejecting Makovsky’s arguments, including a majority of the Jewish members. The Administration is on track to gain enough votes to uphold the President’s veto of a legislative attempt to block implementation of the deal. The straw men won’t stand.

War is complicated

I’m not often an enthusiast for videos, but this one seems to me to do a good job on the complicated relations of Iran and the US in the Iraq context. It is important to keep in mind, however, that in Syria the US and Iran come out more definitively on different sides (Iran with Bashar al Assad and the US at least nominally against), even though they both seek to defeat the Islamic State.

Pushback

The big downside of the Iran nuclear deal is what the Iranians get: somewhere between $50 and $100 billion in unfrozen assets once sanctions are lifted. While I support the deal because it delays any Iranian attempt to get nuclear weapons by at least 10-15 years (and maybe forever), I also recognize that some portion of the unfrozen assets and the increased revenue from future oil and eventually gas sales will be used for activities that destabilize the Middle East and potentially areas beyond. The notion that it will all go to improving the lot of ordinary Iranians is bozotic.

The Obama Administration has hesitated during the negotiations to push back hard against Iranian support for Hizbollah in Syria and Lebanon, the Houthi rebellion in Yemen and arming of Shia militants in Bahrain. Iran views these efforts, which are under the control of the Supreme Leader (SL) and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), as protecting its homeland from Sunni extremists and possible Israeli attack. The Administration’s logic seems to be that pushing back harder might have weakened Rouhani’s standing within the Islamic Republic and made conclusion of a deal on the nuclear program, which is also under SL/IRGC control, impossible.

So what about now? There is still an argument to be made: push back against Iran’s regional troublemaking could stiffen the Iranian reaction and make implementation of the deal more difficult. But that argument is inconsistent with the Administration’s own claim that the deal concerns the nuclear file, as Middle Easterners call it, and nothing else. We are paying for this deal with lifting sanctions. We shouldn’t have to pay for it by tolerating Iranian subversion using money derived from lifting sanctions.

Rob Satloff last week offered a handy checklist of options to pushback against Iranian subversion in the region:

Ramp up U.S. and allied efforts to counter Iran’s negative actions in the Middle East, including interdicting weapons supplies to Hezbollah, Assad, and the Houthis in Yemen; designating as terrorists more leaders of Iranian-backed Shiite militias in Iraq that are committing atrocities; expanding the training and arming of not only the Iraqi security forces but also the Kurdish peshmerga in the north and vetted Sunni forces in western Iraq; and working with Turkey to create a real safe haven in northern Syria where refugees can obtain humanitarian aid and vetted, non-extremist opposition fighters can be trained and equipped to fight against both ISIS and the Iran-backed Assad regime.

All of these seem to me meritorious, but I imagine the Administration might argue that most are already in train. Certainly there have been efforts to interdict weapons going to the Houthis and Assad; I imagine also to Hizbollah, whose missile supplies the Israelis have repeatedly attacked. Training of the Kurds and Sunnis in Iraq started some time ago. Both clandestine and public programs have been training and equipping non-extremist opposition fighters in Syria, though the numbers and outcomes so far have been ridiculously low. Certainly more and better can and should be done.

The only really new idea here–new in the sense that the Administration hasn’t yet signed on to it, but it has been around for years–is the “safe” haven in northern Syria. I certainly don’t understand what the Turks and Americans might have agreed to already and plan to talk with colleagues in the Pentagon next week about that. But let’s imagine that they have agreed on the basic idea, which would deprive the regime of any pretense of sovereignty in a border area of the country and begin to offer an opposition alternative. What is required to make it viable?

There are five basic requirements to be considered:

• Security
• Governance
• Rule of law
• Economic activity
• Social services, including humanitarian aid

Without any one of these, Syrians won’t go to a safe haven and the effort will fail, like many others before it. The conditions created don’t have to be perfect, but they need to be better than what people can find in Syria outside the safe haven. That might appear a low bar, but really is isn’t: there are regime-controlled areas in Syria that have suffered relatively little, in which even its opponents seek haven. And the refugees camps in Turkey are not the worst on earth.

In a future post, I’ll consider how to meet these requirements, which are far from trivial, especially under the conditions prevailing at the moment in northern Syria.