The Flimsy Case Against Iran-Nuke Deal
Between Republican partisanship and Israeli pressure, the ranks of
U.S. politicians and pundits opposed to the Iran nuclear deal are growing. But
their arguments, including from Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Corker, remain
logically flimsy and counter-factual, says ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.
By Paul R. Pillar
Senator Bob Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has long
given us hope for reasonableness even when he and we have been surrounded by
partisan rabidity and a lack of reason. Corker was one of the few Republican
senators to refrain from signing the Tom Cotton letter that lectured the
Iranians on how they cannot count on the United States sticking to any agreement
that Iran may reach with it.
When others in Congress were looking for ways to use new sanctions to torpedo
preemptively any agreement on restricting Iran’s nuclear program, Corker was
working on legislation to provide structure to Congressional review of any
agreement that emerged from the negotiations. The initial version of his bill
was studded with poison pills, but Corker showed the flexibility, working with
acting ranking Democrat Ben Cardin, to revise it into something balanced enough
that it was enacted with broad bipartisan support and signed by President Barack
Obama.
It has been a fairly safe bet for some time that Corker would eventually oppose
the nuclear agreement; with Jeff Flake, the only Republican senator who was
possibly in play on the issue, having announced his opposition the other day,
the GOP ranks in the Senate will be completely closed.
But still one might hope to see signs of well-informed reasonableness,
especially as a welcome contrast with the bombast of the presidential campaign,
in which those vying for primary votes from the party base are striving to outdo
each other in denouncing the agreement with comparisons to genocidal ovens and
the like. We will have enough to worry about concerning the future of the
agreement and thus the ability to restrain Iran’s nuclear activities if one of
those candidates, laden with such campaign baggage, makes it to the White House.
It thus is sad, but also revealing, to see how utterly weak are Corker’s
announced reasons for opposing the agreement, at least those he can fit into the
space of an op-ed. Well-informed reasonableness this is not.
Corker says that rather than ending Iran’s enrichment program, the deal
“industrializes” it, whatever that means. Ending Iranian enrichment of uranium
altogether was never feasible. The agreement severely restricts both the level
of enrichment and the amount of enriched uranium Iran can stockpile.
Maybe “de-industrialization” is a term that could more aptly be applied to what
the agreement accomplishes on that score compared to what the Iranians had been
doing before the preliminary agreement was reached. In observing the terms of
that agreement, Iran already has substantially walked back its program from what
was taking place earlier.
The senator speaks of an inspection process that is “deeply flawed,” with
“unorthodox arrangements” and “secret” agreements with the International Atomic
Energy Agency. In fact, the negotiated inspection arrangements are consistent
with the Additional Protocol for IAEA inspections, and they conform to the usual
practice of having individually negotiated procedures that are kept confidential
between the IAEA and the member state.
The only respect in which the procedures are “unorthodox” is that they are more
extensive and more intrusive than any other nuclear inspection arrangement, the
most extensive and intrusive that any nation has ever agreed through negotiation
to place its own program under. The constant and detailed monitoring of declared
facilities is supplemented by inspections of any other suspect Iranian
facilities through carefully drafted procedures that ensure that if there is any
disagreement, the Iranians get outvoted and the facility gets inspected.
Corker then gets into non-nuclear issues in ways that are nothing short of
strange. He writes that “we will be relying on Iran to help achieve our goals in
Iraq, Syria and perhaps elsewhere.” So is he saying it would be better if Iran
not help us to achieve our goals in such places?
He does say “this abrupt rebalancing could have the effect of driving others in
the region to take greater risks, leading to greater instability.” The parties
to the nuclear agreement have, throughout the negotiation, all stayed focused on
the nuclear issue itself, and any rebalancing that results will hardly be
“abrupt.” It also is hard to see how restricting what Iran can do with its
nuclear program produces instability.
Besides, if other parties in the region are going to engage in risky behavior
that is a problem with them, not with Iran, and such behavior needs to be
addressed directly. Corker tries to tie this confused set of issues back to the
agreement by saying that Iranian awareness of all this “helped the regime
continually erode the deal to its benefit.” Erode from what?
The obligations in this agreement, other than reducing the punishment of Iran,
are all obligations for Iran to fulfill. The starting point, before negotiations
began, was an Iranian nuclear program subject to no restrictions at all beyond
Iran’s basic obligations under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
Corker tries to cast a general aspersion on the negotiations by stating that
“since negotiations began in earnest” all sorts of nasty things have happened in
the region that involve Iran in some way: that Iran has “doubled down on its
support of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad,” and “cemented Hezbollah as an
expeditionary shock force” while lots of people have died in the Syrian civil
war and ISIS has been doing bad things in Iraq.
Nothing whatever is provided in the way of either evidence or reasoning that any
of this has anything to do with either the negotiations or the agreement that
emerged from them. Besides the absence of logic and evidence, this blurt
contradicts Corker’s use in the next paragraph of the now shop-worn theme that
sanctions relief will give the Iranians “hundreds of billions of dollars”, a
gross overestimate, to do those proverbially nefarious things in the region.
If that theme were valid, i.e., that Iran’s regional policy will be dictated by
its available financial resources, then we should have seen a reduction in
Iranian regional activity when the sanctions began to bite, and a further
reduction when oil prices plunged. But Corker, in his effort to suggest that bad
things happen whenever one negotiates with Iranians, is telling us that the
opposite has occurred.
In fact, if there is any pattern at all in Iranian regional activity over the
last several years it is that the activity is reactive, with the Iranians
responding to civil wars or the emergence of extremist mini-states or and any
other events that affect Iranian interests.
Corker winds up by talking about “leverage” as if the more sanctions that are in
place, the more leverage we have. That represents a fundamental
misunderstanding, or misrepresentation, of leverage and where it comes from.
Leverage comes from the ability and prospect to reward someone if they do as we
want or to punish them if they were to act contrary to our wishes.
The prospect of sanctions relief is what gave our side the leverage to induce
Iran to agree to place its nuclear program under extraordinary restrictions. The
prospect of re-imposition of sanctions will be one of the incentives (though not
the only one) for the Iranians to abide by their obligations in the agreement.
Sanctions per se give us no leverage. The belief that sanctions will stay in
place no matter what gives Iran no incentive to concede, to comply, or to do
anything else in accordance with our wishes.
Bob Corker has an important role to play in Congressional oversight of
implementation of the nuclear agreement, especially assuming continued
Republican control of the Senate and thus continuation of Corker’s chairmanship
of the foreign relations committee. He can still play that role positively and
constructively. He has been responsible enough and careful enough not to tie
himself in the kind of constraining rhetorical knots that several of the
presidential candidates have.
Let us hope that he can discard the crummy arguments and, once the agreement is
implemented, perform his oversight function vigorously. Meanwhile, his posture
on the agreement is a demonstration of just how weak the arguments against it
are.
Paul R. Pillar, in his 28 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, rose to be
one of the agency’s top analysts. He is now a visiting professor at Georgetown
University for security studies. (This article first appeared as a blog post at
The National Interest’s Web site. Reprinted with author’s permission.)
Info-War in the Iran-Nuke Talks
Information warfare — or “info-war” — is all the rage inside the Obama
administration, which delights in distorting or misrepresenting facts as a “soft
power” weapon to advance its international goals. Those games have reached into
the Iran nuclear negotiations, reports Gareth Porter.
By Gareth Porter
A public diplomacy campaign by the Obama administration to convince world
opinion that Iran was reneging on the Lausanne framework agreement in April has
seriously misrepresented the actual diplomacy of the Iran nuclear talks, as my
interviews with Iranian officials in Vienna make clear.
President Barack Obama’s threat on Tuesday to walk out of the nuclear talks if
Iranian negotiators didn’t return to the Lausanne framework especially on the
issue of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s access to Iranian sites — was
the climax of that campaign.
But what has really been happening in nuclear talks is not that Iran has backed
away from that agreement but that the United States and Iran have been carrying
out tough negotiations especially in the days before the Vienna round of talks
began on the details of how the basic framework agreement will be implemented.
The U.S. campaign began immediately upon the agreement in Lausanne on April
2. The Obama administration said in its fact sheet that Iran “would be required”
to grant IAEA inspectors access to “suspicious sites.” Then Deputy Security
Adviser Ben Rhodes declared that if the United States wanted access to an
Iranian military base that the U.S. considered “suspicious,” it could “go to the
IAEA and get that inspection” because of the Additional Protocol and other
“inspection measures that are in the deal.”
That statement touched a raw nerve in Iranian politics. A few days later Supreme
Leader Ali Khamenei insisted that Iran would not allow visits to its military
bases as a signal that Iran would withdraw concessions it made in Lausanne. That
reaction was portrayed in the Western media as evidence that Iranian negotiators
were being forced to retreat from the Lausanne agreement.
In fact it was nothing of the sort. The idea that IAEA inspectors could go into
Iranian military facilities at will, as Rhodes had suggested, was a crude
oversimplification that was bound to upset Iranians. The reason was more
political than strategic. “It is a matter of national dignity,” one Iranian
official in Vienna explained to me.
The Iranian negotiators were still pushing back publicly against Rhodes’s
rhetoric as the Vienna round began.
Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas
Aragchi appeared to threaten a reopening of the provisions of the Lausanne
framework relating to the access issue in an interview with AFP last Sunday.
“[N]ow some of the solutions found in Lausanne no longer work,” Araghchi said,
“because after Lausanne certain countries within the P5+1 made declarations.”
But despite Araghchi’s tough talk, Iran has not reversed course on the
compromise reached in Lausanne on the access issue, and what was involved was a
dispute resolution process on the issue of IAEA requests for inspections. In
interviews with me, two Iranian officials acknowledged that the final agreement
will include a procedure that could override an Iranian rejection of an IAEA
request to visit a site.
The procedure would allow the Joint Commission, which was first mentioned in the
Joint Plan of Action of November 2013, to review a decision by Iran to reject an
IAEA request for an inspection visit. The Joint Commission is made up of Iran,
the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus
Germany) and the European Union.
If this Joint Commission were to decide against an Iranian rejection, the IAEA
could claim the right to access even to a military site, despite Iran’s
opposition.
Such a procedure represents a major concession by Iran, which had assumed that
the Additional Protocol to Iran’s “Safeguards” agreement with the IAEA would
have governed IAEA access to sites in Iran. Contrary to most media descriptions,
that agreement limits IAEA inspection visits to undeclared sites to carrying out
“location-specific environmental sampling.” It also allows Iran to deny the
request for access to the site, provided it makes “every effort to satisfy
Agency requests without delay at adjacent locations or through other means.”
The dispute resolution process obviously goes well beyond the Additional
Protocol. But the Obama administration’s statements suggesting that the IAEA
will have authority to visit any site they consider “suspect” is a politically
convenient oversimplification.
Under the technical annex to the Lausanne agreement that is now under
negotiation, Iran would have the right to receive the evidence on which the IAEA
is basing its request, according to Iranian officials. And since Iran has no
intention of doing anything to give the IAEA valid reason to claim suspicious
activities, Iranian officials believe they will be able to make a strong
argument that the evidence in question is not credible.
Iran has proposed that that the period between the original IAEA request and any
inspection resulting from a Joint Committee decision should be 24 days. But that
number incensed critics of the Iran nuclear deal. Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tennessee,
Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who is unhappy with the
whole idea of turning the decisions on inspections over to a multilateral group
that includes adversaries of the United States, has criticized the idea of
allocating 24 days to the process of dispute resolution.
Under pressure from Corker and Senate Republican opponents of the nuclear deal,
the U.S. negotiating team has been demanding a shorter period, Iranian officials
say.
The determining factor in how the verification system being negotiated would
actually work, however, will be the political-diplomatic interests of the states
and the EU who would be voting on the requests. Those interests are the wild
card in the negotiations, because it is well known among the negotiators here
that there are deep divisions within the P5+1 group of states on the access
issue.
There are divisions within the P5+1, especially over aspects of what the
Security Council should be doing, on how sanctions would be lifted and on access
[verification regime]. “We can say with authority that they have to spend more
time negotiating among themselves than negotiating with us,” one Iranian
official said.
Even as Obama was publicly accusing Iran of seeking to revise the basic Lausanne
framework itself, U.S. negotiators were apparently trying to revise that very
same framework agreement itself. A U.S. official “declined to say if the United
States might agree to adjust some elements of the Lausanne framework in return
for new Iranian concessions,” according to a New York Times report.
The Americans may have been doing precisely what they were accusing the Iranians
of doing.
Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and winner of the 2012
Gellhorn Prize for journalism. He is the author of the newly published
Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare. [This article
originally appeared at Middle East Eye at
http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/us-spin-access-iranian-sites-has-distortedissue-1989199085#sthash.9VfPAZnk.dpuf]
Offending Iran’s Dignity
America’s neocons are back at work demeaning an agreement to constrain Iran’s
nuclear program to keep alive the neocon dream of bomb-bomb-bombing Iran. And
the insults are having an effect by offending Iran’s dignity and creating
friction among the negotiators, writes Trita Parsi.
By Trita Parsi
There are few concepts as important yet as misunderstood and unaccounted for in
explaining international affairs as dignity. Explaining what is happening in
Vienna right now in the nuclear talks between Iran and the permanent members of
the UN Security Council plus Germany is virtually impossible unless this
critical variable is taken into account.
On the American side, the limitations of the negotiators are oftentimes
explained in terms of domestic political constraints. Those constraints, in
turn, are mostly rooted in the contradictory interests of various groupings and
factions within the American political system. While the term dignity appears
foreign to the American narrative, it does nevertheless exist in concept, though
not in name.
There is resistance, for instance, towards accepting that the negotiations with
Iran and the United States and its partners are on an equal basis. The language
of the United States deliberately seeks to reflect that it is the superpower in
the equation, that it is in control, and that Iran is a lower power forced into
submission.
“The Iranians know what they have to do,” is a phrase often used by Western
officials. The narrative suggests that the West decides what Iran will be
“permitted” to do and not do, and what it will be “allowed” to keep in terms of
nuclear infrastructure.
This Western sensitivity is particularly visible when there is a perception of
equivalence between Iran and the United States. When an American official
suggested that it would be unrealistic to expect Iran to give unlimited access
to its military sites, since no country would do so including the United States,
critics immediately jumped on the suggestion that the United States could be put
in the same category as Iran.
For the Iranians, the opposite is paramount. Any suggestion that it is unequal
to the other parties in the negotiations risks collapsing the diplomacy
altogether. The Iranian foreign minister oftentimes refers to the other
countries in the negotiations as his partners, reflecting equality. No U.S.
diplomat would use that language for the very same reason.
But the necessity to uphold dignity is at the very center of both the problems
and the solutions in the ongoing nuclear negotiations.
The matter of inspections of Iranian military sites is a case in point. From the
very outset, the Iranians made clear that they knew their
implementation of the
Additional Protocol and intrusive inspections was a key element of a final deal.
Similarly, in his interview with Thomas Friedman in the days after the framework
agreement was reached in Switzerland, President Barack Obama described exactly
how access to military sites will take place.
The process is that of managed access as provided by the Additional Protocol,
with some additional configurations. There was never any hint of the completely
unrealistic “anytime anywhere” concept.
Shortly thereafter, Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Energy Ernest
Moniz stated in interviews that the access would be “anytime, anywhere. ”
Critics of an agreement with Iran immediately jump on the opportunity of making
this a new American red line.
Once the administration started to clarify the access would be managed,
opponents of the deal accused the Obama administration of caving in to Iranian
demands. Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Senator Bob Corker
now calls it a “deal breaker.”
A narrative thus emerged that Iran is walking back from its commitments to allow
inspections of military sites. What had actually already been agreed upon is now
presented as a Western dictate to Iran.
Immediately, Iranian sensitivity about dignity kicked in. Iran’s Supreme Leader
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei told military commanders in a speech that Iran will
resist excessive demands and affronts to its dignity. Access to military site
and interviews with Iran’s nuclear scientist would be rejected, he conveyed.
In reality, however, Iran has in the past given inspectors access to Iran’s
military sites on numerous occasions, both on the nuclear front and, even more
frequently, as part of Iran’s obligations under the Chemical Weapons Convention
treaty. Giving access to military sites per se is not a problem for the
Iranians.
However, doing so if the request is presented as a demand is taboo because it
violates Iran’s dignity. Similarly, International Atomic Energy Agency
interviews with Iranian scientists could be possible, but not if they are
presented or conducted as interrogations. Iran’s sense of dignity would not
allow Iran’s negotiators to agree to that.
The question of the timing of sanctions relief is also affected by dignity. It
is important for the Iranians sense of dignity and equality that the West
initiates sanctions relief simultaneously with any measures Iran takes to cut
back its nuclear program. The compromise that was struck entails the Iranians
beginning to implement their commitments under the
final deal at the same time
as the United States initiates the process of sanctions relief, even though the
initial American step is to provide guarantees that sanctions will be waved on a
specific future date.
That both of these actions take place simultaneously, however, is an important
principle for the Iranians to uphold both their dignity and sense of equality.
No one knows if the parties will manage to reach a final deal. There is a sense
of inevitability in the air here in Vienna, however. In the minds of most, it is
not a question of whether there will be a deal, but when. One reason for this
optimism is that the complexity and difficulty of any of the known remaining
issues are far less than the difficulty of the issues that already have been
resolved. The two sides have gone more than half the distance.
But there are also reasons to believe that there are other issues that divide
two sides that have been kept secret. And those issues probably have strong
political dimensions. If so, the two sides have a strong common interest to keep
those issues out of public sight precisely because the dignity factor will make
them all the more difficult to resolve if they are discussed openly.
Trita Parsi is the author of A Single Roll of the Dice – Obama’s Diplomacy with
Iran (Yale University Press, 2012) . He tweets at @tparsi. [This article first
appear at NationalInterest.org.]
America’s ‘Exceptional’ Negotiations
America has a strange idea about international negotiations: It makes demands
and the other side must capitulate or face crushing penalties if not violent
“regime change.” This strange attitude is threatening the Iran-nuclear talks
and endangering real U.S. national interests, writes ex-CIA analyst Paul R.
Pillar.
By Paul R. Pillar
One of the unfortunate corollaries of American exceptionalism is a warped and
highly asymmetric conception of negotiation. This conception can become a major
impediment to the effective exercise of U.S. diplomacy.
Although the attitudes that are part of this view of negotiation are not
altogether unique to the United States, they are especially associated with
American exceptionalist thinking about the supposed intrinsic superiority of
U.S. positions and about how the sole superpower ought always to get its way.
The corollary about negotiation is, stated in its simplest and bluntest terms,
that negotiation is an encounter between diplomats in which the United States
makes its demands, sometimes expressed as “red lines”, and the other side
accepts those demands, with the task of the diplomats being to work out the
details of implementation. Or, if the other side is not going along with that
script and acceding to U.S. demands, then the United States has to exert more
pressure on the other side until it does accede.
This is markedly different from the rest of the world’s conception of
negotiation, in which each side begins with positions that neither side will get
or expects to get entirely, followed by a process of give-and-take and mutual
concession to arrive at a compromise that meets the needs of each side enough
that it is better for each than no agreement at all.
Americans’ domestic experience with negotiation has been only a partial
corrective to their warped view of international negotiation, and that
experience has become even less of a corrective in recent times. The United
States has a long history of labor-management negotiations that have determined
wages and working conditions of many Americans.
But it also was in the United States that there arose Boulwarism, an approach to
labor relations named after Lemuel R. Boulware, a vice president of General
Electric in the 1950s, consisting of management putting a single, inflexible,
take-it-or-leave-it formula on the table and refusing to make any concessions to
unions. Boulwarism was found to be an unfair labor practice, but with the
decline over the past few decades of labor unions and of the significance of
collective bargaining for American workers, it in effect has come to prevail in
much of the American economy.
Domestic American politics have followed a similar trajectory. Once upon a time,
give-and-take and finding compromises were the daily stuff of American politics,
including as practiced on Capitol Hill. Now, in a coarsened and hyper-partisan
environment, they are so rare as to be a news item when they do still occur.
What is now standard is the imposition of red lines, maybe called something
else, such as litmus tests or no-tax pledges, and a focus on what kinds of
pressure or extortion could achieve total defeat of the other side. Domestic
trends, political and economic, thus have reinforced American ways of thinking
about bargaining that have further entrenched the idiosyncratic and unhelpful
American view of international negotiations.
A consequence of this view is to regard concessions and compromise not as
necessary parts of negotiation but instead as a source of shame or a badge of
weakness. We have seen this amid the flak the Obama administration is taking
from its political opponents regarding its handling of the nuclear negotiations
with Iran.
Among the criticisms, as if this really should count as criticism, have been
observations that the United States has not rigidly held to what may have been
earlier positions and demands. This sort of flak is found, for example, in a
recent letter to the President from Bob Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee. Corker expresses dismay about how the negotiations have
involved movement from the administration’s “original goals and statements,” and
he voices “alarm” about reports of, you’d better sit down before reading this,
“potential concessions” by the United States on some issues on which full
agreement has yet to be reached.
The proper response to such statements is: yes, the United States has been
making concessions, and the Iranians have been making even more, that’s called
negotiating.
Americans may not like to think that they are in the kind of bargaining
relationship one might be with a rug merchant, but a bargaining relationship may
exist whether one party says so or not. Even Boulware was in a bargaining
relationship with labor unions, despite trying to approach the issues at hand as
if he weren’t. Inflexibility is an approach toward bargaining, though not
necessarily a good one; it is not a way of making the bargaining situation go
away.
The fallacy of asymmetry in the American exceptionalist view of negotiation gets
exposed when other parties issue reminders of how negotiation is really a twoway endeavor. Members of the Iranian majles did so this week with a bill cosponsored by a majority of that legislature’s members.
“At the moment, the negotiating team is facing excessive demands from the United
States,” said the chairman of the national security and foreign policy
committee. “The bill is being introduced with the aim of supporting the
negotiators,” he said, “and to protect the red lines drawn up by the supreme
leader.”
The bill then stated demands regarding some of the remaining issues regarding
international inspections, research and development, and the timing of sanctions
relief. The majles members probably know as much about rug merchandising as do
legislators in any other country, and it is unlikely that their bill betokens
any failure to understand the need for compromise. The measure instead is a
message being sent to their counterparts in Washington that two can play the
same game and that no one issued an exclusive license to the United States to
draw red lines.
The give-and-take of negotiation serves at least a couple of functions that
parties on both sides of any issue would be smart to exploit. One is that this
aspect of negotiation is a form of information gathering, in which the parties
feel out what the other side cares about the most and cares about less, and thus
where within the bargaining space the most mutually advantageous deals can be
struck.
Making a particular concession might, of course, be a dumb move, but it might
instead be a prudent response to having found out more, through the negotiation
process, about the other side’s preferences, objectives, and fears.
The give-and-take also means using concessions to get concessions. However
distasteful some Americans may find this sort of trading, it is a fact of
negotiating life, in international diplomacy as well as in other negotiating
situations. Good negotiators recognize that, which is why they begin with
“original goals and statements” that they fully expect they will not adhere to
rigidly.
The American exceptionalist demand-and-pressure conception fosters
misunderstanding of these realities. And this failure of understanding can lead
to blowing good opportunities to use diplomacy to the fullest to strike bargains
that advance U.S. interests.
Paul R. Pillar, in his 28 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, rose to be
one of the agency’s top analysts. He is now a visiting professor at Georgetown
University for security studies. (This article first appeared as a blog post at
The National Interest’s Web site. Reprinted with author’s permission.)
Mixed Signals on the Middle East
On one level the Congressional failure to authorize war on the Islamic State
while seeking to sabotage the peaceful nuclear accord with Iran would seem to
fit neatly with the interests of the Saudi-Israeli alliance as it presses for
“regime change” in Syria and Iran, but there are other factors afoot, writes exCIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.
By Paul R. Pillar
The role that the U.S. Congress has assumed for itself as a player in foreign
policy exhibits an odd and indefensible pattern these days. Sen. Chris Murphy,
D-Connecticut, calls it a “double standard,” although that might be too mild a
term.
On one hand there are vigorous efforts to insert Congress into the negotiation
of an agreement on Iran’s nuclear program. The efforts extend even to attempts
to interfere in the details of what is being negotiated, as reflected in a
string of amendments being considered in debate in the Senate this week on a
bill laying out a procedure for Congress to pass a quick judgment on the
agreement. On the other hand there is inaction, with little or no prospect of
any action, on an authorization for the use of military force against the socalled Islamic State.
That combination is exactly the opposite of the roles Congress should play,
taking into account first principles of when and why the people’s
representatives ought to weigh in on the conduct of the nation’s foreign
relations.
Going to war is probably the most consequential thing the nation can do
overseas. It entails substantial costs to the nation, and as recent experience
should remind us, carries the risk of far greater costs, both human and
material, than may have been anticipated at the outset. It is quite appropriate
for such a departure not to be left solely in the hands of the executive.
The impending nuclear agreement with Iran entails none of those things. No
Americans are being put in danger. There is no risk of being dragged into wider
or longer commitments to pacify, occupy or do something else to land overseas.
There is no drain on American taxpayers; in fact, to the extent that completion
of the agreement will lead to lessening of economic sanctions on Iran, it will
entail lifting of what has also been an economic burden on the United States.
As the subject of a complicated international negotiation that involves several
other states and in which compromises on all sides are essential, for national
legislatures to intervene in the details with specific requirements or demands
is simply a recipe for failure of the negotiations. It is entirely appropriate
for this agreement, like the great majority of international agreements that the
United States makes, to be a matter of executive action until fulfillment of the
terms of the agreement requires legislative action.
Several reasons account for the inappropriate reverse nature of where Congress
is weighing in and where it isn’t. Debate about the nuclear deal and about the
bill bearing the name of Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tennessee, isn’t really about
Congressional prerogatives, especially given that the bill is not necessary for
Congress to express itself however it wants about the substance of whatever
agreement emerges from the negotiations.
It instead has been about whether opponents of any agreement with Iran would be
able to use a procedural mechanism for increasing their chances of killing the
deal. This is reflected in the current grumbling by diehard opponents of an
agreement who see that the current version of the Corker bill does not give them
as much of a chance for doing that as they had hoped.
The inaction on an authorization for the use of military force has a couple of
explanations. The more respectable one is the inherent difficulty of crafting
suitable language when the intended purpose of the military action is not as
simple and straightforward as, say, defeating another nation-state.
Instead the purpose involves a terrorist phenomenon in which both the geographic
and temporal extent of what needs to be done is uncertain. It is hard to come up
with a legally precise formula that gives the executive the authority it needs
to do something effective but also imposes meaningful limits, in terms of time
and place, on the military operations. The draft resolution that the
administration sent to Capitol Hill has some questionable language; fixes to it
will be necessary but difficult. The difficulty is not a reason not to try.
Not trying gets to the second explanation for the inaction, which is political
pusillanimity. Members of Congress realize that taking a stand on such things
involves taking a risk, Some members feel burned either for opposing one Persian
Gulf war that turned out to be a smashing victory or for authorizing another
Persian Gulf war that turned out to be a costly mess.
It’s easier for them just not to commit themselves and to stay quiet while the
White House asserts executive authority and uses military force anyway. And that
posture is a cop-out.
Paul R. Pillar, in his 28 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, rose to be
one of the agency’s top analysts. He is now a visiting professor at Georgetown
University for security studies. (This article first appeared as a blog post at
The National Interest’s Web site. Reprinted with author’s permission.)
Fearing an Iran-Nuke Deal Might Work
Republicans, carrying water for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, have come up
with a new scheme to kill a deal to constrain but not obliterate Iran’s nuclear
program. The new goal seems to be to prevent the agreement from demonstrating
that it can work, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar explains.
By Paul R. Pillar
Those determined to kill any agreement with Iran have trotted out a succession
of rationales for doing so but have kept their focus firmly fixed on the U.S.
Congress. That is hardly surprising, given that both houses of Congress are now
controlled by the anti-Obama party and Congress is where the lobby that acts on
behalf of the right-wing government in Israel exerts its power most directly.
There have been multiple legislative vehicles that the anti-agreement forces
have tried to use. Earlier ones had to do with using new sanctions to throw a
wrench in the negotiating process, but currently the opponents’ most viable
vehicle is a bill sponsored by Bob Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, that would call for the Congress to do a quick vote on an
agreement well before any legislation to implement the agreement was actually
required.
By the standards of Congressional Republicans, Corker seems relatively
reasonable and pragmatic, as reflected in his being one of the few senators in
his party to abstain from signing that outrageous letter telling the Iranians
not to trust the United States to keep its word in international agreements. But
let’s be honest about the game that is being played; it’s still the same game
that has been played all along, which is to take as many whacks as possible
against the nuclear agreement and the negotiations leading to it and to hope
that at least one of the whacks will be fatal.
There is no way that the Corker bill, given the posture and approach of the
majority party on this issue as indicated by the letter to the Iranians, could
strengthen the basis of the agreement, or show that the United States is united,
or have any positive result.
The best result that could be hoped for from the kind of hasty vote that the
bill calls for would be that an attempt to override a presidential veto of a
resolution of disapproval would fall a few votes short, hardly the sort of
scenario that makes foreign interlocutors more willing to take risks in dealing
with Washington.
The nature of the game comes through clearly in some of the details of the bill,
which contains booby-traps designed to maximize the chance of killing the deal.
One provision, for example, requires the president to certify every 90 days that
Iran “has not directly supported or carried out an act of terrorism against the
United States or a United States person anywhere in the world.”
So if, for example, Israel hits Lebanese Hezbollah and Hezbollah retaliates with
a bomb somewhere that damages a U.S.-owned commercial property, the president
cannot make that certification and poof, there is no more nuclear agreement.
The Corker bill does not even do what the bill purports to do, which is to give
Congress a say on the nuclear agreement that it supposedly otherwise would not
have had. Congressional action will be required in any case to enable any later
sanctions relief that goes beyond what could be granted with a presidential
waiver.
Even before then, Congress could, with or without Corker’s bill, pass a
resolution of approval, or disapproval, or indifference regarding the nuclear
deal any time it wants. What the bill does is to make it seem obligatory for
Congress to pass a resolution hastily, as well as to make it clearer to the
Iranians and to everyone else that Congressional disapproval would in fact kill
the deal.
The bill calls for a rush to judgment. One of the provisions that demonstrates
this is the bill’s requirement for the Executive Branch to present to Congress
within five days after an agreement is reached a comprehensive, fully
coordinated assessment of the ability to verify all the agreement’s provisions.
Such an assessment is indeed an important part of evaluating the deal. But the
timetable is ludicrous, and is one of the best indications in the bill of a lack
of seriousness about wanting to consider the deal carefully. Those in the
Executive Branch who will have to analyze the verification issues will be
fortunate just to get an authoritative copy of the agreement within five days
after it is signed.
If members were really to be pragmatic and reasonable, they would ask: “Why the
rush?” The risks of hastiness are nearly all on the side of hasty disapproval
rather than letting implementation of the agreement begin. Hasty disapproval
would mean collapsing the whole diplomatic process associated with the
agreement, losing the restrictions on the Iranian program embodied in the Joint
Plan of Action reached more than a year ago, and losing allied support for
continued sanctions given that Washington clearly would be responsible for
killing the arrangement.
Letting implementation of the agreement begin, on the other hand, would be only
the start of what will be a very gradual process in which most of the sanctions
relief that Iran seeks would only come later, after perhaps a couple of years of
Iranian adherence to the deal.
The early phase of implementation will be an extension of the testing period
(already begun under the Joint Plan of Action) in which Iran will have to
demonstrate its commitment to live by severe restrictions on its nuclear program
and to keep that program peaceful. Anyone in Congress or anywhere else who
really wants to deliberate carefully on the deal ought to welcome that testing
period rather than trying to short-circuit it.
The real answer to the question, “Why the rush?” is that opponents of any
agreement with Iran want to kill this particular agreement before it has a
chance to demonstrate its success. If a couple of more years go by in which Iran
continues to observe stringent restrictions on its nuclear program and its
commitment to a non-nuclear-weapons future, it will become harder than ever for
opponents to argue with a straight face that it would be in U.S. interests to
destroy the arrangement that had brought about that result.
This dynamic involves another parallel with the politics surrounding the
Affordable Care Act, in addition to that act being, like a nuclear deal with
Iran, one of the biggest achievements for President Barack Obama and thus among
the biggest things that the anti-Obama party would love to kill.
As successes of the ACA have continued to become clear, the fear has grown among
members of that party that, as newly declared presidential candidate Ted Cruz
has put it, Americans will come to like Obamacare so much that it will be more
difficult than ever for Republicans to repeal it.
As with Obamacare, what opponents of a nuclear agreement with Iran fear most is
not the agreement’s failure but rather its success.
Paul R. Pillar, in his 28 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, rose to be
one of the agency’s top analysts. He is now a visiting professor at Georgetown
University for security studies. (This article first appeared as a blog post at
The National Interest’s Web site. Reprinted with author’s permission.)
The Illusion of Syria’s ‘Moderate’
Rebels
In militarily going after ISIS, President Obama is again letting his foreign
policy be shaped by the popular illusions of Official Washington, particularly
the idea that aiding Syrian “moderates” is a viable part of the strategy, as exCIA analyst Paul R. Pillar explains.
By Paul R. Pillar
The voluminous commentary about President Obama’s speech on going after ISIS
reflects the usual mixture of genuine policy analysis and pursuit of political
agendas. A prevalent misdirection exhibited both by those politically opposed to
this particular president and those who support him, as well as by many of those
who are neutral, is to assume that the strategy laid out in the speech is
primarily the product of Barack Obama’s thinking and preferences. It isn’t.
Many of us, if we took full account of current American perceptions and
sentiments about ISIS, longer American habits in thinking about terrorism, and
the political requirements of serving as U.S. president could have written
pretty much the same speech. The strategy in it is primarily the product of
those public perceptions, sentiments and habits, which are too strong for most
American politicians, including those in Congress as well as the White House, to
resist.
We cannot read Barack Obama’s mind, but the frequently voiced comment, mostly
from confirmed critics of the President, that he only slowly realized ISIS to be
a serious menace and is belatedly recognizing the need to act forcefully against
it is very likely incorrect. It is far more probable that the President’s
assessment of the group and of the costs and risks of the various measures that
might be taken against it has stayed fairly constant.
What evolved, and evolved rapidly, was the public alarm about the group. This
latter interpretation conforms more closely to how we have seen Barack Obama
operate and how we have seen American public opinion (and the political
responses to it) operate. Mr. Obama had tried (somewhat, though not hard enough)
to convey a careful and reasonable assessment of the group’s significance, and
of the downsides of possible further U.S. actions in the Middle East. But
reasonableness lost out to a groundswell of public sentiment.
There will be disappointments and failures in some of the measures the President
described in his speech, and some of the risks involved are apt to materialize
into serious costs to U.S. interests. The failures and costs, as well as
whatever successes might come from the measures to be taken, should be
attributed less to the mind of Barack Obama than to the collective mental habits
of the American public.
The most fundamental respect in which this is true is with the overall degree of
alarm about ISIS, which far exceeds what would be warranted by careful and sober
analysis of the threat that this group, notwithstanding its abhorrent brutality,
poses to U.S. interests. Prevailing public sentiment has equated gains in dusty
territory in the Middle East with the threat of a terrorist spectacular in the
U.S. homeland.
The American public is basing its perception on emotion, and its record in
gauging terrorist threats that way is poor. It reacts to the past rather than
assessing the future. It is reacting now not only to the past trauma of 9/11 but
to also to the gruesomeness of recent videotaped killings of captives, which
does not tell us much more about ISIS than we already knew, apart from
confirming the group’s willingness to do deadly things in response to U.S. use
of force against it, which does not constitute an argument to use force.
The American public looks at terrorism in general not as the timeless tactic
that it is but rather in terms of its embodiment in specific named groups or
individuals, “the terrorists”, whom the public believes must be eliminated.
This view overlooks the frequently changing roster of groups emerging and dying,
splitting and metastasizing. It also overlooks the whole motivations side of
when and why anyone either joins or forms a group that has used terrorism, and
when and why a resistance group already in existence would resort to terrorism,
especially terrorism against the United States. And it overlooks whether
mounting a very visible campaign against a group may play into the group’s own
plans and ambitions.
The conception of counterterrorism as consisting of the elimination of a fixed
group of bad guys is related to the further American inclination to equate
counterterrorism with use of military force. The whole “war on terror” metaphor
exacerbated this unfortunate tendency.
Military force is only one of several counterterrorist instruments, it is not
necessarily the best one to use in any one circumstance, and the sorts of
terrorist activity that ought to worry us the most present few good military
targets. Disproportionate emphasis on the military instrument also tends to be
associated with underestimation of the counterproductive effects that ensue when
collateral damage leads to more anger and more motivation to resort to
terrorism.
This emphasis also has been associated with the argument advanced by political
opponents of Mr. Obama that somehow if he had found a way to extend the presence
of U.S. troops in Iraq beyond the eight-and-a-half years it had already lasted
that ISIS would not have been a problem. This argument has always been rather
rich, given that ISIS, under a different name, came into existence as a direct
result of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and overthrow of the incumbent regime.
The historical amnesia involved with the argument extends as well to events
later in the last decade, when even the “surge”, although it temporarily
reversed the escalating violence in Iraq, as 30,000 U.S. troops ought to have
been able to do, failed to achieve its more fundamental objective of making
possible political accommodations in Baghdad that in turn would make possible
stability in Iraq. This experience shows how especially fanciful is the notion
that a later and smaller presence of U.S. troops would somehow have made Nouri
al-Maliki behave like a good prime minister who would practice inclusive and
non-authoritarian politics.
Another recurring pattern in the American public philosophy that is not unique
to the issue of terrorism but has been especially apparent with it is that,
simply put, any problem has a feasible solution, and that it is within the power
of the United States to achieve that solution. If a serious problem persists,
according to this view, then it is only because incumbent U.S. policy-makers
have lacked the will or the smarts to find and implement the right solution.
This mindset will be the basic source of disappointment with any expectation of
“destroying” a terrorist group rather than just degrading or containing it.
The same mindset also keeps knocking up against reality in Syria, where there
have been no good solutions, for the United States any more than for others to
implement. Here is where we hear another recurring “if only” argument from
opponents of the administration, to the effect that if only more aid had been
given earlier to “moderate” oppositionists, extremists such as ISIS would not
have become as much of a problem as they have.
This search for, and focus on, the elusive moderates has been such a salient
issue for so long that it is a safe bet that it has been one of the most
exhaustively studied topics for the administration, well before this week’s
presidential speech.
Among the realities that any such study would have uncovered are that what
passes for a moderate Syrian opposition has always been badly divided and
lacking in internal support, that the dynamics of civil warfare inherently favor
the less inhibited, by definition, less moderate, elements, that it is almost
impossible to provide material aid to such elements without some of that aid
making its way (as it already has) into the hands of the very forces such as
ISIS that we want to counter, and that there is no way of squaring the circle of
beating back ISIS without effectively aiding the Syrian regime that we also
supposedly would like to be defeated.
But in a larger anti-ISIS arena in which good solutions also may be hard to come
by, and in which the popular and political American resistance to reintroducing
U.S. combat troops is still a major factor, we keep coming back by default to
this business of trying to aid “moderate” Syrian rebels.
Congressional pusillanimity plays a significant role here: members of neither
party want to vote before midterm elections on an authorization to use U.S.
military forces, but supporting anything about aiding the proverbial moderates
in Syria is a no-U.S.-boots-on-the-ground way for members to show their antiISIS enthusiasm.
Bob Corker, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
commented that “since there has been bipartisan support for arming the moderate
opposition,” maybe the administration gave it a prominent place in its anti-ISIS
package “because they thought this is the one piece that they could get a lot of
congressional buy-in on without doing a lot of selling” He’s probably right.
Yep, there is a lot in that package that deserves questioning and criticism. In
searching for the reasons why, most Americans ought to look first not at the man
in the White House but instead in the mirror.
Paul R. Pillar, in his 28 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, rose to be
one of the agency’s top analysts. He is now a visiting professor at Georgetown
University for security studies. (This article first appeared as a blog post at
The National Interest’s Web site. Reprinted with author’s permission.)
Congress Bends to Israel’s Iran Demands
Congressional mischief-making to undermine a deal to restrict Iran’s nuclear
program continues, much of it orchestrated by the Israel Lobby which supports
the Israeli government’s threats of a military strike against Iran, as ex-CIA
analyst Paul R. Pillar notes.
By Paul R. Pillar
Those who want permanent pariahdom for Iran and thus oppose any agreement with
the government in Tehran keep looking for ways to use the U.S. Congress to
sabotage the deal that has been under negotiation in Vienna and would restrict
Iran’s nuclear program.
A recent previous effort by the saboteurs was a bill that would have violated
the preliminary agreement that was reached with Iran last November by imposing
still more sanctions on Iran. That effort was beaten back, partly with an
explicit veto threat by President Barack Obama.
Even more recently Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tennessee, the ranking Republican on the
Foreign Relations Committee, introduced an amendment that would have Congress
holding a “vote of disapproval” within days after the negotiators reach
agreement.
If something like Corker’s proposal were adopted, the vote of disapproval would
be exactly that, but based on the politics of the issue rather than on the
merits of the agreement. Such a snap vote would allow little time for weighing
the merits of the deal, or for alternatives to the agreement to be considered.
It would allow no time for Iran to accumulate a track record of compliance with
the full agreement.
The political habits, among members from both parties, that would kick in when
voting would be the ones that have been demonstrated time and time again with
the parade of previous sanctions legislation. Bashing Iran is seen as good
politics, and it is seen as “pro-Israel” (i.e., whatever the current government
of Israel wants, as distinct from what is in the larger interests of the state
of Israel).
A vote against the agreement would be seen as bashing Iran, even though the
agreement would restrict rather than expand what Iran could do with its nuclear
program. As with any negotiated agreement, the deal will be a compromise and not
perfect and it thus will always be easy to find specific provisions to be
grounds for disapproval, without members being held accountable for considering
the entire deal against the alternatives.
Congress is a co-equal policy-making branch, and it can and will be involved in
resolution of this issue. But in shaping how the legislative branch will be
involved one has to consider the political realities, not just procedural
formalities. The saboteurs certainly have considered those realities, although
they do not openly acknowledge them.
A recent op ed by Eric Edelman, Dennis Ross, and Ray Takeyh does not explicitly
endorse the Corker proposal but argues more generally for more congressional
involvement, the earlier the better. They would have us believe that the issue
at hand is no different from strategic arms control treaties with the USSR or
earlier multilateral efforts to remake the international order after World War
II. The writers’ history is faulty and tendentious in several respects, but two
items in particular stand out.
Edelman et al., in commenting on Richard Nixon’s handling of strategic arms
control, mention in passing that Nixon may be better known for the opening to
China, as well as ending the Vietnam War. They do not mention that the opening
to China, which truly was a historic and beneficial achievement, was one of the
most closely held foreign policy initiatives ever, with not only Congress but
even the State Department cut out of all the preparation.
The political realities on that issue at that time dictated Nixon’s secretive
approach. The President was beginning a rapprochement with a despised and
distrusted revolutionary regime, which had come to power more than two decades
earlier and with which there had since been almost no interaction with the
United States.
In that regard the China opening is a far closer historical analogy to what is
happening today between the United States and Iran than are strategic arms
control treaties with the Soviet Union.
In the early 1970s, Nixon was facing not only widespread distrust of the Chinese
Communist regime but also narrower sources of resistance. Back then AIPAC had
not yet hit its stride and become able to get 70 senators to sign a napkin, and
the NRA had not yet experienced the change in leadership that would turn it into
a lobby powerful enough to effectively rewrite the Second Amendment, but there
was something called the China lobby. That lobby included diehard supporters of
the Nationalist regime on Taiwan who resisted any dealing with the mainland
regime and continued to resist full diplomatic recognition of Communist China
even after Nixon’s initiative.
Lobbies wax and wane, but some of the sorts of challenges they pose to
presidents undertaking important diplomatic initiatives have stayed pretty much
the same.
The op-ed writers also refer to the early Cold War years, when President Harry
S. Truman “had to bring along a Republican Party skeptical of international
engagement. He cultivated influential Republican lawmakers such as Sen. Arthur
Vandenberg of Michigan and paid close attention to their advice and
suggestions.”
This comment implies a grossly mistaken version of Vandenberg’s political
biography. He was indeed an isolationist in the interwar years, but Pearl Harbor
changed all that. By the time Truman became president Vandenberg considered
himself an energetic internationalist. The cooperation between the Truman
administration and the Republican leader of the Foreign Relations Committee was
fruitful not because the administration was reaching out to an isolationist but
rather because Vandenberg’s inclinations regarding such things as the creation
of NATO were already going in the same direction as Truman’s.
They don’t make Arthur Vandenbergs any more. The Vandenberg of the 1940s, the
one who cooperated with Truman, would not be welcome in today’s Republican
Party. Perhaps the closest thing to a modern-day counterpart is Richard Lugar,
who isn’t in Congress anymore, after losing a primary election to a Tea Party
candidate a couple of years ago.
In the political reality on Capitol Hill today, any administration outreach
regarding Iran immediately runs into two strong, obstinate, and uncooperative
tendencies. One is the determination by the rightist government of Israel to do
all it can to prevent agreement between the United States and Iran, with
everything that determination implies regarding effects on U.S. politics. Some
of AIPAC’s napkins have become frayed over the last year or so, but the lobby is
still formidable.
The other is the tendency among many Republican members of Congress to oppose
whatever Barack Obama proposes, and especially anything that would be considered
a signature achievement for the President. If members vote more than three dozen
times to repeal a health care law, some of the same members will similarly and
reflexively oppose what would be a leading foreign policy achievement by Obama,
next to getting out of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but members cannot do
anything to prevent the commander-in-chief from doing that, just as diehard
proponents of the Vietnam War could not prevent Nixon from getting out of that
conflict.
The terms of an Iranian nuclear agreement are still under negotiation, but
probably the implementation of each side’s obligations will be phased and
gradual. It would be sensible, as well as politically realistic, for Congress’s
necessary involvement to be phased in gradually as well, and certainly not to
take the form of quickie votes. Probably the initial phases of sanctions relief
would rely on executive action. Only later, after implementation of the
agreement has become a going concern and both sides have had a chance to
demonstrate their seriousness about compliance with the agreement, will Congress
have to play its role with legislation.
Paul R. Pillar, in his 28 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, rose to be
one of the agency’s top analysts. He is now a visiting professor at Georgetown
University for security studies. (This article first appeared as a blog post at
The National Interest’s Web site. Reprinted with author’s permission.)
Complicating Iran Nuke Talks
Under pressure from the Israel Lobby, U.S. negotiators are injecting Iran’s
missile program into negotiations aimed at constraining Iran’s nuclear program,
a move that further complicates — and could endanger — the complex talks, Gareth
Porter reports for Inter Press Service.
By Gareth Porter
The Obama administration’s insistence that Iran discuss its ballistic missile
program in the negotiations for a comprehensive nuclear agreement brings its
position into line with that of Israel and U.S. senators who introduced
legislation drafted by the pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC aimed at torpedoing the
negotiations.
But the history of the issue suggests that the Obama administration knows that
Iran will not accept the demand and that it is not necessary to a final
agreement guaranteeing that Iran’s nuclear program is not used for a weapon.
White House spokesman Jay Carney highlighted the new U.S. demand in a statement
Wednesday that the Iranians “have to deal with matters related to their
ballistic missile program.”
Carney cited United Nations Security Council resolution 1929, approved in 2010,
which prohibited any activity related to ballistic missiles capable of
delivering nuclear weapons, including missile launches. “So that’s completely
agreed by Iran in the Joint Plan of Action,” he added.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif not only explicitly contradicted
Carney’s claim that Iran had agreed to discuss ballistic missiles but warned
that a U.S. demand for discussion of its missile program would violate a red
line for Iran. “Nothing except Iran’s nuclear activities will be discussed in
the talks with the [six powers known as the P5+1], and we have agreed on it,” he
said, according to Iran’s IRNA.
The pushback by Zarif implies that the U.S. position would seriously risk the
breakdown of the negotiations if the Obama administration were to persist in
making the demand.
Contrary to Carney’s statement, the topic of ballistic missiles is not part of
the interim accord reached last November. The Joint Plan of Action refers only
to “addressing the UN Security Council resolutions, with a view toward bringing
to a satisfactory conclusion the UN Security Council’s consideration of this
matter” and the formation of a “Joint Commission” which would “work with the
IAEA to facilitate resolution of past and present issues of concern”.
It is not even clear that the U.S. side took the position in the talks last fall
that Iran’s missile program had to be on the table in order to complete a final
agreement. But in any event it was not part of the Joint Plan of Action agreed
on Nov. 24. Past U.S. statements on the problem of the Security Council
resolutions indicate that the administration had previously acknowledged that no
agreement had been reached to negotiate on ballistic missiles and that it had
not originally intended to press for discussions on the issue.
The “senior administration officials” who briefed journalists on the Joint Plan
of Action last November made no reference to ballistic missiles at all. They
referred only to “possible military dimensions” of the Iranian nuclear program
and to “Iranian activities at Parchin.” The demand for negotiations on Iran’s
missile program originated with Israel, both directly and through Senate Foreign
Relations Committee members committed to AIPAC’s agenda.
Citing an unnamed senior Israeli official, Ha’aretz reported on Thursday that
Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs Yuval Steinitz had met with Undersecretary
of State Wendy Sherman, the chief U.S. negotiator in the nuclear talks with
Iran, and with senior French and British foreign ministry officials before the
start of the February talks and had emphasized that Iran’s missile program “must
be part of the agenda” for negotiation of a final agreement.
By early December, however, Israel was engaged in an even more direct effort to
pressure the administration to make that demand, drafting a bill that explicitly
included among its provisions one that would have required new sanctions unless
the president certified that “Iran has not conducted any tests for ballistic
missiles with a range exceeding 500 kilometers.”
Since Iran had obviously tested missiles beyond that limit long ago, it would
have made it impossible for President Barack Obama to make such a certification.
Although the bill was stopped, at least temporarily, in the Senate when enough
Democratic members refused to support it, Republicans on the committee continued
to attack the administration’s negotiating position, and began singling out the
administration’s tolerance of Iranian missiles in particular.
At a Feb. 4 Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, Sen. Bob Corker of
Tennessee, the panel’s ranking Republican, ripped into Sherman. After drawing a
highly distorted picture of Iran’s readiness to build a nuclear weapon, Corker
asked, “Why did you all not in this agreement in any way address the delivery
mechanisms, the militarizing of nuclear arms? Why was that left off since they
breached a threshold everyone acknowledges?”
But instead of correcting Corker’s highly distorted characterization of the
situation, Sherman immediately reassured him that the administration would do
just what he wanted. Sherman admitted that the November agreement covering the
next months had not “shut down all the production of any ballistic missile that
could have anything to do with delivery of a nuclear weapon.” Then she added,
“But that is indeed something that has to be addressed as part of a
comprehensive agreement.”
Sherman also suggested at one point that there would be no real need to prohibit
any Iranian missile if the negotiations on the nuclear program were successful.
“Not having a nuclear weapon,” she said, “makes delivery systems almost, not
wholly, but almost, irrelevant.” That admission underlined the wholly political
purpose of the administration’s apparent embrace of the Israeli demand that Iran
negotiate limits on its ballistic missiles.
The Obama administration may be seeking to take political credit for a hard line
on Iranian missiles in the knowledge that it will not be able to get a consensus
for that negotiating position among the group of six powers negotiating with
Iran. Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Rybakov clearly implied that
Moscow would not support such a demand in a statement Thursday that Russia
“considers that a comprehensive agreement must concern only and exclusively the
restoration of trust in a purely peaceful intention of Iran’s nuclear program.”
Although U.S., European and Israeli officials have asserted consistently over
the years that Iran’s medium-range ballistic missiles are designed to carry
nuclear weapons, Israel’s foremost expert on the Iranian nuclear program, Uzi
Rubin, who managed Israel’s missile defense program throughout the 1990s, has
argued that the conventional analysis was wrong.
In an interview with the hard-line anti-Iran Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms
Control in September 2009, Rubin said, “The Iranians believe in conventional
missiles. Not just for saturation but also to take out specific targets.
Remember, they have practically no air force to do it. Their main striking power
is based on missiles.”
Since 2008, the International Atomic Energy Agency has accused Iran of working
on integrating a nuclear weapon into the Shahab-3 missile reentry vehicle in
2002-2003, based on a set of drawings in a set of purported Iranian documents.
The documents were said by the George W. Bush administration to have come from
the purloined laptop of a participant in an alleged Iranian nuclear weapons
research program.
But that account turned out to be a falsehood, as were other variants on the
origins of the document. The documents actually came from the Mujahedin-e-Khalq,
the anti-regime organization then listed as a terrorist organization by the U.S.
State Department, according to two German sources.
Karsten Voigt, who was the German foreign office coordinator, publicly warned
about the MEK provenance of the papers in a November 2004 interview with the
Wall Street Journal. Voigt, who retired from the foreign office in 2010,
recounted the story of how an MEK member delivered the papers to German
intelligence in 2004 in an interview last year for a newly-published book by
this writer.
Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S.
national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism
for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan. His new book, Manufactured
Crisis: the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, was published Feb. 14. [This
article was originally published at Inter Press Service.]
How GOP Sabotaged a Union Vote
The defeated unionization vote at a VW plant in Tennessee marked a new rightwing tactic, with state Republicans weighing in with threats of retaliation if
the workers joined the UAW, a shocking strategy that drew little criticism from
the mainstream U.S. press, notes Stephen Crockett.
By Stephen Crockett
Last week’s Volkswagen worker unionization vote in Tennessee was the dirtiest
union election of the 21st Century with all the dirty tactics coming from outside
anti-union political forces.
Without the intimidation and lies of elected Tennessee Republicans along with
billionaire financed national right-wing groups, the union would almost surely
have won the union representation vote. (A slim majority of 53 percent of plant
workers opposed unionization.)
Outside groups financed by extremist right-wing billionaires put up emotionally
charged smear campaign billboards blaming the United Auto Workers (UAW) for the
decline of the automobile industry in Detroit. These are false charges. Labor
costs in total are a tiny portion of the cost of cars and trucks.
The truth is that global trade policy and poor management decisions concerning
the types of vehicles built are mostly responsible for the long-term problems
and the decline of Detroit.
The most recent crisis that required the bailout of General Motors and Chrysler
was the direct result of the collapse of Wall Street and the biggest banks. Auto
sales collapsed because the financing of new car purchases collapsed. Unions
certainly played no role in the creation of this crisis. Unions did play a huge
role in saving both companies.
If either company had failed, it would have taken Ford down too since the auto
parts suppliers to all companies would have gone out of business. The entire
American economy would have gone into another Great Depression.
The Wall Street/banking crisis was caused by poor regulation of that industry
and abuses by Wall Street/banking insiders. Who pushed through the deregulation
of Wall Street and the banking industry? The answer is mostly Republican
politicians and right-wing-billionaire-financed organizations like those putting
up the anti-union, smear billboards in Chattanooga to defeat the VW unionization
vote.
The same right-wing billionaire groups and Republican politicians (along with
some corporatist elected Democrats) largely pushed through the bad trade policy
that created the serious decline of Detroit and the relative decline of the Big
Three American automakers.
The irony that those forces whose ideas and actions undermined the American auto
industry were blaming the industry’s unionized workers was completely lost on
the Tennessee and national media. Nobody seemed to be covering this situation at
all. They still are not discussing it.
Another barely covered aspect of the situation is that Republican officeholders
used the power of their offices to interfere in this election. The only parties
who should have been involved were the workers and the company.
VW actually seemed to want the workers to join the UAW. VW has very good
relationships with its workers all over the world. VW managers wanted to bring
their Worker Council model to the United States to help all American companies
and workers establish better cooperation in all workplaces. The UAW was very
supportive. The Worker Council model is a huge success and has helped VW become
the international success story that it is.
The Worker Council models, like traditional unions, bring an element of
democracy into the workplace. Those forces opposing it are the same forces
behind voter-suppression laws and actions all over America to manipulate our
elections to government offices. Their efforts and tactics mirror their actions
in these other arenas. They are not friends of democracy in America in
government or the economy.
Elected Republicans in Tennessee wanted this model defeated because they profit
in terms of campaign donations by the bad worker-employer labor relations
situation in the United States. These Republican politicians saw that good labor
relations might be good for the nation but would be very bad for them. They went
to war with both VW and the UAW just to retain their political power in
Tennessee and nationally.
These Republicans threatened to pull tax breaks to the manufacturing plant if
the workers voted in the union. The Tennessee politicians and the state
government had no business getting involved in this unionization vote. Their
actions were completely corrupt and should have been illegal. Gov. Bill Haslam
and Sen. Bob Corker would be facing jail time in a more just society.
Their highhanded actions are certainly abuses of power not unlike those of Gov.
Chris Christie’s machine in New Jersey, using strong-arm tactics to achieve
political ends. Of course, we are not seeing the media make this kind of
comparison. Threatening tax breaks already granted for blatantly politically
partisan reasons certainly seems to need federal investigation by the U.S.
Department of Justice.
Statements by Sen. Corker about the future product lines from VW seem to be
outright lies. He claimed that a vote for the union would result in new models
going to other plants and suggested that his information came from top VW
management sources, though he didn’t identify his sources. Corker’s claims were
denied by company spokespersons.
It appears these lies and threats worked on just enough workers to defeat the
unionization vote. However, if the media had fully explored the situation and
explained the tactics, the outcome might have been very different.
Stephen Crockett is a business owner (College Marketing.com, talk show host at
Democratic Talk Radio, and a union activist. He can be reached by email at
[email protected].