A Bad Deal Off to a Worse Start
Iran is flouting the nuclear deal, except where it's benefiting.
By
Mortimer B. Zuckerman
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Jan. 21, 2016, at 6:00 a.m.
President Barack Obama never submitted his Iranian nuclear deal for ratification by the Congress because he knew it would have no chance of passing. That does not make the United States unique: The Iranian parliament has never approved it either (that body passed a heavily amended version) and the Iranian president has never signed it. The Iranian cabinet has never even discussed it. And the other members of the P5+1 – Britain, China, Germany, France and Russia – have likewise given it short legal shrift. Indeed, President Obama "may end up being the only person in the world to sign his much-wanted deal, in effect making a treaty with himself," as the Gatestone Institute's Amir Taheri has said.
In other words, Iran is not legally bound to do anything, something which a State Department official admitted last November in a letter to Kansas GOP Rep. Mike Pompeo of the House Intelligence Committee, in which she stated the deal "is not a treaty or an executive agreement, and is not a signed document." Instead, the official wrote, its success "will depend not on whether it is legally binding or signed, but rather on the extensive verification measures" and our "capacity to reimpose and ramp up our sanctions if Iran does not meet its commitments." And how is that going?
So far so good for the Islamic Republic. Per Taheri, Britain now has lifted the ban on 22 Iranian banks and their companies which had been blacklisted because of alleged involvement in nuclear-linked deals; German trade with Iran is up 33 percent; China has signed deals to help Iran build five more nuclear reactors; Russia has commenced delivering S300 anti-aircraft missile systems and is angling to sell planes to the Islamic Republic; and France has sent its foreign minister and a 100-strong delegation to negotiate big business deals. Nations that weren't in the P5+1 are also scrambling to get into the act. Indian trade with Iran is up 17 percent, for example. And the country's nuclear project? It is "fully intact," the head of Iran's Atomic Energy Agency, Ali Akbar Salehi, said in October.
And with international inspectors last week certifying that Iran has, thus far, complied with the provisions of the agreement, oil and financial sanctions on the country were officially lifted and as much as $100 billion of its frozen assets were released. That all marks a substantial payoff for a deal whose ongoing strictures on Iran are, essentially, nonbinding. And the Islamic Republic was able to leverage the release of five Americans it had unjustly held, getting clemency for seven Iranians who had been at minimum charged and in many cases convicted in actual credible judicial proceedings, not to mention having 14 others removed from international most-wanted lists. The deal also included a 400 Million dollar gift and later it was revealed Obama gave them an additional $1.7 Billion. U.S. officials have insisted that this doesn't set a precedent, just as they once objected to the very idea of an exchange (even though it's the second time it has cut such a deal with the Iranians), but it looks for all the world like an exchange rate has been established.
Obama and his Secretary of State John Kerry claim that their nuke deal with the "moderate faction" in Tehran might encourage positive changes in Iran's behavior. That hasn't happened. Instead, Iran has acted with impunity, safe in the knowledge that Obama will minimize and talk around its violations, lest his centerpiece foreign policy accomplishment prove illusory. "Obama won't do anything that might jeopardize the deal," Ziba Kalam, an adviser to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, said in October. "This is his biggest, if not the only, foreign policy success." And the deal has done nothing to soften Iran's aggressive posture across many issues.
Meanwhile, "for the first time, the [International Atomic Energy Agency] linked various instances of previously reported clandestine activities into a coherent account of Tehran's nuclear-weapons development process," the Foundation for Defense of Democracies' Olli Heinonen noted last month; that he added, revealed that its "clandestine nuclear activities represented a parallel nuclear program (from mining to uranium conversion and enrichment) carried out alongside its declared one." Indeed, Iran had a program up to 2003, according to the report, and a scaled back version until 2009. And the IAEA confirmed it has not been able to determine the full picture of Iran's efforts as the country has not yet "come clean" about them. "The truth of Iran's work on nuclear weapons is probably far more extensive than outlined by the IAEA in this report," David Albright of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security told the Financial Times.
But the Obama administration accepted a pledge in the agreement with Iran that it did not have to disclose its past nuclear weapons work or fully cooperate with the IAEA investigation in order to receive sanctions relief.
Rather than demand total Iranian transparency on its previous nuclear efforts, the Obama people "hoped that defusing tensions on this issue and focusing on the future, rather than the past, would build confidence in Iran's nuclear intentions so that a more stable and cooperative relationship prevails between Iran and the West," as Michael Singh of the Washington Institute of Near Studies and Simond de Galbert of the Center for Strategic and International Studies wrote in The Wall Street Journal last month. But that only allows Iran nuclear maneuverability going forward.
At the same time, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, describes Israel as "a cancerous tumor" whose elimination would mean that "the West's hegemony and threats will be discredited" in the Middle East. In its place, he boasts, "the hegemony of Iran will be promoted." Today there are dozens of maps circulating in the Muslim world showing the extent of Muslim territories lost to the infidel that must be recovered.
Then there is Khamenei's position on Israel. It has no right to exist as a state, he believes. (He also regards the Holocaust as either "a propaganda ploy" or a disputed claim. "If there was such a thing," he writes, "we don't know why it happened and how.") He claims his strategy for the destruction of Israel is not based on anti-Semitism but on "well-established Islamic principles." One is that a land that falls under Muslim rule, even briefly, can never again be ceded to non-Muslims.
And according to Khamenei, Israel is a special case. The first is that the country is an "ally of the American Great Satan" and plays an important role in its "evil scheme" to dominate "the heartland of the Ummah." A second reason is that Israel is a "hostile infidel," having repeatedly fought with Muslims. Finally, Khamenei sees Israel's occupation of Jerusalem, which he describes as "Islam's third Holy City" as putting the country in a category unto itself. He proposes a protracted stretch of guerilla warfare aimed at driving the majority of Israeli Jews from their country. To this end he wants set up Hezbollah-style groups in the West Bank. "The solution is a one-state formula," he declares, and it would be an Islamic state called Palestine.
Certain that Obama is unwilling to undermine the nonexistent "deal," the mullahs have intensified their backing for Houthi rebels in Yemen and heightened their propaganda war against Saudi Arabia, now openly calling for the overthrow of the monarchy there. Iran's military has engaged with Russia in Syria to shore up the country's dictator, Bashar Assad. They have heightened contacts with Palestinian groups in the hope of unleashing a new "intifada" against Israel. Khamenei's mouthpiece, the newspaper Kayhan, wrote in a recent editorial, "Palestine is thirsty for a third intifada. It is the duty of every Muslim to help start it as soon as possible."
Nor will Obama's hopes of engaging Iran on other issues come to fruition, for Khamenei declared "any dialogue with the American Great Satan" to be "forbidden." Nor have they moderated their "hate-America campaign," notes Taheri. "'Death to America' slogans in Tehran have been painted afresh along with U.S. flags painted at the entrance of offices so that they could be trampled underfoot," Taheri writes. Inside Iran, Obama's "moderate partners" have doubled the number of executions and political prisoners, recently crushing marches by teachers calling for release of their leaders, arresting hundreds of trade unionists. When the administration unveiled the agreement for U.S. lawmakers, the members of Congress were told that new sanctions on Iran would violate the deal.
And all of this has taken place against the backdrop of the United States having gone out of its way, as no major power in history, to help, respect, please and even appease the Islamic world. By contrast, no other nation has been a victim of vilification, demonization and violence on the part of the Islamists as has the U.S., as Taheri has pointed out.
"During the past six decades, the U.S. has been by far the largest donor of aid to more than 40 of the 57 Muslim-majority nations," Taheri writes. "In the 1940s and 1950s, tens of millions of Muslims were saved from starvation and famine thanks to U.S. food aid. The Point IV program, launched by President Harry Truman, helped eradicate a number of endemic diseases, including smallpox and malaria, which killed large numbers of Muslims each year. Many Muslim nations have been annually receiving large checks from the U.S. for decades, among them Egypt, which gets $2 billion, and Pakistan, the homeland of San Bernardino killer Syed Farook, which gets $1 billion."
Today, half of Iranian President Rouhani's closest aides are holders of Ph.D.s from U.S. universities, Taheri notes, among them his chief of staff, Muhammad Nahavandian, and his foreign minister, Muhammad Javad Zarif. And, Taheri adds, the U.S. has been host to more than five million Muslims from all over the world, many of them fleeing brutal Islamist regimes in their homelands. Yet the result is "Death to America" and hatred for Western values.
So the nuclear deal, however weak in its terms, will in all likelihood not be enforced.
No wonder Sen. Bob Corker, the Tennessee Republican who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, opened a recent hearing with these candid words: "I think the agreement is off to a really terrible start." The committee was focusing on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which is going to provide substantial financial rewards that could top $140 billion to the Islamic Republic of Iran, which is also the world's leading sponsor of terrorism.
Corker noted that since the agreement was signed in July, Iran has continued to flout the U.N. not only by giving arms to Yemen and Syria but also sending Gen. Qasem Soleimani, chief of Iran's elite military Qods Force, and other sanctioned officials to Russia, Iraq and elsewhere and by refusing to fully cooperate with the IAEA investigation into its nuclear weapons research.
The U.S. now must sustain our terrorism and human rights-related sanctions against Iran until that country ends its illicit activity and, more, we should toughen our terrorism-related sanctions by keeping money from reaching the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and business entities it owns. The bottom line is that we must maintain economic sanctions against Tehran for its sponsorship of terrorism and human rights abuses.
We must confront Iran's destabilizing behavior and sponsorship of terrorist organizations and regimes. This must remain a top U.S. priority. And we must also retain sanctions that pressure Iran by targeting that country's human rights abuses and ongoing sponsorship of terrorism. What is critical is preventing Iran from cheating – a country that denies the Holocaust is not the partner for a deal that relies on verification.
Of course Obama's never submitted the Iranian nuclear deal for ratification. He knew it would have no chance of passing in Congress. Instead it will go down in American history as one of the most counterproductive diplomatic efforts by any American administration.