Iran Nuclear Deal
In a January 21st Op-Ed at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace website, CEIP President Jessica Tuchman Mathews writes that after a decade long impasse on Iran's nuclear program, world powers and Iran are on the verge of a solution. "Yet the US Congress, acting reflexively against Iran, and under intense pressure from Israel, seems ready to shatter the agreement with a bill that takes no account of Iranian political developments, misunderstands proliferation realities, and ignores the dire national security consequences for the United States." Mathews notes that the US's unilateral sanctions did nothing to stop Iran's uranium enrichment since the sanctions had little support in the international community. Other world powers looked at the sanctions as an attempt to stop Iran from enriching nuclear fuel for peaceful purposes as was its right as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The situation changed in 2009 when President Obama stated that he was willing to engage in a serious dialogue to allay growing concerns over Iran's nuclear enrichment. The sanctions gained international community support and seriously impacted Iran's economy. "No outsider can say for certain that Iran ever definitively chose to become a nuclear weapons state. On the one hand, it has spent billions of dollars pursuing activities that can be rationally explained only if the regime seeks the ability to produce weapons....Yet Tehran has also said that it does not want nuclear weapons. It has argued that nuclear weapons would not be appropriate for an effective military strategy and that they would violate the principles of the Islamic Republic."
One thing that is clear is that "Iran has been unambiguous in insisting on its right to uranium enrichment...Those like [Israeli] Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who insist that the only acceptable level is zero enrichment in Iran know, or should know, that they are using code for 'no deal would be acceptable.' " Attacks on Iran's nuclear enrichment facilities would delay but not stop its program and it would cause the international consensus on sanctions to collapse. "Countries like Russia, China, Turkey, India, and Japan that have adopted the oil and financial sanctions against Iran with varying degrees of reluctance are unlikely to sustain them to support a war against enrichment" Such illegitimate attacks would also strengthen the hand of Iranian hard-liners, make it impossible to have inspections, and, if Iran then chose to actually develop nuclear weapons, cause another round of proliferation in an already unstable region.
As to the terms of the nuclear deal, "Iran agreed to eliminate its existing stockpile of 20 percent enriched uranium either by diluting it down to low enrichment or converting it to an oxide form that is not adaptable for further enrichment,...[to stop] the operation or the installation of additional advanced centrifuges,...halt progress on the [plutonium] reactor under construction at Arak", and limit its stock of low-enriched uranium. Finally "To reduce the possibility that Iran could be running covert, hidden fuel cycles, it extends monitoring for the first time to uranium mines and mills and to centrifuge production and assembly facilities. These inspections are unprecedented in both frequency and extent." In return Iran has $7 billion in sanctions lifted.
All this is now in jeopardy if the new Iran sanctions bill is approved by congress - the Senate is eight or nine votes shy of a veto-proof bill. "Its passage, as an act of bad faith on the US’s part after having just agreed not to impose new sanctions during the term of the six-month deal, would probably cause Iran to walk away from the negotiations." Mathews concludes: "A final agreement is by no means assured, but the opportunity is assuredly here. The price of an agreement will be accepting a thoroughly monitored, appropriately sized enrichment program in Iran that does not rise over 5 percent. The alternatives are war or a nuclear-armed Iran. Should this be a hard choice? Astonishingly, too many members of Congress seem to think so."
(Mathews article was originally published in The New York Review of Books.)
Let's hope that Harry Reid can keep the bill from reaching the Senate floor and that no other Senators sign on to this ill-thought-out and dangerous piece of legislation.
In Brief (Links)
[Mother Jones, January 23] Is the HHS running from a voter registration fight with Republicans? The health insurance exchanges set up under Obamacare, as agencies providing public assistance, are required by federal law to help millions of uninsured Americans register to vote. But the Obama administration is refusing to fully comply with that law.
[La Repubblica. January 24] "F14-T will be the new Maranello red." The new Formula 1 race car from Ferrari will try to win the 2014 F1 World Cup. The car was named after an online vote of Ferrari fans worldwide. [Official photos]
[Mother Jones, January 23] Unlimited incomes in a world run by artificial intelligences? These speculative ideas appear in a working paper by, believe it or not, the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank. Kevin Drum, commenting on a James Pethokoukis post, writes that the general idea that robots and AI are...going to have a
huge economic impact in the medium term future...is something that
seems so obvious to me that I'm a little puzzled that there's anyone
left who still doesn't see it." [Pethokoukis' post is even more mind-boggling in its discussion of the AI singularity.]
With 130,000 dead and 9.5 million displaced, the Syrian Civil War is approaching the end of its third year. Amidst low expectations, the Geneva II Conference got underway this past Wednesday. The first face-to-face meetings between the opposing parties were held Saturday with only UN mediator Lakhdar Brahimi speaking and no agreements made. [The Guardian, January 25] Al Jazeera has a number of articles and opinion pieces about the conference: Randa Slim in a January 23 op-ed notes that first peace initiatives rarely produce agreements to end conflict and Syria is not likely to be an exception. She points to two successful conferences as models - the "Dayton accords which in the 1990s brought an end to the civil war in Bosnia...and the Bonn 2001 Conference in which the international community enabled an interim government to come to power in Afghanistan after the collapse of the Taliban regime." Rami Khouri explains in another op-ed post why Iran's presence in Geneva II is critical for any progress.
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