The View from Right Field

Iran’s Ballistic Missile Tests: Is Another Red Line Disappearing?

Remember President Obama’s “red line” on Syria’s use of chemical weapons.  It looks like he may be in the process of doing it again.  Since the nuclear agreement with Iran was signed, Iran has launched two ballistic missiles in violation of UN Security Council resolutions against such tests.  In one case, even a United Nations panel said Iran violated the Security Council resolution.

Senators, including even senators who voted for the nuclear agreement with Iran, have called for the United States to issue new sanctions against Iran because of these tests.  Finally, on Wednesday, the Administration notified Congress that it would be imposing new sanctions against Iran because of the violations.  They wouldn’t be big, just financial sanctions against a few companies and individuals.  But Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has said that any new sanctions on Iran, whether relating to the nuclear agreement or anything else, would violate the nuclear agreement.

Here’s Why Iran Won’t Violate the Nuclear Agreement – Or At Least Why We Won’t Say They Are

An editorial in yesterday’s Chicago Tribune notes that, while negotiations with Iran were going on, Secretary of State Kerry said Iran was going to have to disclose its past work on building nuclear weapons, i.e., weaponization, as part of any deal.

When the agreement was finally announced, the International Atomic Energy Agency was delegated the job of finding this out.

But the Obama administration is now hedging.  The Administration is saying it doesn’t need Iran to say what it has been doing.  “[W]e believe we already know about Iran’s past activities,” it claims.  This from intelligence agencies that have gotten virtually nothing right about the Middle East for decades.

Some Thoughts on the Nuclear Agreement With Iran – And What We Do Next

While we were on vacation, the debate on the nuclear agreement with Iran picked up steam.  Therefore, in one sense, this post is a little late.  However, since any vote in Congress will not come until September, it is still timely.  So, here are my thoughts on the agreement with Iran – and the debate about it.

1.  President Obama’s argument that it is either his agreement or “some sort of war” is just not true.  There are other options, and there might have been even more if the Administration had done a better job of negotiating, both with the Iranians and with the other parties to the agreement.  Trying to sell the agreement on the basis of this document or “some sort of war” is more an indication of the difficulty the President has in trying to convince people who disagree with him than the reality of the situation.

2.  “Some sort of war”?  What is the President talking about?  What does this even mean?  For somebody who is said to be a great speechmaker, “some sort of war” is really inarticulate.

3.  Saying that a more stringent agreement could not have been negotiated because (i) Iran would not have agreed and (ii) the international sanctions would not have held for much longer is an interesting argument for somebody who has based his career on opposing the use of force against Iraq and, at least implicitly, continuing the sanctions against Iraq.  Why would we have been able to maintain the sanctions against Iraq in 2003, when we couldn’t maintain them against Iran today?

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.