The View from Right Field

Jeffrey Goldberg May Have Explained It: President Obama Is So Hyper-Rational, He Can’t Understand How People Can Disagree With Him

Jeffrey Goldberg may have hit, perhaps unintentionally, on one of the main problems with the Obama presidency.  This is from Mr. Goldberg’s article yesterday at The Atlantic on the nuclear agreement with Iran:

“Unlike many proponents of this deal, I take the Iranian regime’s threats to exterminate Israel seriously.  (I’m not sure, based on my last conversation with Obama [an interview Mr. Goldberg conducted with the President in May of 2015], that he fully understands the depth of the regime’s anti-Semitism, in part because the regime’s anti-Semitism is so absurdly offensive and illogical that the hyper-rational Obama might not believe that serious people actually think the way certain Iranians think.)”

Read this part of what Mr. Goldberg wrote again: “the hyper-rational Obama might not believe that serious people actually think the way certain Iranians think”.  This ties in with what David Sanger wrote in The New York Times:

“Mr. Obama is essentially betting that once sanctions have been lifted, Iran’s leaders will have no choice but to use much of the new money to better the lives of their long-suffering citizens.  He has told his aides that he expects relatively little to be spent to finance terrorism or the emerging corps of Iranian cyberwarriors, a group now as elite as Iran’s nuclear scientists.”

The Critical Role of the IAEA, and Its Director General, in Any Nuclear Deal With Iran

According to The Wall Street Journal (and, I would assume, many other media outlets), the International Atomic Energy Agency, a United Nations agency, is to play a key role in the Obama administration’s proposed agreement Iran’s nuclear program.  According to the Journal:

“The Vienna-based IAEA will be tasked with policing Iran’s nuclear sites and ensuring it doesn’t work on a covert weapons program, as well as extracting answers from Tehran on its covert nuclear activity in past years. …

The U.N. agency will also have a critical say in the timing of the lifting of international sanctions by judging when Iran has completed initial steps to roll back its overall nuclear program.”

The Journal notes that some U.S. lawmakers and Mideast diplomats worry

“whether the IAEA will have the mandate, manpower and resources to effectively police Iran.

They [note] that the agency has failed to detect covert nuclear programs in Iran, Syria, North Korea and Libya in past decades.  And they [say] Tehran has repeatedly stonewalled the IAEA’s decadelong probe into allegations Iran secretly developed nuclear weapons technologies.”

U.S. “Steps Up Pressure” Against Syria On Its Continued Use of Chemical Weapons

As I have mentioned before (also here), Syria is still using chemical weapons against its own people.  Instead of the kinds of chemical weapons that Syria agreed to give up back in September of 2013, in order to avoid possible U.S. air attacks, Syria is now using chlorine gas.  And what is the United States doing about this?  Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal tells how the U.S. is “stepping up pressure” on Syria:

“Three U.S. diplomats stepped up pressure against the Syrian government on Friday by accusing it of continuing to use chemical arms against its opponents in the country’s four-year civil war.

The American ambassador to The Hague-based Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, Robert Mikulak, cited a ‘steady stream’ of accounts that the government is using chlorine as a chemical weapon, as recently as this month.

The Iran Nuclear “Agreement”

I have not written about the “agreement” with Iran regarding its nuclear program for a couple of reasons.  First, I have written about the subject before¹, and the agreement that was announced last week really doesn’t change much of what I wrote before.

Second, from what I have read about the agreement in the media, I am not sure how much of a real agreement it is.  Being a lawyer (or, at least, a former lawyer), I think of an agreement as something that is written down, with detailed terms and, hopefully, a clear understanding by both parties as to what their respective rights and obligations are. 

This is not what we have in the case of the so-called agreement with Iran.  Rather, it seems the parties talked long enough that they think they have some common understanding on a series of general ideas.  But there was no “term sheet” or “letter of intent” as to what the parties agreed.  Rather, there were dueling press releases, which were, to some extent, not in accord with each other.

A Few More Thoughts on Iran: Why the Letter by 47 Republican Senators Was a Bad Idea – And What We Need To Do Now

On Monday, 47 Republican senators, organized by Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark), sent an open letter to the leaders of Iran telling/reminding them that any agreement or arrangement Iran might enter into with President Obama on its nuclear program would, unless it was in a treaty approved by two-thirds of the Senate, be binding only on President Obama and that it might not be accepted by the next president.

While, at this point, these comments might seem a little late, I think they are still relevant because they are less focused on the past and more focused on the future; i.e., they are concerned with getting our policy on Iran closer to right for the future, regardless of how poorly we have done it in the past.  With that introduction, here are my thoughts:

I am not sure I understand the purpose of the Republican letter.  So far, the only thing it seems to have accomplished is to unite the Democrats in the Senate.  Even Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ), who has expressed strong reservations about the President’s Iran policy, including co-sponsoring sanctions legislation with Mark Kirk (R-Ill), wouldn’t sign the letter.  Instead of uniting people who want a stronger policy vis-à-vis Iran, Senator Cotton’s letter divided them.  Also, instead of uniting people to deal with the likelihood that Iran will eventually get nuclear weapons, either because it waits out the time limits of a weak agreement, breaches the terms of any agreement, or doesn’t enter into an agreement, Senator Cotton has put them on opposite sides.

Thoughts On a Potential Agreement With Iran: Are We Asking the Right Questions?

While the talks on Iran’s nuclear program come up against a deadline (or, at least, as supposed deadline) at the end of this March, The New York Times last weekend published an article on what Iran isn’t talking about at all: the military dimensions of its nuclear program.  Here are some excerpts from the article:

“Yet despite that progress, Iran has so far managed to evade a central question – whether it knows how to build an atom bomb. …

American officials are vague when pressed on how fully Iran will have to answer questions it has avoided for years from United Nations inspectors with the International Atomic Energy Agency, based in Vienna.  To date, Iran has dodged all but one of the agency’s dozen sharp questions on bomb design.

Iran’s most serious verification shortcoming,’ Olli Heinonen, the former chief inspector, now at Harvard, said recently, ‘remains its unwillingness to address concerns about the past and possibly ongoing military dimensions of its nuclear program.’

A Test for the Upcoming Agreement With Iran

As I said a couple of weeks ago, I do think we will reach an agreement with Iran on its nuclear capabilities.  The question is, as I also said, how good of an agreement will it be?  Let me suggest a test.  Unfortunately, it is an after-the-fact test, but it will still give us a pretty good idea of how good the agreement is.

Here’s the test:  The agreement with Iran was originally supposed to keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons.  If, after an agreement is signed, other countries in the area start developing nuclear weapons or otherwise start doing what Iran is doing now (not including Israel, of course; they already have nuclear weapons), then the agreement will not have succeeded in what it was supposed to do.

Because the only reason other countries in the area would start to develop nuclear weapons capability is if they think that either Iran has nuclear weapons capability or it can develop nuclear weapons within a really short period of time, and that, therefore, they need to get going on their own nuclear program now if they want to be able to counter Iran’s.

John Kerry Reminds Congress Benjamin Netanyahu Supported U.S. Invasion of Iraq – Apparently Forgetting He Did, Too

[An extended update of this post can be found here.]

Next week Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will make a speech before Congress in which he is expected to oppose the reported terms of the nuclear agreement that the U.S. and Iran are getting close to finalizing.  Ahead of that speech, in testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee yesterday, Secretary of State John Kerry tried to discredit Prime Minister Netanyahu by noting he had supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003:

“The prime minister, as you will recall, was profoundly forward-leaning and outspoken about the importance of invading Iraq under George W. Bush, and we all know what happened with that decision.”

What Secretary Kerry seems to have forgotten, however, is that he, Vice President Joe Biden, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton all supported the invasion, too.  All three of them voted for the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002.  But then, I guess you can say Secretary Kerry was for the war before he was against it.

Nuclear Non-Proliferation. How Is It Going – And Where Is It Going In the Future?

President Obama likes to talk about nuclear non-proliferation.  You get the feeling it is a big deal for him.  The President talked about it in Prague in 2009.  Even after Russia invaded Ukraine last year, the U.S. announced cuts in its nuclear weapons far ahead of the deadlines in the New START agreement with Russia – and even though Russia has apparently violated another nuclear weapons agreement it has with the U.S.  Also, at times it seems the President has to be pushed to modernize our nuclear weapons, even though nuclear weapons get old and unreliable if they are not updated from time to time.

So, how has President Obama done in terms of nuclear non-proliferation during his presidency?  Obviously, he is pushing hard to reach an agreement with Iran to limit its nuclear capability, though it is unclear how much he is going to accomplish even if an agreement is reached.  The original purpose of an agreement was to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons.  Lately, though, it looks like the most we will achieve is to get Iran to slow down its nuclear program or, maybe, put it on pause a year or so away from the point of finally developing a weapon.  That is a lot different from what we initially were trying to do – and even that assumes Iran will comply with the agreement, which is perhaps doubtful given its track record of violating past agreements.

But it’s not just Iran.  Given the President’s interest non-proliferation, it is interesting to see how some of his actions have seemed to work at cross-purposes with this goal.  Consider two situations: Ukraine and Libya.  I have talked about both of them before, but let me do it again, this time in the specific context of non-proliferation.

Why We Will Have an Agreement With Iran – And Why I Am Not Hopeful About It

President Obama has said that the current deadline on the nuclear talks with Iran will not be extended.  Of course, that has been said before, with respect to other deadlines for these talks, but maybe it will be true this time.  In any case, the question is: Will there be an agreement and will be it a good one.  (I realize that is two questions). 

We are told that Iran needs an agreement because the sanctions, along with the drop in oil prices, are hurting its economy.  That may be true, but I think President Obama wants an agreement pretty badly, too.  He is not going to get much passed by the 114th Congress, so his legacy is going to be limited to Obamacare, whatever he can do by executive order, and foreign affairs.  With troops back in Iraq (even if they aren’t wearing combat boots), Russia invading Ukraine, China’s aggressiveness in the South China Sea, etc., there is not much in foreign policy to build a legacy on – unless he can get an agreement limiting Iran’s nuclear capability.

In other words, it is possible that President Obama wants an agreement as much as Iran supposedly needs one.  Which means that the key to the agreement will be the skills of the respective negotiators.  In that regard, consider when Iran released the American hostages that it allowed to be taken in 1979: January 20, 1981, the day that Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as President.  These people know how to negotiate.  Will our negotiators be that good – or do we want an agreement too much?