Consequences of an Iranian Nuclear Deal on U.S.-Israel Relations

Consequences of an Iranian Nuclear Deal on U.S.-Israel Relations

Howard Adelman

Whoa! Halt! Hold your horses. John Kerry seemed eager this week to damp down speculation that a nuclear deal with Iran was almost completed. Kerry insisted that a deal was not imminent. There were still significant gaps. But in Geneva this past weekend, the U.S. energy chiefs joined the talks, including U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, The head of the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) and a former foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, also joined the Iran nuclear negotiations on 21 February, clear signs that the differences had boiled down to a crucial few but very important issues requiring high level intervention. It helps that Salehi was educated at MIT.t was on that image believe the total number of the centrifuges had been settled and are to be reduced from 19,000 to 6,500. Perhaps the mixture of the original R-1 centrifuges and the more advanced centrifuges still had to be settled, but the information I have is that this issue had also been determined at about 50% of each kind. There were minor issues, such as the inventory and use of the tailings, but neither of these required a high level of input from either side. Another major issue was whether IAEA would be allowed full inspection of the Parchin facility to deal with the issue of militarization of nuclear weapons, but Salehi and Moniz were not the right senior personnel to sort out this issue. I, therefore, concluded that the restrictions on the production of plutonium at the Arak reactor had not yet been finalized. This was both a very technical as well as high level political issue. The two sides might also have been in contention over the period of limitation on the number of centrifuges. If the period was to be ten years, how many additional centrifuges after the termination of that restrictive period? 3,500 as rumoured and these over a further five or ten years?

However important the outstanding items, the parties were within striking distance of a deal. There were also the issues of the waiving or lifting of sanctions which Secretary of State, John Kerry, and the Iranian foreign affairs minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, were trying to finalize. Kerry did not want to lose leverage and bargaining power with the suggestion that such a deal was imminent for that alone might have undercut the momentum. And it had become important, if possible, to make the deal before Netanyahu’s scheduled 3 March speech before both houses of Congress to take the wind totally out of his sails. That tight deadline was the real challenge now. For Iran now had the tremendous incentive of seeing the widening gulf between the U.S. and Israel increased and reified. A rare accomplishment for an avowed enemy of both the U.S. and Israel.

Netanyahu, Ya’alon and Bennett were all in a panic mode. What if the major security issue for the right, the bogeyman of a nuclear Iran, was suddenly removed as a major issue in the Israeli elections? All three had run on a platform of the prime importance of security. Netanyahu was still considered best positioned to defend Israel. However, if the security issue was cut down to size, most Israeli voters preferred the Zionist unity group led by Herzog and Livni to take care of the important domestic social and economic issues. The rumours of an impending deal did not mean that Israel was no longer threatened by Iran. Iran would remain a supporter of terrorism. Iran would grow as a regional power. But the removal of the nuclear option suddenly revealed Netanyahu to be an emperor without any clothes. For it was he that had done the most to cast Iran as a nuclear enemy and not as the country most determined to wipe Israel off the map. As he repeatedly stated, “there is no doubt that the greatest challenge to our security is the attempt by Iran to arm itself with nuclear weapons.” Well if Iran no longer can produce nuclear weapons, what happens to the major thrust of Israeli foreign policy? It was on that image of Iran as a nuclear threat to the whole world and not just to Israel that Netanyahu had placed his total bet. Once removed, the absence of the image of Iran as a nuclear military power left him not only naked but hoisted with his own petard.

But the problem is made far worse by Netanyahu repeatedly reinforcing his own self portrait as a person not only in hyperbole but in outright lies. He kept insisting that the impending nuclear agreement with Iran “leaves Iran the ability to produce the necessary material for a nuclear bomb within a few months and afterwards, to produce dozens of nuclear bombs.” Utter nonsense! The agreement not only prevents such a possibility, but the release of the Mossad memo as well as the reports of the IAEA clearly show both that Iran was still far from being within a few months of producing a bomb and, perhaps, even more importantly, Netanyahu had been informed of this by his own highly respected intelligence agency. Netanyahu’s shrill rhetoric has not only undermined his own credibility, it has seriously damaged Israel’s. What is even far worse, his entire failed effort to paint Iran as this huge nuclear threat has strengthened Iran, and distracted genuine criticism from Iran as a supporter of terrorism, as a rising and dangerous military power in the Middle East and, most importantly, as Israel’s main enemy as Iran has not retracted its goal of eliminating Israel. For Israel, Netanyahu’s policies could not have resulted in a more perverse result.

Netanyahu, by placing all his efforts at demonization of Iran by the nuclear imagery, had, in effect, damaged Israel. That image would now boomerang back on his own small country as the only nation in the Middle East with a nuclear arsenal. Netanyahu’s portraiture of Iran would henceforth harm the country that he led, not Iran. The effort to brand Iran as a threatening nuclear power now would turn against Israel as the sole nuclear power in the Middle East, but one without the rationale of a competing nuclear threat. The number and size of Iran’s nuclear production facilities were to be fully transparent as would its dedication solely to peaceful purposes for all to see. And Iran had never been shown to have engaged in underground testing even before the Joint Plan of Action (JPA) of November 2013. Israel’s own intelligence agency, Mossad, had informed the political leadership in Israel that Iran had no operational plan, only research, on how to weaponize its nuclear arsenal.

That Mossad report was probably even more damaging than even the prospective nuclear deal with Iran. For all the claims of the right that Iran was on the verge of becoming a nuclear power had been revealed as so much malarkey. Israel’s own intelligence service had said as much. The misused expression “on the verge” had been used to obscure and mislead, for Iran evidently had no capacity to become a nuclear power within a year let alone 3-6 months. Rather, the petard intended to blow a significant hole in Iran’s foreign and military policy had rebounded against Israel. Successive revelations within only one week had revealed the Israeli right wing leadership as tricksters if not outright liars. What they had said no longer would be perceived as coming from thinking or even sincere belief, but as emanating from their own rear ends.

A worst case scenario had developed, not of Iran emerging as a nuclear power, but of the portrait of Iran as a nuclear power self-destructing. The destruction of that image had blown a huge breach in the unity of the most powerful nation on earth with Israel. Israel had been literally hoisted upon its own petard. Rouhani could now playfully ruminate like Hamlet: “tis the sport to have the engineer Hoist with his owne petar.” Engineers in the sixteenth century were the constructors of military devices. That device was now blowing up, not only in the faces of the right wing leadership in Israel, but in the face of the plotting and scheming of the Republican leadership in the United States. We have yet to see how badly wounded the twin messengers of doom, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, will be as they try to flee as fast as possible from the explosion, but since they will almost surely dodge and dart in their retreat, they may not be as badly hurt as if they simply retreat backwards from the backblast in the most direct route possible. Yet Obama may smirk and think to himself how most sweet it is when two craft headed towards you are forced to veer off course and end up crashing into one another.

Unfortunately, Israel will be the real victim as its relations with the United States will suffer enormously. The withholding of strategic intelligence from Israel will be the least of Israel’s worries. With the sidelining of Iran as a nuclear bogeyman, the search for a final resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict may return to the limelight. Even if the United States does not go so far as reversing itself in its opposition to a Middle East Nuclear Weapon Free Zone (MENWFZ), the White House in future may be expected to adopt some if not almost all of the following new initiatives even as it continues to reiterate that the U.S. remains committed to Israel’s genuine security requirements and the right to defend itself.

Prioritizing the creation of two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security
Denounce many of the myriad of efforts by Israel to develop a one-state future for the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean with Palestinians only having “autonomy”
Cease expending diplomatic capital to protect Israel from international actions against Israeli policies with which the U.S. disagrees
Explicitly begin depicting any expansion of West Bank settlements outside of the areas already agreed to be traded when a two state solution is agreed upon as not simply “illegitimate” but as “illegal” and a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention
Abstain from, or even support, a UN Security Council Resolution condemning Israeli settlement expansion
Support a UN Security Council resolution setting forth a framework for a two-state final status agreement that include a basic set of principles
If not 4 above, the U.S. may independently put forth a framework for a final status agreement including fundamental principles as the basis for such an agreement
Provide indirect and even overt support for the Arab Peace Initiative and explore and move towards recognizing the Palestinian Authority as the government of an independent state
Provide a myriad of indirect forms of support for the “peace” parties in Israel
Move to deny tax-exempt status to American organizations that use tax-deductible funds to support west bank settlements.

Israel is now on the most dangerous swamp since the end of the Six Day War. Netanyahu, the man most Israelis believe was best equipped to defend Israel’s security interests, has emerged as the leader who has most endangered those interests. The Israeli ship of state is now surrounded by shoals and needs a highly skilled captain to avoid crashing on the rocks. If Netanyahu is re-elected, as seems likely, the danger will increase enormously. Iran will remain as Israel’s most threatening enemy with a leader least capable of countering the threat.

I’m in Mourning

Feb26

I’m in Mourning

Howard Adelman

Here you are rejoicing. Two days have passed and you have not had to feel guilty for not reading Howard’s blog. While you are grinning from ear-to-ear, I am in mourning. Not only have I lost my old computer and now have to type on the backup that, luckily, I had purchased in Victoria, but I keep making errors with my two-fingered typing. Though this is a Dell laptop like my previous one, the delete is in a different place so when I hit what I think is the delete key, the cursor goes to the end of the line. When I try to type “ee”, I type “rr” so feel comes out as frrl. When I do type delete in the new location, a period appears. And this computer skips in a different way than my last one. So this paragraph took five minutes rather than two minutes to type. Is there anything worse than clumsy fingers being soaked by tears falling on them as you try to write a blog?

And now I have to retype the second paragraph because I pressed the wrong key and the paragraph was deleted. You already know that I lost the blog I wrote for the day before yesterday. What you do not know was that the blog contained what I believe was the most significant analysis I had done on the Iranian nuclear negotiations. You also do not know that I also lost the blog I wrote yesterday, not as important as the previous one, but a blog that I felt very proud about as well. Worst of all, I lost all the research materials I had collected in one file for my next series of blogs on Libya. I had not backed up any of these files yet on my other computer. You not only do not know about these losses, but what happened and why I think it happened.

Yesterday, Nancy drove me several towns away (a drive of about 30 minutes) to our local computer repair shop. Then drove me back to the computer shop. Then back again. We left at 9:30 a.m. We did not get back home until almost five. What had happened? On Tuesday morning, as I told you, as I was completing that morning’s blog, it disappeared from my screen. What actually happened was that some strange material suddenly appeared on my screen. I thought it was a pop-up ad and, without looking at it closely, deleted it. The deletion then wiped out all my open files – the research file for the next day’s blog, the back-up research material for the blog I was writing and the blog itself.

I spent a good part of Tuesday searching for that file to no avail. I am computer challenged, but not terribly so. I have lost material before and somehow I usually find it after an intensive search for an hour or two. I could not find the missing material this time and shifted to re-creating the research file on the anticipated effects of a signed nuclear deal with Iran on Israel-U.S. relations for the next day’s blog. It was far easier re-assembling that material than recollecting the material I had used for that day’s blog that had disappeared. It dealt with the analysis of material revealed on Monday of a highly secret Mossad report dated October 2012 to the Israeli government on the status of the Iranian nuclear program. The hardest material to re-create would be the one page detailed summary I had prepared of the contents of that report. In any case, I was hoping I would still find my missing blog.

Tuesday evening, lo and behold, and to my chagrin and Nancy saying, “I told you so,” my blog reappeared. It, as well as numerous other autosave documents from the last few weeks, suddenly were there on my screen. And I cannot tell you whether it was the result of something I did or this was simply manna from heaven delivered by the collective memory of the computer cloud in our contemporary heaven. But there it was. Not the final version, but probably the version from about fifteen minutes before I lost the document. So a quick read and a half an hour of work and the blog was ready for sending out in the morning. I actually tried to send it out Tuesday evening, but I was not able to connect to the internet and decided to leave it overnight and try to send it out on Wednesday morning. The material that had re-appeared also included the appendix which contained my analysis of the Mossad 2012 report. I had saved that in a separate file. So I had the full blog.

I also had the material for Wednesday morning’s blog and the material I had reassembled that day with a great deal of overlap, but with some additional material as well. I would get up the next (yesterday) morning, send out the blog from the day before and then write my blog for that day.

It was not to be. When I awoke, I could still not connect to the internet. So I wrote that morning’s blog and waited until Nancy or one of our guests woke up to help me get on the internet. I finished the second blog, everyone woke up, but no one was able to help me get connected. My computer (the old one) showed that I was connected, but I was unable to upload Firefox or Xplorenet and send out my blogs. The blogs were there on the computer, but I could not share them in the usual way.

That is when we decided to take the computer to the hospital. We got to the computer store and the proprietor opened up the computer and tried to connect me to the internet. The material was there in front of him to send out, but somehow the computer would not allow him to make a connection. He said he would have to back up my files and reconfigure the system. He asked if I had saved my files. I said I had. He asked permission to close the files, a procedure necessary for his backing up my files and figuring out why I was not connecting to the internet. I said, “Sure.” Big mistake! I should have copied the opened files first before closing them, but you know what they say about hindsight.

After spending time shopping for gifts to bring back to Toronto, going to the bank and having lunch, we returned to the computer store. He said that the computer was not ready. He would need a few more hours. We came back later and again he said it was not ready. The long and the short of it in the end was that he said he had been unable to either fix my computer or even backup my files. He had never seen anything like it. He asked if I had smashed the computer on the floor or against a wall. I assured him that I had not.

He said that he would have to get hold of a much more powerful system to try to access and back up my files. He would also have to order a new hard drive. Not only was my software system a mess, but the hard drive would now be useless. He asked me to phone him and he would let me know when he would have the far more powerful machine and when he could get a new hard drive delivered. He said that alone would cost about 2,000 pesos. But he was frank. He was very doubtful if he would ever be able to back up my files from my destroyed hard drive and software systems. As much as I insisted, he refused to charge me for the time he had spent on my machine.

On the return home through the mountain highway, I was not the best of company. In my head, I replayed what had happened over the last 60 hours. I tried to recall what had happened when my blog disappeared from my screen. On one side, I had the purloined Mossad material. On the other half of the screen – at home I work much more efficiently with the equivalent of seven screens – was my blog on which I was working. When I sent out the message that there would be no blog that day, I received several notes commiserating with me. But I also received a note from a former graduate student of mine in Calgary who wrote, “It must be the work of the Israeli-American intelligence hacking community.” I, of course, thought he was joking.

I thought again. I knew something about Israel’s skills in computer sabotage. After all, they had penetrated the computer systems of the Iranian nuclear program on at least three different occasions, one time with a devastating effect on cascades of their centrifuges. What if malware had been built into their intelligence report so that if anyone who was unauthorized accessed the secret material, their computer would become infected and their software system destroyed. After all, the computer store guy had said that he had never seen anything like it. Perhaps Mossad had destroyed my computer.

I also wondered why there were no detailed reports in the media on this purloined material dubbed “The Spy Cables” since I had found the one document that I had read to be quite sensational. After all, this reported leak of hundreds of secret intelligence papers from agencies all over the world, not only offered “a glimpse into the murky world of espionage,” it also provided a check list to compare public political claims with the information their own intelligence services were providing. The cable that interested me was relayed to South Africa’s State Security Agency (SSA) shortly after the September 2012 address in which Netanyahu had displayed a cartoonish diagram of a bomb with a fuse, marked with a 70 percent line and another “red line” at 90 percent as described in the Al Jazeera news story on Monday headlined, “Mossad contradicted Netanyahu on Iranian nuclear programme.” Perhaps the material was bogus. But even that would merit a major story. Besides, on reading the document, it seemed to be totally consistent with what I had read in IAEA reports as well as with the style of another Mossad report I had read years ago. Al Jazeera wrote:

Less than a month after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s 2012 warning to the UN General Assembly that Iran was 70 percent of the way to completing its ‘plans to build a nuclear weapon,’”, Israel’s intelligence service believed that Iran was “not performing the activity necessary to produce weapons”…A secret cable obtained by Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit reveals that Mossad sent a top-secret cable to South Africa on October 22, 2012, that laid out a “bottom line” assessment of Iran’s nuclear work. It appears to contradict the picture painted by Netanyahu of Tehran racing towards acquisition of a nuclear bomb.

Writing that Iran had not begun the work needed to build any kind of nuclear weapon, the Mossad cable said the Islamic Republic’s scientists are “working to close gaps in areas that appear legitimate such as enrichment reactors”. Such activities, however, “will reduce the time required to produce weapons from the time the instruction is actually given”. That view tracks with the 2012 US National Intelligence estimate, which found no evidence that Iran had thus far taken a decision to use its nuclear infrastructure to build a weapon, or that it had revived efforts to research warhead design that the US said had been shelved in 2003. Netanyahu had told the UN General Assembly that, “by next spring, by most at next summer at current enrichment rates, [Iran] will have finished the medium enrichment and move on to the final stage,” to enrich uranium to weapons grade.

Perhaps the absence of detailed follow-up stories was a result of those media agencies having their computers discombobulated as mine had been. So when I thought of trying to access once again the one document from the reams of intelligence material from the U.S., Russia, South Africa, Israel, Britain, etc. that Al Jazeera had obtained and shared with The Guardian on Monday, I had second thoughts. I had read only a very tiny portion of the material – that which dealt with the Mossad’s October 2012 report on the Iranian nuclear program. It was a sepia-coloured document that I found hard to read, but did manage and made detailed noted which I digested and summarized. In my blog, I had reprinted the internet address to find the material again. That was lost, but I could get it back by following the same route I had on Monday. But what if I found it, accessed the material with the same result – an infected computer with a destroyed software system? I decided I could not take a chance at this time. I would have to tell you what the sensational parts of the report contained from my memory, but if anyone cares to access the material and test whether my memory is accurate, the Al Jazeera story will provide the leads to the actual document.

The report said that although Iran had conducted research on weaponizing nuclear material, no program was underway, nor had a program even been designed, to create a weaponized missile for delivering a nuclear explosive.
The Arak plutonium reactor would not be ready for operation until mid-2014 and even then no plutonium-based nuclear weapon could be created until a necessary complementary plant was built to decommission nuclear material.
Even if Iran had everything in place, it would only be able to produce one plutonium bomb per year.
Mossad intelligence had been excellent since its reports on the amount of both 20% enriched and 5% enriched nuclear material, as well as on the numbers of active and passive centrifuges (10,000 + 9,000) and their types (first generation and advanced) were totally consistent with what IAEA found in its 2014 inspections.
Most importantly, in October 2012, it was unlikely that Iran would be able to make a nuclear device for several years.
There was no evidence to indicate that Iran was trying to upgrade its uranium stock beyond a 20% enrichment level needed for a nuclear device.
Nevertheless, the pattern of Iranian behaviour remained suspicious with respect to an ultimate aim of making and owning nuclear weapons.
The report was silent on Iran’s support for terrorism, its search to become a regional power and its determination to exterminate Israel.

The bottom line – Iran’s immanent emergence as a nuclear power had been grossly overstated.

With the release of this report as well as the leaked contents of the immanent negotiated deal on Iran’s nuclear program, Netanyahu, Ya’alon and Bennett panicked. They held a joint press conference to reiterate their fears of Iran as a nuclear threat and a threat to the whole world. What they said was grossly misleading even though most individual sentences or clauses were not specifically false. I showed how the statements were not lies – it depended, for example, on what was meant to be “on the verge.” But they were very far from the truth. Tomorrow, I will analyze their statements and suggest the reasons for their panic and the implications of the fallout on American-Israeli relations, especially on the legitimate fears of Iran’s rise even if it never becomes a nuclear power in the next 10-15 years. The evidence seems to be that Israel had held onto the position of Iran as a nuclear power as a way to rally the world to Israel’s side in trying to prevent Iran emerging as a power at all, even a non-nuclear one.

Had Netanyahu gambled and lost? What are the consequences?

Tomorrow: The Consequences of an Iranian Nuclear Deal on U.S.-Israel Relations

IAEA 19 February Report on Iranian Compliance

Feb23

IAEA 19 February Report on Iranian Compliance

Howard Adelman

Although the U.S. is the primary negotiator with Iran on behalf of the P5+1 team, Iran is required to be compliant with United Nations Security Council (UNSC) approved provisions in the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Safeguards Agreement under the terms of the Joint Plan of Action (JPA) mandatory under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter. The UNSC is the key reference point, not the U.S. The JPA of 11 November 2013, which took effect on 20 January 2014, was to be concluded by 20 July 2014, but has since been extended first to 24 November 2014 and then to 30 June of 2015. However, as efforts to blow up the agreement by the U.S. Republican-dominated Senate have advanced, with new threatened sanctions against Iran to be voted on near the end of March, pressure has increased immensely to conclude an agreement much before June. The JPA never made provision for any restrictions on Iranian missile development because there are no relevant international agreements on such restrictions. In contrast, there are strict restrictions under the 15 May 1974 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

But there are other tools that might accomplish much of the same task. On 19 February, the IAEA issued its latest report on the compliance with the Joint Plan of Action (as extended). The first impression one gets in reading the report is the sense of urgency in resolving differences. On 7 February, when Iran’s Foreign Minister, HE Mohammad Javad Zarif, met with the IAEA Director General, they agreed to discuss the whole program of compliance at all levels and resolve all outstanding issues as soon as possible.

The IAEA confirmed that:

Iran has not enriched UF6 above 5% U-235 at any of its declared facilities
As required, all of Iran’s stock of UF6 enriched up to 20% U-235 has been further processed through downblending or conversion into uranium oxide
Enrichment of UF6 up to 5% U-235 has continued at the regular and not an increased rate of production
The amount of UF6 enriched up to 5% U-235 is 7,952.9 kg
No additional major components have been installed at the IR-40 Reactor
There has been no manufacture and testing of fuel at IR-40
The Agency continues to enjoy managed access to centrifuge assembly workshops, centrifuge rotor production workshops and storage facilities.

It should be a done deal, right? Wrong. There were still two outstanding practical measures. First, there remain reasonable grounds to believe that Iran has not provided access to all relevant information, documentation, sites, material and personnel essential to restoring international confidence, given Iranian previous disregard for international agreements and overt and covert attempts to ignore them. Second, with respect to the initiation of high explosives and neutron transport calculations, Iran has yet to provide any explanations for discrepancies pointed out and failed to make provision for practical measures to resolve such disputes. These issues have been outstanding since last May. They are not new issues that have been placed on the table.

Clearly, Iran’s repeated stalling on these issues raised suspicions as each round of talks passes without these being resolved or Iran even making practical suggestions for their resolution. One is left with the impression that Iran has been stonewalling. In total, Iran has declared 18 nuclear facilities (not counting Parchin which Iran declares is not nuclear – see appendix) and 9 other locations where nuclear material is used (dumps & hospitals using radioactive isotopes. Although activities being undertaken by Iran at some of the facilities remain contrary to IAEA requirements, and although Iran has not suspended all of its enrichment activities, IAEA has managed to verify that material has not been diverted and is being handled in accord with the JPA. As stated above, IAEA has attested that Iran has not produced enriched U-235 above 5% and all its 20% enriched materials has been transformed as required. Further, both Iran’s material and all of its processing facilities are currently under IAEA monitoring and containment.

So what precisely is the problem? I will not rehearse the detailed account of what Iran has done to become compliant. The list is long and detailed. However, in focusing only on the gaps in failures to comply, as I will shortly do, there is a propensity to come away with a distorted picture. Even more important, Iran has been compliant on all items that are not matters of interpretive dispute as to whether compliance is required under the JPA. The interpretive issues are key, not only to assessing compliance, but in the public relations issues to establish transparency in a credible way and to ensure that core related security issues are addressed, such as missile development capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, and not simply the ability to produce weapons-grade fuel. The issue of Iran as a regional power, its influence in Syria, Lebanon, Gaza and Yemen, and support of terrorism are other matters that will never become part of these negotiations.

To focus on two key outstanding issues, section H of the IAEA report details the possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear program. The issue is initially one of transparency and the concern of IAEA that Iran has not disclosed nuclear-related activities involving military related organizations. Thus, the issue is not about the core of the nuclear program – the number and status of its various centrifuges and the amount and form of its nuclear materials at the core of the negotiations – but whether Iran is developing a nuclear payload for a missile and a missile capable of carrying such a payload. Does the JPA include the military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear program? The IAEA says it does. Iran had never said it does not, but has never responded positively to IAEA’s probes on this issue or proposed practical alternatives for resolving them.

It does not matter what Iran thinks for two very different reasons. First, IAEA is the international arbiter, not a party negotiating with Iran. Secondly, if Iran does not deal with the issue, Obama will never get away with signing a deal and he already has more than enough difficulties on his plate from the negotiations. The opposition would turn into a firestorm quite aside from all the other issues not being dealt with in the negotiations. Specifically, IAEA requires access to all sites, equipment, persons and documents requested. IAEA’s suspicions have been further aroused by evidence IAEA has collected that Iran has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device, information contained in its November report and further corroborated by additional evidence since.

The site is Parchin, not Fardow or Natanz. Parchin is located just outside of Tehran. It is the facility identified as a possible or even probable nuclear weapons site. But the IAEA has not been able to confirm or disconfirm its suspicions, though IAEA inspectors have accumulated considerable evidence to weigh in on the probability side. Further, the activities are extensive both in terms of size, location, access to needed expertise, links with military facilities and the command centre of the Iranian military. Key evidence has been provided by a series of satellite photos over time. The only reasonable explanation for that type of construction activity seems to be the development of a nuclear military facility.

Iran negotiators have adamantly rejected these suspicions, but, as the IAEA has reported, Iran has never offered a suggested process for falsifying them. Seyed Hossein Mousavian, Iran’s chief negotiator at the talks, instead insisted that, “we completely, categorically deny any nuclear activities in Parchin. Americans, again, they are lying because the IAEA have never asked for inspections and because they have claimed we rejected the inspections of the IAEA and the IAEA up to now they have never asked for inspections.” But whatever the truth about what is taking place at Parchin, the claim that IAEA has never asked for inspections is an outright blatant lie since even the most cursory reading of IAEA reports clearly shows that Iran has repeatedly been asked for information on and access to all areas of Parchin.

Instead of Mousavian providing a method for resolving the dispute, he repeatedly goes on a rant about American perfidy, accusing the Americans of supplying doctored satellite photos, but never offers access or information to falsify the evidence or even propose a method for falsification. The problem, of course, is that the same evidence supports an interpretation of developing high explosive but non-nuclear warheads. Access to Parchin would provide evidence on what every enemy of Iran would desire – intelligence about Iran’s non-nuclear program. But information on the facility, access and inspection are the only way to resolve the dispute. However, given Iran’s other ambitions, whatever their nuclear goals are, Iran has been totally obstinate about granting information and access to Parchin. Iran has instead insisted that IAEA provide prima facie evidence of nuclear activity at Parchin.

I suspect there will be none when Iran eventually provides access under strict conditions. But developing a military warhead for high explosive material is the same as developing one for nuclear explosions. Iran did provide access to IAEA in the past, in January 2005, but since access was restricted to only one of four areas identified as being of potential interest and to only five buildings in that area, though nothing incriminating was found in the area accessed, restricted access only exacerbated suspicions. These suspicions seemed to be confirmed in November 2011 when satellite photography recorded all kinds of haulage facilities removing material consistent with the possibility of a small nuclear accident at the plant or efforts to remove such material surreptitiously. But from samples taken from the areas visited a few years earlier, IAEA could find no evidence of nuclear material being used on the site. Further, since then, given the time gap and the possible efforts at covering their tracks, the Agency’s ability to conduct effective verification has been severely compromised. Even if there is no evidence of nuclear material, Iran has enough rapid centrifuges of advanced design that, given even its stock of depleted uranium, it could rapidly move to becoming a nuclear power as long as Iran masters two other components of the system, warhead design and an appropriate missile delivery system.

If the Parchin site had been used to develop a nuclear warhead, and if there was a contamination clean-up from November 2011 until the first few months of 2012, why would the Iranians not permit full access now? Perhaps, because the inspectors could find traces of nuclear material. Perhaps because Iran did not want any inspectors near its missile development program. But without supplying either access or another satisfactory approach to resolving the issue, IAEA will not confirm Iranian full compliance and there will be no deal.

The second issue is the discrepancy in neutron transport calculations. IAEA has proposed a system assessment to resolve the problem. This involves “considering and acquiring an understanding of each issue in turn, and then integrating all of the issues into a ‘system’ and assessing that system as a whole.” The Agency has assured Iran that once it “has established an understanding of the whole picture concerning issues with possible military dimensions, it will quickly undertake its analysis and report back to the Agency’s Board of Governors.

Besides these two major outstanding issues, there are medium ones and several minor ones. A medium range issue is limiting the number of centrifuges. The measure of the number of centrifuges Iran could retain is determined by their collective output. There has been evidence that at Natanz, the technicians had lowered the average separative output of the IR-1 cascades in order to be able to retain more cascades and, hence, more centrifuges. Thus, when limits were agreed to on the average output permitted, Iran would be able to retain a greater total of cascades. It is not as if IAEA could not figure this out. They easily did. However, the effect was to view the Iranians as petty tricksters rather than as key partners in establishing total transparency. This appeared more to be petty cheating rather than inadvertent omission. This and other errors and omissions enhance suspicions. They make it very difficult for the inspectors to retain both their cool and their objectivity. Of course, these unresolved issues also enhanced the belief that the Iranians were planning a breakout in less than one year.

Another example of an even more petty lack of transparency was Iran’s failure to report on the slightly enriched uranium (to about 2%) originating from tailings and dumped into emergency holding tanks. Iran was explicitly required to report on all nuclear material it possessed. Further, Iran has not been able to explain why it has been unable to complete the conversion of 3.5% LEU hexafluoride to the oxide form but only to an intermediate form. So even though Iran’s average daily production of 3.5% low enriched uranium (LEU) has decreased, even though Iran has been compliant with JPA on a very wide front of measures, one suspects a feint. It is as if the IAEA is dealing with a habitual thief and liar who has vowed to go straight and seems to be really trying but cannot help slipping back into old patterns of dissembling and dishonesty on the margins.

Iran continues to enrich U-235 to 5% for medical use and enriched UF6 to 20% U-235i used in its research reactors, but these activities are open to inspection. Iran has not yet provided preliminary design information and the construction schedule for the nuclear plants that Iran had announced it was expecting to construct on the Bushehr site at the beginning of 2015. Until the outstanding issues are resolved, IAEA will not be in a position to provide credible assurance about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran unless and until Iran provides the necessary cooperation with the Agency. And until the Agency can certify that all activities and nuclear material are devoted to peaceful purposes, no certification will be forthcoming.

Iran has five options. One, it can comply. Two, it can continue to stall, but that now seems to have come to a dead end on that route. Three, Iran can, through a series of small deviations, enhance its inherent capacity to produce weapons-grade uranium and therefore, reduce the real breakout period by months while it appears to be over a year. Four, Iran could try to make a side deal, say with Obama, if indeed he is the pro-Islam outlier that extremist Republicans claim he is; the evidence that Iran was trying to accomplish the third option was a counter-indication that Iranians were not up to the fourth option for that would have required Iran always to appear squeaky clean. Fifth, they could revert to the old order and the suspension of sanctions would then be cancelled. Iran seems to be trying for number three as it tries to get out of the corner in which it found itself.

Israel seems to have collected intelligence that a successful deal is in the offing. Hence the greatly enhanced activism of both Netanyahu and the Republicans in Congress. For both had been betting on the negotiations collapsing. The prospect of a successful outcome sent the fear of God down their spines. For such an agreement would not encompass Iranian missile development, only perhaps nuclear and perhaps high explosive warhead development. But certainly not Iran’s support for terrorism or its ambition to become a regional power. Just as certain, the British concern with Iran’s human rights record would not be addressed. For these reasons, any deal with Iran would be a bad deal for these critics.

Since I cannot envision the new Iran government wanting to revert to the pre-2014 regime that was crippling the Iranian economy or that Obama would agree to undercut the IAEA, and since stalling is no longer practicable, I concur with Israeli intelligence that a deal is in the offing and the IAEA will emerge as the hero of the whole process because it will also prevent the third option. Officials in Egypt, Israel and Saudi Arabia fear that the U.S. under Obama wants to focus its efforts on establishing order in the Middle East by accepting Iran as a regional power committed to stability and security, which may indeed be true, but this does not entail, as some also fear, replacing America’s traditional Middle East allies – Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey – with Iran.

Whatever the outcome, the use of Israel as a political football within the U.S. and the fallout between the White House and Netanyahu, though understandable from both sides, has left serious scars on the U.S.-Israeli connection. On 18 February, Josh Earnest, the White House spokesperson, insisted that they would still keep Israel informed on negotiations – as if Israel does not have independent sources for learning about the progress – but that the White House continued to be concerned about leaks. Earnest then practically called Israelis liars. “There’s no question that some of the things that the Israelis have said in characterizing our negotiating position have not been accurate,” clearly implying that some information was taken out of context and distorted. It would have been better if Earnest had referenced his charge since the dispute, as I have tried to document, is not about the particulars of the agreement, but about an agreement at all. Obama thus appears not to be playing hard ball but croquet or, at best, snooker.

Appendix – Iran’s Nuclear Sites – Note Fardow, Istafan, Natanz, Parchin and Tehran

1 Anarak – near Yazd – nuclear storage site for uranium

2 Arak – IR-40: 40 MW heavy water research reactor online in 2014 to replace Tehran research reactor producing radioisotopes for medical purposes

3 Ardakan – mill with annual capacity 120,000 metric tonnes of ore producing 50 MT uranium

4 Bonab – Atomic Energy Research Center focused on agriculture

5 Bushehr – Nuclear power plant became operational in August 2010

6 Chalus – site not currently operational for nuclear purposes

7 Darkovin – nuclear power plant with 360 MW capacity

8 Fordow – the underground uranium enrichment facility near Qom discovered in 2009 that became operational in 2011 to take over from Natanz’s enrichment of uranium to 5%

9 Gachin – uranium mine

10 Isfahan – nuclear research facility that currently operates four small nuclear research and conversion reactors

11 Karaj – Center for Agricultural Research and Nuclear Medicine

12 Lashkar Abad – pilot plant for isotope separation

13 Lavizan – decommissioned

14 Natanz – 100,000 sq. meter nuclear enrichment facility with 7,000 centrifuges producing LEU hardened by one concrete wall 2.5 meters thick and a second thick wall roof hardened by reinforced concrete and 22 meters of earth

15 Parchin – facility near Tehran for the testing and manufacturing of conventional explosives suspected of developing a nuclear warhead but full access has never been granted to IAEA

16 Ramsar – highest background radiation in the world, but not a nuclear facility

17 Saghand – Iran’s first uranium ore mine

18 Tehran – Nuclear Research Centre originally fueled by highly enriched uranium in 1967 & converted to 20% enriched facility in 1987 and in production in 2012

17 Yazd – Radiation Processing Center focused on geophysical research

Sanctions and Relief Implementation

Feb23

Sanctions and Relief Implementation

Howard Adelman

Note that the EU3+3 (Britain, France, Germany + China, Russia and the U.S.) is the same as the P5+1 (Britain, China, France, Russia and U.S., permanent members of the UN Security Council + Germany).

To understand the current conflict over sanctions against Iran, it is helpful if we provide a brief history.

1979 (November) President Carter’s Executive Order 12170 freezing Iranian assets (estimated value $10-12 billion) in response to Iranian hostage-taking of American embassy personnel by radicals protesting allowing entry to the Shah of Iran for medical treatment into the U.S.
1980 embargo on U.S. trade with Iran imposed and travel ban to Iran issued
1981 sanctions lifted after hostage crisis resolved
1984 U.S. prohibits weapons sales, loans or assistance to Iran following Iraq invasion of Iran and belief that Iran is developing a nuclear weapons program
1987 (October) President Ronald Reagan issues Executive Order 12613 prohibiting all imports from or exports into U.S. by Iran
1995 (March) President Clinton issues Executive Order 12957 prohibiting all manner of trade between the U.S. and Iran in support of the Iranian petroleum industry
1995 (May) President Clinton issues Executive Order 12959 prohibiting any trade with Iran
1996 (August) under President Clinton, Iran and Libya Sanctions Act (ILSA) (H.R. 3107, P.L. 104-172) signed into law but Libya deleted from name of law when sanctions against Libya lifted in 2006
1997 (August) Mohammad Khatami, considered a reformer, elected President of Iran and president Clinton eases some sanctions
2000 sanctions reduced for pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, caviar and Persian rugs
2001 (August) Iran (and Libya) Sanctions Act renewed under President George W. Bush
2004 U.S. Courts overrule a Treasury Department application of sanctions to intellectual exchanges and reciprocal publication arrangements
2005 Mahmoud Ahmadinejad elected President of Iran and lifts suspension of uranium enrichment program agreed to with Britain, France and Germany (EU3) and sanctions in place now vigorously reinforced
2006 UNSC Resolution 1696 passed against the renewal of Iranian uranium enrichment program
2006 UNSC Resolution 1696
2006 UNSC Resolution 1737
2007 UNSC Resolution 1747
2008 UNSC Resolution 1803
2008 UNSC Resolution 1835
2010 (June) UNSC Resolution 1929
2010 (July) EU expands its sanctions beyond those required by the UNSC
2012 (October) EU significantly expands and details more specifically its bans on the provision of services and equipment for the petrochemical industry, including oil tankers, the supply of services upon which Iranian production was so dependent, especially the ban in the export of certain specific metals, including graphite, that would be critical to Iran’s ability to fabricate its own machinery related to Iran’s ballistic missile development as well as its petrochemical industry
2013 (March) EU imposition of sanctions against judges, media officials and a special police monitoring unit linked to the death of a dissident held in custody
2013 (June) election of Hassan Rouhani government in Iran
2013 (July) almost five months before Joint Plan of Action agreement signed and after Rouhani elected on a pledge to enter negotiations with the UN, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 400:20 in favour of increased sanctions against Iran
In contrast, following Rouhani’s election, the EU took a pro-active stand to invite Iran to join negotiations and a step-by-step approach that would restore normal economic relations while ensuring Iran’s right to develop nuclear technology for peaceful purposes
Sanctions begin to be lifted for an initial six-month period by the EU in January 2014 after the JPA came into effect beginning with suspension of the ban on the import of petrochemical products and the banking and insurance related thereto.

While George W. Bush was renewing the sanctions regime against Iran, since 1998, Iran and the EU had been seeking to formalize its commercial and political cooperation arrangements and, in 2001, sought to negotiate a comprehensive trade and co-operation as well as political dialogue agreement. Negotiations started in 2002 but paused when Iran declined to engage in any further human rights dialogue after 2004. Once Iran’s clandestine nuclear development program was revealed in 2005 and Iran refused to co-operate with IAEA, all dialogue between the EU and Iran stopped.

The increasing severity of United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolutions between 2006 and 2010 were in direct response to Iran’s refusal to abide by the international Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the requirements set down by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). IAEA was determined to resolve the Iranian nuclear issue to ensure the NPT was not breached. At the same time, the IAEA recognized Iran’s rights to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.

The biggest change came because of independent EU action in July 2010 since the EU was then Iran’s largest trading partner. Further, London is a global financial centre; UK financial restrictions made it much more difficult for Iranian banks to use the international financial system to support its oil and gas business and Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs. In addition to an embargo on nearly all dual-use goods and technology which could contribute to uranium enrichment, reprocessing of nuclear fuel, heavy water or to the development of nuclear weapons delivery systems, the EU introduced bans on the export of telecommunications, monitoring and transport equipment as well as arms, followed by more sanctions on instruments that could be used for internal repression. Perhaps the bans on investments, services and technology for the oil and gas industry were the most crippling since Iran’s oil production systems were based on European technology. European banking restrictions related to investments, grants, financial assistance, especially transfer of funds to and from Iran, and the ban on the provision of insurance services, were also enormously effective. But perhaps the sanctions that most hit home to persons of influence in Iran were the restrictions on the admission of specific persons (a long list to which more names were continuously added), freezing of their funds and economic resources and their inability to satisfy any claims.

By the time the JPA was put in place in November 2013, oil imports from Iran had fallen to zero and EU exports fell again by 26% in the 2012-2013 period. EU sanctions against Iran are based not only on the failure of Iran to be compliant with the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) but also because of Iran’s human rights record, support for terrorism, and its destructive approach to Israel-Palestine peace negotiations. Given the close economic ties between the EU and Iran, the targeted sanctions against specified individuals and organizations were even more significant because they entailed freezing of funds and economic resources of persons responsible for serious human rights violations in Iran and persons, entities and bodies associated with them. The list of people and organizations affected was long.

It was in the context of the UN sanctions against Iran for its breach of NPT that the Joint Plan of Action (JPA) has to be understood rather than the 35 years of U.S. up-and-down sanctions against Iran. In return for Iran taking steps to halt and roll back its nuclear enrichment program, the E3/EU+3 agreed to:

Pause efforts to further reduce Iran’s crude oil sales to enable Iran’s current customers to purchase their current average amounts of crude oil
Enable the repatriation of an agreed amount of revenue held abroad and, for such oil sales, suspend the EU and U.S. sanctions on associated insurance and transportation services
Suspend U.S. sanctions on Iran’s auto industry and associated services
Suspend U.S. and EU sanctions on:

Iran’s petrochemical exports, as well as sanctions on associated services
Gold and precious metals, as well as sanctions on associated services

License the supply and installation in Iran of spare parts for safety of Iranian civil aviation and associated services. License safety related inspections and repairs in Iran as well as associated services
No new nuclear-related UN Security Council or EU sanctions

U.S. Administration, acting consistent with the respective roles of the President and the Congress, will refrain from imposing new nuclear-related sanctions
Establish a financial channel to facilitate humanitarian trade (transactions involving food and agricultural products, medicine, medical devices, and medical expenses incurred abroad) for Iran’s domestic needs using Iranian oil revenues held abroad involving specified foreign banks and non-designated Iranian banks yet to be defined
This channel could also enable: transactions required to pay Iran’s UN obligations; and, direct tuition payments to universities and colleges for Iranian students studying abroad, up to an agreed amount for the six-month period
Increase the EU authorization thresholds for transactions for non-sanctioned trade to an agreed amount.

Nine months ago as the first deadline for the Joint Plan of Action approached, the negotiations on a comprehensive nuclear agreement hit a snag over the issue of sanctions, though, as became a pattern over the last nine months, the Iranians continued to voice optimism about the results of the negotiations. Thus, on 21 May 2014, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said, “Today, the nuclear negotiation is progressing and is on the threshold of reaching a conclusion.” The very next day, this was the same message coming from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Saeed Jalili, the former lead negotiator, a conservative very close to Khamenei, said, “We should permit the (Iranian) nuclear negotiation team to proceed with its programs in the framework of (the Supreme Leader’s proposed) ‘heroic lenience’ and we should all assist them in their bid to materialize the nation’s rights.”

There could be two reasons for the articulation of this optimism: 1) domestically to dampen down the ultra-conservative voices critical of the negotiations; 2) to send a message to the P5+1 that the Iranians are fully committed to the success of the negotiations. But there were two sets of issues which this optimism masked. There were disagreements about Iranian compliance that would persist for the next nine months and that I will deal with in tomorrow’s blog. Second, there were rising voices within Iran that the pace of lifting sanctions had been far too languid given the enormous concessions (in their minds) that the Iranians had made thus far in their nuclear program. Just as there were continuing concerns within the U.S about the Iranian commitments to a successful outcome of the negotiations., within Iran there were an increasing number of queries from many quarters about whether the U.S. was truly committed to lifting sanctions or whether the whole process was just a ruse to stop, set back and eventually derail Iran’s development of its nuclear program.

As reported from the Tasnin News Agency in Al-Monitor, Seyed Hossein Naghavi Hosseini, spokesperson for the Iranian Parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, noted “intense disagreements” over a variety of issues during the Vienna talks, including an alleged P5+1 proposal for a 10-year rollout for sanctions relief. The Iranians were afraid of a Republican backlash that could re-impose sanctions, since they already anticipated that American sanctions relief would only take place under U.S. President Barack Obama’s executive authority to waive many of the sanctions on Iran. Waivers can be easily rescinded. Iran might accept waivers, but only in an initial phase in a process leading to complete sanctions relief.

Hosseini called for lifting of all sanctions rather than segmentation and a phased-in approach, a comment directed not only at the then current snag in negotiations about sanctions, but an explicit critique of the JPA provision for the implementation of the agreement of “specified long tern duration” usually bandied about as ten years. The issue was a divide between ending or suspending sanctions.

If the U.S. insisted upon a 10-year rollout period for sanctions relief, then the Iranian rollback in its nuclear program should also be phased over ten years, Iran insisted. Yet the other side insists on Iranian compliance with IAEA requirements as a prerequisite to sanctions relief, consistent, not with the preamble of the JPA, but with the position that Iran is the outlier in its failure to comply with its international treaty obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPA). The sanctions were imposed for Iran’s failure in compliance. Making relief implementation proportionate to Iranian compliance is akin to requiring the justice system to reduce a fine in proportion to a felon desisting in the future from recommitting the felony.

The JPA calls for a “comprehensive solution.” Comprehensive entails lifting all trade, technology, banking, energy and aeronautical sanctions – including UN Security Council, EU multilateral and national sanctions – with the implication that these even included non-nuclear sanctions by the U.S. (hence the importance of having the historical background). But U.S. oil and financial sanctions are subject to the Iran Sanctions Act described above. To waive sanctions, the President must certify to Congress, not only that Iran will not be able to build nuclear weapons within a one year breakout period, but that Iran no longer seeks to build weapons of mass destruction ever. Further, the President must certify that Iran no longer sponsors terrorism (Hamas and Hezbollah, both clients of Tehran, though Hamas had a fallout with Iran over Syria). Both Hamas and Hezbollah are listed by the U.S. as terrorist organizations. Finally, the President must certify that Iran no longer represented a security threat to U.S. Interests. Given the U.S. commitment to Israel and Saudi Arabia, how could this be possible given Iran’s continuing foreign policy?

Who said that sanctions are easy to lift but hard to impose? This analysis suggests that the opposite may be truer.

All these issues end up being tied into the negotiations. And I have not even delved into the Syrian part of the equation. It is a truism that Lebanese issues and conflicts over Hezbollah cannot be resolved without reference to Syria. So bringing all of these into the negotiations would definitely kibosh them. Where do you draw the line? As we shall see tomorrow, IAEA restricts the negotiations to nuclear issues, but then includes military developments (e.g. missiles) related to nuclear militarization, but excludes other foreign policy issues.

However, with the U.S. as the lead negotiator on the side of the UNSC, the matter becomes complicated in a totally other way – not over what is included and what is excluded, but over who is included and who is excluded. Many members of Congress insist they must have a say since an act of the U.S. Congress is involved. And the Iranians, as well as everyone else, know the position of the Republicans. Senator Bob Corker, ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, however, insists that what is at stake is a good deal, not knee-jerk opposition to Iran. “If it’s a good deal, I’m going to vote for it. I want a good outcome… We haven’t been in the camp of wanting to add sanctions right now. We’ve been in the camp of wanting to find what a good deal is. So if we get a good deal, I’ll be glad to vote for it.” However, for the Republicans, merely extending the breakout period from three months to one year does not represent a good deal.

So the sanctions issue is bound to be a spoiler for both sides if politicians and the domestic constituencies behind them become convinced that Iran is not sincere in its quest to pursue a strictly peaceful use of nuclear energy. Hence, as we shall see tomorrow, the repeated reassurances that Iran is complying with almost all the requirements of the JPA. Hence, also the IAEA’s insistence of stretching beyond a narrow interpretation of nuclear negotiations to include other nuclear-related security issues (missile delivery systems) as well as assurances of full transparency.

The First Six Months of Compliance with the JPA

Feb20

The First Six Months of Compliance with the JPA

Howard Adelman

To reiterate for the umpteenth time, the point of the JPA negotiations from the very start was not to eliminate Iran’s nuclear program, but to establish a set of provisions and verification measures to protect American and allied national security interests by limiting (not eliminating) Iran’s nuclear programs. Extensive verification measures were to be put in place intended to eliminate the risk of Iran breaking out with an ability to produce nuclear weapons at its declared and/or covert nuclear sites without being detected in a timely manner. The issue of timeliness was defined as sufficient time to permit U.S. and international responses that would prevent Iran succeeding. As clarified in the last blog, this entailed instituting very intrusive verification procedures to detect the construction and operation of secret gas centrifuge plants in Iran’s nuclear program to ensure that Iran’s actions conform to the agreements it made as interim confidence-building measures before a more comprehensive program can be put in place. For the best summaries of the monitoring of the progress of the negotiations, see the series of reports of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington (ISIS). Better yet, read the IAEA reports themselves. This blog is based on those reports.

Fordow is a nuclear enrichment plant constructed in secret at a time when Iran was obligated to report its construction to the IAEA and not only did not, but repeatedly and blatantly lied about it, absolutely denying such a development. That alone required any verification process to be very robust. The plant is buried deep under a mountain near the Iranian holy city of Qom. The only purpose of the plant is to produce military-grade nuclear materials, though Iran argues the grade of nuclear material is required for its research reactor. In September 2009, its existence was publicly revealed by President Obama. The end goal of the negotiations had to be closing this site. If Iran wanted to continue producing nuclear material for peaceful purposes, it did not need a plant under a mountain resistant even to bunker bomb attacks, though the access tunnels, ventilation equipment and electronic supply would not be immune. The interim goal was to halt Iran’s progress in its tracks and to cut through Iran’s duplicitous and contradictory reporting on its activities to the IAEA between 2009 and 2013.

The truth: at Fordow, Iran had installed almost 2,800 first generation IR-1 centrifuges in two halls each designed to hold 8 cascades of 174 centrifuges per cascade = 1,392 centrifuges x 2 = 2784 centrifuges of which 696 were operational. According to the IAEA, 4 cascades of 174 centrifuges (696) in two tandem sets to produce near 20 percent low enriched uranium the only real purpose of which was nuclear weaponry. In the JPA, at Fordow:

there will be no further enrichment over 5% at 4 cascades now enriching uranium
enrichment capacity will not be increased
Iran will not feed UF6 into the other 12 non-operative state cascades
There will be no further interconnections made between cascades
Any replacements of existing centrifuges will be of centrifuges of the same type.

To ensure the above, Iran agreed not only to stop making 20% enriched uranium, not only to install no further advanced centrifuges at Fordow, but also to disconnect the piping of cascades not in operation, maintain those centrifuges in a non-operative state and only enrich uranium up to 5% in the 4 operating cascades. In the end, Iran would have to actually remove about 15,000 of its centrifuges after the JPA was signed according to the Washington Post.

Note that in the JPA interim agreement, Iran could continue enrichment at its R&D Natanz Pilot Fuel Enrichment Plant and even develop more advanced centrifuges, but these developments would be monitored to ensure conformity with IAEA safeguards. In spite of this provision, by February 2014, even Israel’s senior security officials in the IDF and Mossad had begun to consider whether Iran was sincere in following a new tack and that, possibly, this was not just a new phase in past deceptive practices. At the renewable energy meeting in Abu Dhabi on 18-19 January, Israeli Water and Energy Minister Silvan Shalom listened intently to Iran’s minister of energy. More significantly, at the Munich Security Conference on 2 February, Israel Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon sat in the front row of a panel discussion that included Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif.

What was happening with Iran’s agreement to convert its existing 20% enriched uranium, 50% as working stock of 20% oxide for fabrication of fuel for the Tehran Research Reactor (TRR) while the other 50% had to be diluted to no more than 5% low enriched uranium (LEU) hexafluoride? If the 20% enriched oxide is reconverted to a fluoride form and then further enriched to weapon-grade level (90% U235), this would be enough to make a 25 kg bomb. Recall that Little Boy dropped on Hiroshima was a 15 kiloton bomb and Far Boy dropped on Nagasaki was a 21 kiloton bomb, not 25 kg. Nevertheless, if Iran is truly committed to the use of nuclear energy only for peaceful purposes, it does not need 20% enriched nuclear material.

Why do I go into all this detail? Why not jump to much more recent reports, or even more, to the latest AIAE Report on Iran’s compliance with the JPA? There are several reasons. First, I want to establish my credibility; I have read all the reports. Second, I want to try to see if there is a pattern in Iran’s compliance and non-compliance, for both are at work. Third, I want to demonstrate that, as far as possible, I have tried to be fair in appraising Iran’s compliance with the terms of the JPA. On the other hand, I do not want to burden readers with a morass of details. So after this initial review of the first six months and my conclusions about a pattern, in Monday’s blog I will jump to the very recent report of the IAEA that I received yesterday to assess whether in fact my perceptions of a pattern are correct.

As a result of last February’s IAEA report, one clear sign of progress was that Iran agreed that it would put on hold any plans to build additional centrifuge plants, more specifically, the plans for the third centrifuge plant that AIAE had revealed. On the other hand, trust was not enhanced in Iran’s intentions when commitments come only after new discoveries by the IAEA. There is a clear perception that there is a continuing failure to provide full disclosure, though certainly a great deal that IAEA did not know previously has been disclosed. Hence, IAEA determined to place a priority on gaining access to a full range of information that it did not have last February and that it would need to assess Iran’s compliance and even perhaps its intentions.

One area of critical importance was Iran’s research and development program mentioned above. Unfortunately, for many observers of this process, the JPA did not adequately address this issue and, by omission, Iran was permitted to undertake research to improve the quality of its centrifuges. This is understandable in a way since better centrifuges are also needed for the peaceful use of nuclear energy. Iran may not develop new types of centrifuges using uranium hexafluoride at its Natanz Pilot Fuel Enrichment Plant, but it can undertake research to improve the performance of existing centrifuges. The dilemma is that, given the goals of the JPA to limit the breakout period to at least a year, significant improvements in the performance of Iran’s existing centrifuges could significantly reduce that timeframe. Yet there is no provision in the JPA to limit the possibility. So the negotiators are working on using the transparency clauses to ensure Iran reveals its improvements.

The issue of a breakthrough with laser enrichment is instructive. In 2010, Iran announced that it had significantly improved performance through a laser enrichment program. The JPA in the technical annexes provided seven practical methods for monitoring this possibility of accelerating the breakout period. Iran was required to implement them by 15 May 2014. As we shall see, Iran did comply with these additional “technical” requirements, including the requirement that Iran provide full relevant information on the Lashkar Ab’ad Laser Research Centre and to allow inspection visits.

Reduction in suspicion of Iran is not helped when, at the time the JPA was signed and immediately thereafter, all work on construction and improvements at the Parchin military site seemed to be at a standstill, but the February satellite photos revealed that new activity was taking place at the site and Iran had not informed IAEA that this was taking place. In the meanwhile, Ira’s Foreign Minister, Javad Zarif, was performing the role of the eternal optimist on the international stage signaling that a comprehensive deal was doable in the next 4-5 months.

What was becoming clear was that two intersecting issues were clear. First, there had to be strict limits on the number of centrifuges Iran could have. Second, as and if their productive capacity improved, those numbers had to be reduced. As the quality of the enrichment program improves, the number of centrifuges in operation had to decrease. Otherwise there was no way of being secure about a breakout period that seemed reasonable at the time of any deal.

The other complementary issue was the amount and quality of nuclear material that Iran had already in hand. The 20 February 2014 IAEA report was promising because IAEA could, by then, provide a reasonably accurate picture of the total volume of 20% enriched uranium that Iran had on hand, especially since the JPA had agreed that 50% of that material could be retained in the form of oxide. The problem, as everyone recognized, was that this process could be reversed for the nuclear material retained in oxide form using its existing technological knowhow and equipment. Only two steps were needed: 1) converting it back into a hexafluoride form, and 2) then enrich it to a grade suitable for nuclear weapons. So the negotiators had to make this process impossible. The question was not only whether, at the end of six months, Iran had converted all or almost all of its stock of 20% enriched uranium equally into the two forms provided in the JPA, but how to ensure 135-175 kg of 20% enriched uranium now in oxide form could and would not be reconverted back into hexafluoride form.

The 20 March 2014 IAEA report was very positive. Iran had made progress on a number of fronts in complying with the terms of the JPA:

No new enriched U-235 to 20%
No expanded conversion capacity
Degraded 74.6 kg of 20% enriched U-235 to no more than 5%
7 kg of 20% enriched U-235 had been converted to the oxide form
No efforts had been made to reconvert U-235
Iran had provided information on the continued construction of the Enriched Uranium Production Plant (EUPP) that was to be used to degrade 20% enriched U-235, but the work had not completed
No processing at the Tehran Research Reactor (TRR)
Iran had complied with the terms of the Safeguard Agreement
Iran had provided information on the uranium mine at Gchine
Daily access had been provided to both Natanz and Fordow
Inspection via managed access had been allowed to the centrifuge assembly workshop, the centrifuge rotor production workshop and to storage facilities.

Perhaps Zarif had been right to be optimistic. Though Olli Heinonen, the Senior Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and former Deputy Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, also seemed optimistic, he reminded everyone that a great deal of confirmation work remained to be done and the results of inspections still had to be completed. Even the delay in meeting targets for conversion of 20% enriched UF6 to 5% enriched UF6 as uranium oxide was explicable in terms of plant construction delays.

Nevertheless, the negotiations were haunted by a number of unresolved issues. Iran has been suspiciously intransigent about the Parchin facility where Digital Globe imagery dated 25 April 2014 shows signs of renewed external activity there, a critical observation since this is where Iran’s nuclear weapons development program takes place. Iran had promised to clear up crucial questions about its past nuclear military production, but has not yet complied. What, in fact, has Iran done towards producing nuclear weapons?

Nevertheless, the IAEA May 2014 report remained optimistic since enrichment to almost 20% had ceased, 100kg of 20% enriched had been converted to less than 5% and its stock of hexafluoride was approaching zero, no new centrifuges were installed at Natanz and Fordow, and Iran complied with the practical measures insisted on by IAEA. What also becomes clear, the restrictions in examining the military dimension of Iran’s program were a mistake as, without such information, it is impossible to calculate with any degree of accuracy Iran’s break out time frame. Knowing this, IAEA promised to report back on that dimension of the nuclear issue.

Ironically, problems were emerging on the provisions for removing sanctions:

Sunday: Sanctions and the Implementation of Relief

Monday: The 20 February 2015 IAEA Report

Tuesday My Overall Assessment of the Nuclear Negotiations

Wednesday Libya

Monitoring and Verifying the JPA in a Duplicitous Environment

Feb20

Monitoring and Verifying the JPA in a Duplicitous Environment

Howard Adelman

I have lost track of the number of times that I have been asked why I tied Argentina into the “discussions” between Israel and the U.S. and the negotiations between Iran and the U.S. over the nuclear issue. The parallelism in the roots of anti-Semitism in both Argentina and Iran seemed a stretch. The evidence for Iran bombing the Jewish cultural centre in Buenos Aries in 1994 seemed a long time ago and, further, did not appear to have any connection with nuclear materials, even if the bombing constituted an argument for Iran’s determined, venomous and lethal manner of conducting foreign policy. Though the possibility that Iran was planning a similar attack last year in Montevideo, Uruguay certainly raised a red flag, it seemed to reflect on Iran’s overseas intelligence agency that would target civilians and not its nuclear policy. Two days ago, the diplomatic connection was made. Argentina formally asked the U.S. to include the issue of the 1994 bombing within the nuclear negotiations. I could say that I anticipated this connection, but I did not.

As I am prone to say, FAT CHANCE! Argentine courts may have accused a group of Iranians of planning the attack on the AMIA Jewish community centre that killed 85 people, and Iran’s intelligence service may even have had a hand in the murder of Alberto Nisman, but why would that instigate Argentina’s Foreign Minister, Héctor Timerman, to send a letter to John Kerry to make a request made previously. “I am asking you again that the AMIA issue be included in the negotiations with the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

The answer I think is simple, since Argentina does not really expect the Obama administration, given the importance this administration has placed on the negotiations with Iran, to actually push to have that item on the agenda when no provision was made for adding new agenda items under negotiation in the Joint Plan of Action (JPA) agreed to by Iran. President Cristina Férnandez and Héctor Timerman very badly need to divert the focus on them brought about because they have been accused of conspiring with Iran to whitewash the crime in order to clinch a grains-for-oil deal. This is not about electioneering since Férnandez is constitutionally barred from running in October for a third consecutive term. This is also not just about their historical legacy. Both do not want to be accused let alone tried for a criminal conspiracy.

But why make such an obviously fruitless effort? As Jen Psaki diplomatically replied on behalf of the U.S. State Department, she was unaware of any plans to raise the AMIA issue in the negotiations. Because Férnandez and Timerman believe that Mossad, and, perhaps, even the CIA, are behind the effort to shift the focus of anger for the unresolved AMIA bombing on them by delivering to Alberto Nisman allegedly incriminating evidence that there had been such a deal. I suspect, and I only suspect for I have absolutely no evidence for it, that Férnandez and Timerman both believe that Iran was behind Nisman’s killing. Finding Iran responsible is not the problem for them. But if that investigation leads back to connecting them to a deal with Iran to shift the investigation to the side because of an oil-for-grain deal, that would be a very serious problem subjecting both to being charged for criminal conspiracy to hide a crime, even if they were never proven guilty of that charge.

However, this blog is not intended to be a whodunit. It is more of an inquiry into what is really going on and a whydunit. Shifting now back to the substance of the negotiations is necessary, but I will try to tie all loose ends together, and well before the June deadline for doing this in the nuclear negotiations. Before I undertake the comparison, Machiavellian diplomacy requires that a person talk out of two sides of his/her face at one and the same time. My analysis in my last blog suggested that the pro-Iranian thrust of the preamble of JPA might have been deliberate in order to allow Iran to be boxed in tighter than otherwise might be the case by the substantive clauses. Those specific regulations are about performance rather than intentions, but unless viewed through the lenses of possible malevolent intent, then the only assessment will be of the performance relative to the term of agreement and not to the issue of the test itself which, in the end, is intended to examine intent and ensure behaviour conforms to that intent. But that latter issue must in turn be placed within a more general context.

The current Iran regime has been conducting a pro-Jewish (definitely not pro-Zionist) public relations campaign to offset the widespread image of the Iran power-brokers as uniformly anti-Semitic. Mair Javendafar, a Jew originally from Iran who teaches Contemporary Iranian Politics in Israel, documented that offensive in a recent article in Al-Monitor entitled, “Rouhani accommodates Iran’s Jewish students.”

President Hassan Rouhani as of 4 February made what had been an emerging practice official – Jewish students no longer are required to attend school on Shabat, a decree that resurrected a practice initiated right after the 1979 revolution but did not last. A year ago, Rouhani’s government donated $400,000 to the Jewish charity hospital. In December, he also unveiled a memorial to Jewish soldiers who died in the Iraq-Iran war. As well as attending such memorials, Ali Younesi, Rouhani’s special assistant, visits synagogues and other Jewish institutions. In the meanwhile, a second Holocaust denial cartoon exhibition is being organized in Tehran, so President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s heritage is still alive and well. After all, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei also called the Holocaust a hoax. All this is for a population that now numbers less than 9,000. In 1979, when Iran severed relations with Israel, the Jewish population there totaled 80,000, mostly in Tehran. So what is the relationship between these recent pro-Jewish initiatives, Iran’s virulent anti-Israeli stance and the nuclear negotiations?

A similar dual track process is visible in Obama’s relationship with Netanyahu. When Netanyahu addressed the UN in September, Obama had a private discussion with Netanyahu over their differences, but only after Obama went through a barrage of denials that he was snubbing Netanyahu and refusing to meet with him. The Israeli press reported that the White House had turned down a request for a meeting while the White House issued a statement that no request had been made. One brouhaha follows another, and each one ending in an affirmation from the White House that American ties with Israel are deep and abiding.

In one case, the head of Mossad, Tamir Pardo, was reported as even opposing additional sanctions against Iran. However, in a 19 January meeting, Pardo absolutely denied that he had said any such thing. Quite the contrary. He insisted that the sanctions had been very effective and were the key instruments that brought Iran to the negotiating table. Further, Pardo agreed with a carrot and stick approach to negotiating with Iran rather than a confrontational posture based on absolute demands. Pardo’s criticism was about the absence of a sufficiently large stick in pressuring Iran. That stick, he insisted, should include stopping the talks and resuming under better parameters. He reinforced Kissinger’s critique that the parameters of the talks were flawed. What I wanted to emphasize here is the continuing disinformation war surrounding the negotiations. Thus, normally astute reporters, such as David Ignatius of the Washington Post, is used as a conduit to get out the message that the Obama White House had decided to cut out the Israelis from any briefing on the negotiations, and then, subsequently, the White House denies there was any truth to the story. This exercise in simulation diplomatic warfare is part of the fog of diplomatic war.

We know the following. Before negotiations even opened on the basis of the JPA in November 2013, Obama and Netanyahu were at loggerheads over the Iran negotiations. America’s goal was to extend the breakout period for construction of a nuclear weapon to at least one year, not, as many Republican critics contend, that this had been a change in policy from the original goal of eliminating Iran’s potential to produce nuclear weapons altogether – a goal few viewed as achievable without bringing down the regime. Israel’s goal was to end the ability of Iran to produce nuclear weapons ever. Henry Kissinger in his testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee cited the UNSC resolution “to deny Iran the capability to develop a military option.” True, but hardly revealing since the issue was how best to operationalize that goal, by instituting inspections and oversights and extending Iran’s breakout period for a year or by insisting that Iran’s nuclear program in its entirely be dismantled, a goal which the JPA explicitly rejected as unrealizable. Does one opt for conflict prevention which would require a much higher level of confrontation, or conflict management at a much lower level of engagement?

In January, in a phone call between Obama and Netanyahu, Obama had asked Netanyahu to hold his diplomatic firepower while negotiators explored whether Iran would agree to a deal that limited centrifuges and stockpiles in order to extend the breakout period for Iran to at least a year. Netanyahu responded to the American negotiating position that a year wasn’t enough; he repeated Israel’s hardline insistence that Iran should not be allowed any centrifuges or enrichment. There had been two additional differences in the background. As already mentioned, Obama seemed willing to permit Iran to become a regional power and even recently endorsed such a proposition. That possibility made Israel (and Saudi Arabia) apoplectic. Israel wanted to reign in and, hopefully, eliminate Iran’s ability to send missiles to Israel; the JPA made no reference to missiles. In addition, Kissinger criticized the two developments as leading to a nuclear arms race in the Middle East so that Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt would be pressured to begin a process of developing a capability for making nuclear weapons.

The implication that this week’s simulated exercise in diplomatic warfare arose because Netanyahu had released information about the American goal of a one-year breakout period, is nonsense. Anyone who did any reading on the matter knew this and has known this for at least a year. (See my previous two blogs on the progress of the negotiations.) One did not need Netanyahu to learn about this. The White House in January had not only asked, but urged Netanyahu to hold his diplomatic firepower when Israeli intelligence had concluded that a deal was now possible and even imminent. Netanyahu determined to scuttle the deal. While the negotiations had been continuing previously and success was not imminent – rather failure seemed in the offing – Netanyahu had held most of his fire. That phase was over. Netanyahu and his Republican allies in Congress were explicitly out to kibosh the agreement before it was too late. The issue was not over the specifics – whether Iran would be allowed to retain 6,500 or 7,000 centrifuges, but over the deal itself.

To repeat. The issue is that the deal now seems not only possible but imminent. For allowing Iran to retain its centrifuges that would allow it in a year to upgrade its uranium to weapons grade, had all along been unacceptable to Netanyahu, let alone the absence of any limits on Iranian missile development. Piled on these old schisms is now a new one. The White House now seems determined to lift sanctions without Congressional approval if it gets the deal it wants rather than face certain defeat by presenting the deal negotiated to the Senate for ratification.

The issue is even larger. The Iranian religious regime is opposed to liberalism and Western values, but has fully embraced its technology, except when the electronic revolution threatens its system of corruption and authoritarianism, its repression of rights and freedoms. Any deal agreed to now will strengthen Iran’s preservation of its Manichean world view which has focused on Zionism as the fundamental source of all evil, the Small Satan for which America, the Great Satan, is its major tool. This stance, if it is the governing one, will, in the end, sabotage the Iranian government’s current genuine efforts in engagement with the outside world even if the intentions of the current Iranian government are really just to use nuclear technology for peaceful purposes. As the critics of the negotiations chime, if you believe that, then you believe pigs can fly.

There is one final contextual issue – the timing of sanctions. Iran is currently in a terrible position economically and very sensitive to external pressure given both the low price of oil and the internal weaknesses of a kleptocratic economy of rent seekers where many of the large firms are in the hands of Iranian extremists who use those businesses both to fund their political agendas as well as for personal gain. Just this week, Iran’s Central Task Force to Combat the Smuggling of Commodities and Currency pointed to corruption as a key factor behind Iran’s high inflation and high unemployment rate. Smuggling is used not only to get around sanctions, not only to feed personal greed, but to feed a dissident apolitical underground interested in cigarettes, cell phones, cosmetics, music, dance, films, alcohol and drugs. So there is a weird interdependency between the religious puritans and the secular cultural dissidents in the dependency of both on smuggling totaling over $25 billion.

How has Iran behaved since the JPA was agreed to in November 2013? For the process of negotiations, the practices of providing transparency and rules for ensuring that transparency must be assessed in order to weigh one way or another for anyone who sees a rationale in both perspectives to decide which of the alternative strategies to follow.

The JPA provided that Iran would undertake the following voluntary measures:

From the existing uranium enriched to 20%, Iran could retain half as working stock of 20% oxide for fabrication of fuel for the TRR while the remaining 20% UF6 had to be diluted to no more than 5%
There had to be no reconversion line
Iran must confirm that it will not enrich uranium over 5% during the six months
Iran must not make any further advances of its activities at the Natanz Fuel Enrichment Plant1, Fordow2, or the Arak reactor3, designated by the IAEA as IR-40
When the line for conversion of UF6 enriched up to 5% to UO2 is ready, Iran has to convert that to oxide UF6 newly enriched up to 5% during the 6 month period

No new locations for enrichment are to be developed
Iran will continue safeguarded R&D practices, including enrichment R&D practices, as provided in the operational schedule of the conversion plant declared to the IAEA
No reprocessing or construction of a facility capable of reprocessing
There will be enhanced monitoring.

In addition to the above undertakings, provision was made for specified information to be provided to the IAEA, including information on Iran’s plans for nuclear facilities, a description of each building on each nuclear site, a description of the scale of operations for each location engaged in specified nuclear activities, information on uranium mines and mills, and information on source material. This information would be provided within three months of November 2013.

Iran was also required to submit an updated and completed Design Information Questionnaire for the purposes of conducting a building inspection (a DIQ) for the reactor at Arak (IR-40) to the IAEA. Iran had to agree to conform to an IAEA Safeguards Standards for IR-40. When inspectors are not present at a facility, Iran had to allow daily IAEA inspector access for DIQ verification, Interim Inventory Verification (IIV), Physical Inventory Verification (PIV), and unannounced inspections, for the purpose of access to offline surveillance records at Fordow and Natanz. IAEA has to have access to centrifuge assembly workshops, centrifuge rotor production workshops and storage facilities; and uranium mines and mills.

Five other measures for assessing Iran’s intentions and performance were put in place:

1 During the 6 months, for centrifuges that have been installed but not currently enriching uranium, Iran will not feed UF6 into them.

Any replacements of centrifuges will be of the same type.
At Fordow:

there will be no further enrichment over 5% at 4 cascades now enriching uranium
enrichment capacity will not be increased
Iran will not feed UF6 into the other 12 non-operative state cascades
There will be no further interconnections made between cascades
Any replacements of existing centrifuges will be of centrifuges of the same type.
1. At Arak, for 6 months, Iran will not:
commission the reactor
transfer fuel or heavy water to the reactor site
will not test additional fuel
will not produce more fuel for the reactor
will not install remaining components.
1. Iran’s centrifuge production during the 6 months will be dedicated to replacing damaged machines.

Without yet assessing whether Iran complied with any or all of these provisions, it is clear that these are about halting a process underway of producing military-grade nuclear fuel whatever the protestations of Iran about its commitment to exclusive peaceful use of nuclear energy. Further, it is also clear that that these were interim steps to assess sincerity by Iran and to provide a foundation for further transparency and monitoring Iranian compliance. Finally, it is also clear that the negotiations are not about eliminating Iran’s nuclear program altogether.

How did Iran perform in the first six months? What quid pro quo in lifting sanctions did the West undertake and put into effect?

Tomorrow: The First Six Months of Compliance with the JPA

The Joint Plan of Action: P5+1 and Iran

Feb18

The Joint Plan of Action: P5+1 and Iran

Part IV: The Washington-Jerusalem-Buenos Aries-Tehran Quadrangle

Howard Adelman

In the ongoing dispute between the White House and the Israeli government over the invitation to Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress on the Iran nuclear negotiations, we supposedly learned that Netanyahu would no longer be updated on the progress of those negotiations. The explanation: fear that Netanyahu will use the information for political needs. But that is not all. In addition, Obama’s National Security Advisor was said to be cutting off all contact with the Israeli National Security Council. If true, a brouhaha would now have become an imbroglio, for the dispute now would directly affect the security of Israel. Obama appeared to have declared diplomatic war against Israel, showing, perhaps for the first time since he has been president, that he too can play hardball.

In what sense could informing Netanyahu on the status of the talks allow Bibi to use that information for political purposes since he has always used information for political purposes? That was the whole point of promising to keep Jerusalem updated – as a quid pro quo to getting Israel to step down from plans to bomb the Fordow reactor and other nuclear installations in Iran. Was Obama trying to provoke Israel into using the bombing card?

When Wendy Sherman, Under Secretary of State in charge of the nuclear talks with Iran, was reported as announcing that she ceased briefing and updating Israel on the talks, were there any reports that she offered evidence that Netanyahu was using the material she supplied inappropriately to advance his own political prospects within Israel? When Susan Rice, Obama’s National Security Advisor, purportedly announced that she was cutting off all contacts with the Israeli National Security Council, and its chief, Yossi Cohen, she allegedly claimed that Israel was turning a U.S. national security issue into a political issue within the U.S. to interfere in U.S. domestic politics. But if the White House had responded in this way, Obama’s office would have been responsible for turning a minor diplomatic misstep and, in my mind, inadvisable visit, into a major security issue.

In other words, Netanyahu was being portrayed as having committed a double boo-boo and the revenge by the White House had reportedly come down swiftly and heavily. One reaction: what is Israel supposed to do when it feels the progress of the negotiations is undermining the understandings between the U.S. and Israel on the quid pro quo? Go quietly into the night?

Netanyahu’s office, however, kept its cool about the latest purported revelations as it has over the invitation to address Congress. In the latter case, Israel simply slipped out the information that Netanyahu had indeed followed protocol and informed the White House about the invitation before he accepted. (If the Oval Office only learned about the invitation from Netanyahu, their intelligence on gathering information on what is going on in Congress must be dreadful.) If Obama’s White House had indeed responded to Netanyahu’s plan to speak to a joint sitting of Congress as reported, a really serious breach in protocol would have taken place, now by the White House, for Obama’s office could have let Netanyahu know that if he accepted the invitation from the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the White House would come out with full guns blazing.

Was this only the opening salvo? Something seemed fishy. First, the alleged White House reaction was so disproportionate to the alleged offense. Second, such a response would not have been self-serving as it would have alienated much of the Jewish base who support the Democrats which would then rally on behalf of Israel – not Netanyahu – because such a response would have gone far too far. Third, Netanyahu, who is a street brawler, did not respond and return diplomatic artillery fire. His office only stated that, “The relations between the two nations are deep” and that Yossi Cohen will leave for Washington next week to take part in a conference when he will meet with Sherman and Rice, totally contrary to the report that Rice would no longer meet with Cohen.

I thought the invitation to Netanyahu was only a brouhaha, but if the report had been accurate, the tension between Netanyahu and the White House would certainly no longer be just that. Personal animosity would have risen to fever pitch and threatened the deep relations between the two countries. I had thought the acceptance of the invitation to address Congress was inadvisable, but I did not think that Obama would suddenly raise the stakes and plant a minefield for Israel around the Iran negotiations.

Are the negotiations going so badly that Obama wants to blame Israel for torpedoing them and then justify why the U.S. will not support Israel in seeking increased sanctions or even diplomatically supporting Israel in dealing with the existential threat of a nuclear-armed Iran? Is there time to step back from the breach? Certainly John Boehner, Speaker of the House of Representatives, had issued the invitation without keeping the White House in the loop. I suspect that may have been unprecedented, not only in relations between the White House and Congress, but in the war between the Republicans and the Obama administration thus far. And clearly John Boehner has not yet bought into the compromise of a Netanyahu meeting with Congress that is a private briefing. As Boehner said, “It’s an important message that the American people need to hear.”

If the story on the White House cutting off briefings on the progress of the talks and cutting off contacts between Israel’s National Security Agency and Washington’s had been accurate, what was taking place was not only an all-out diplomatic war between Israel and the White House, but an all-out-war between the Republicans and the White House over the most important foreign policy initiative of Obama’s second term. Obama needed that like he needed a hole-in-the-head.

Before the purported huge increase in temperature in the war of words between the White House and Netanyahu, a few House of Representative democrats had tried to cool things down by asking Boehner to postpone Netanyahu’s planned speech to Congress. Representatives Keith Ellison, Steve Cohen and Maxine Waters were collecting signatures to that effect when the White House salvo allegedly went off. The petition said that, “as members of Congress who support Israel, we share concern that it appears that you are using a foreign leader as a political tool against the president.” 13 Democrat representatives indicated that they did not intend to attend the speech in addition to Vice President Joe Biden. Was the White House now undercutting the counter-attack of the Democrats in Congress by alienating a significant portion of their constituency by an unprecedented breach in the relations between the U.S. administration and Netanyahu?

As you have almost certainly learned, the Monday story in the Hebrew press has since been reported as erroneous. If so, some Haaretz reporter will have to pay a high price. The White House and the State Department both categorically denied the report that it had significantly upped the ante well beyond its clearly signaled displeasure at Netanyahu coming to Washington to address Congress in March. In fact, the day before the report appeared, White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough explicitly repudiated all reports of a widening rift between the Obama administration and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. On NBC’s Meet the Press, he repeated the well-worn mantra: “Our relationship with Israel is many-faceted, deep and abiding…focused on a shared series of threats, but also, on a shared series of values that one particular instance is not going to inform overwhelmingly.” Inform overwhelmingly?

So why tell a story about what turns out to be a non-story? Because it may not just be a non-story. It may have been a false leak, a way of warning Netanyahu without actually starting a full-scale diplomatic wary? Because it is important to differentiate between diplomatic artillery fire using live ammunition, artillery fire using simunition (non-lethal ammunition used in target practice and simulated war games) from a fireworks display. This may not have been a lethal salvo in a diplomatic war. But it may not just have been fireworks. Obama may have been using simunition. Further, it is important to learn the Talmudic practice of analysis based on the principle of, “On the one hand…then on the other hand.” For it is too easy to select one of the hands and presume that is the story. All hands must be analyzed and the purpose of each assessed to reveal a larger picture.

The gap between Netanyahu and Obama is deep enough. The rift between the Democrats and the Republicans in contrast to a time when politicians previously sought bipartisan support for foreign policy initiatives need not be expanded into a wide and much deeper chasm. Were the Republicans merely up to their customary obstreperous shenanigans or had Obama made so many compromises in dealing with Iran that both Israeli and U.S. vital security interests had been compromised?

There was a substantive issue that needed to be explicated. According to the Obama administration, the negotiations managed, thus far, to extract enormous concessions from Iran in the first round, a position, incidentally, echoed in Tehran by Iranian domestic critics who insist that Iran gave up too much. On the other hand, the Republican threat to pass new sanctions legislation has accelerated the tortoise-paced style of the negotiations, enough so that the White House is now leaking reports of major progress — that 80% of the differences have been resolved and a positive outcome can be expected by the March deadline. The new Senate de facto deadline had made Obama’s plan for an interim agreement on principles with a follow-up comprehensive agreement by 30 June a chimera.

That plan already had run up against the declared policies of the Iranian government. Iranian leaders have repeatedly insisted that the next stage must not be an interim deal, but must be a comprehensive one. Both sides have insisted that no agreement is better than a bad agreement. But that insistence is totally beside the point and window dressing since any agreement once made will be presented as a win-win for both sides and, hence, a good agreement. The more important procedural difference is that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who will have the final say in Iran, has insisted that he would oppose an interim agreement based on “general principles in one step, then get to specifics.” He had informed Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, his chief negotiator, that he would only endorse a comprehensive agreement based on the corollary to the November interim agreement “to build on a current momentum in order to complete these negotiations within the shortest possible time, up to four months, and if necessary to use the remaining time until the end of June to finalize any possible remaining technical and drafting work.” He would not tolerate the Sword of Damocles and the prospect of renewed sanctions hanging over the government of Iran.

Thus, both sides are now working on concluding a substantive agreement before the end of March that may include some items that still need to be resolved before the end of June. Whatever is agreed, if an agreement is reached, will not be presented as an interim agreement, but as a final one with only a few loose ends left to be tied.

However, before I get into what we know about the essential terms of the deal, it is important to understand the terms of the Joint Plan of Action (JPA) and its shortcomings. The JPA set out to provide a negotiating framework to allow Iran and the P5+1 to reach a mutually-agreed long-term comprehensive solution that would ensure Iran’s nuclear program would be exclusively peaceful. Since few countries trusted Iran to abide by its agreements given its previous behavior, the terms would have to meet two almost irreconcilable goals: putting practices in place that would prevent a nuclear breakout using Iran’s supposedly peaceful nuclear program. Secondly, it would have to satisfy the Ayatollahs that such limitations did not compromise Iran’s supposed plans for the peaceful use of its nuclear technology even if one did not buy into Iran’s protestations all along that “under no circumstances would Iran ever seek or develop any nuclear weapons.” Its very enrichment program of U-235 could have no other purpose than use in nuclear weapons.

The initial framework agreement in itself provoked consternation in both Israel and a significant part of the Washington security establishment. First of all, not only was there no statement that the negotiations were intended to place boundaries on Iran’s quest to become a regional power – a quest which the White House had not only acceded to but has since endorsed – but there was nothing in the statement of purpose to address the problem of Iran’s continuing drive to perfect its international missile delivery system. Instead, the purpose of the negotiations as set forth was to arrive at a comprehensive solution that, “would enable Iran to fully enjoy its right to nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.”

The two omissions and this positive formulation of goals in terms of protecting Iran’s rights, not ensuring its obligations, were sufficient to produce apoplexy in critics. However, the proposition ensuring Iran’s rights to a peaceful use of nuclear power was followed by a subsequent sentence that read, “Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek or develop any nuclear weapons.” Note the difference. The agreement will ensure that Iran can use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. The JPA does not then say that the agreement is intended to ensure that Iran can never use its nuclear capacity to produce nuclear weapons. Only that Iran affirms that intention. But Iran can affirm that it has changed its mind. The opening paragraph of intentions in the JPA could not have been more alarming for Israel, even without citing Iran’s past practices of deceit and even without the issue of Iran as a regional power and its development of missile technology.

There is clearly a Machiavellian way to read Iran’s assurance that, “under no circumstances will Iran ever seek or develop any nuclear weapons.” For, as stated above, the statement did not say that the agreement was intended to accomplish that goal, but that Iran affirmed that it had no intention to ever seek or develop such weapons. But Iran had always insisted on that, even as it secretly pursued a program that could only be for the production of nuclear weapons. What did Iran’s avowal mean? Was it not just posturing, lying for the sake of what Iran saw as a greater good – the extermination of Israel, a goal embraced by both so-called moderates and extremists in Tehran? Why would Israel not be frightened by such a formulation?

If in past agreements, the Iranian regime had agreed precisely to such a formulation and had broken every agreement heretofore, why repeat the process? The answer was that this time the deal would be comprehensive with respect at least to nuclear issues, and no piece of the puzzle would be agreed to until the whole puzzle was resolved. Plans for either an interim framework agreement or even a comprehensive agreement with loose ends to be subsequently cleaned up already breached that requirement. Both the transparency requirements and the limitations placed on the program would be practical. That was more than a non sequitur; the wording implied that past agreements had been impractical. In retrospect and in one sense, everyone could agree to that since, because of Iran’s non-compliance, the clauses had not achieved their stated purposes. Nevertheless, the wording clearly implied that the problem was not that Iran deliberately flouted the terms to which it had agreed, but that the terms themselves were flawed.

Anyone critical of Iran’s intentions and the integrity of its promises would be bound to be upset before finishing the first paragraph. Further, if one suspected the Obama administration of naiveté even if you were not among the nutty right who believe that Obama is a stooge to advance Islam in the world, the sensitive antennae had to go off. The opening paragraph was clearly designed only to protect the so-called moderates within Iran and not protect the believers in diplomacy and engagement in Washington from their hawkish critics. What about the agreement on a step-by-step implementation program? That seemed to contradict the need for comprehensive agreement and, presumably, implementation, before sanctions were lifted. What if the whole step-by-step process was only being used by Iran to escape as many of the existing sanctions as possible, let alone any new threatened ones, while pursuing its “peaceful” development of a nuclear capacity?

After all, the core problem was dual use. Once the enrichment capacity was in place, gearing up to produce sufficient military grade nuclear material was only a matter of time, not of capacity or skills or knowledge. Whistles were blowing. Sirens were wailing. Alarm bells were clanging. Critics were being wakened to a call to arms. And we have only read the first paragraph. After all, critics argued, when has anyone ever threatened Iran’s capacity to develop a peaceful use of nuclear energy? This was always a fictional posture of the Iranian regime. And the opening paragraph of the JPA bought into that narrative without mentioning explicitly that the intention of the agreement, not Iran’s testimony, was to ensure that a cluster of practices guarantee that Iran was permanently incapable of developing nuclear weapons. But we already know that the goal had been revised from that. It was now simply to ensure that Iran could not achieve breakout within a year.

One last point needs to be reiterated. As one of my Canadian Foreign Affairs friends assured me bluntly, and undiplomatically, I would never make a diplomat for I did not understand that the goal of diplomacy was not clear and distinct thinking, but obfuscation and equivocation. My scholastic nitpicking of the first paragraph of the JPA, I could hear him say, was beside the point. More precisely, the equivocal manner of surrendering to the other side was the point. The preamble was designed to allow one side to win rhetorical brownie points when the meat of an agreement belonged to the actual practices. What is given away in the general introductory portion of an agreement is retrieved in spades in the very specific substantive clauses.

The JPA required Iran to comply in good faith with all its previous commitments as near-term measures to be monitored by a Joint Commission made up of Britain, France and the U.S. as well as Europe + China, Russia and Germany (E3/EU+3). A key is that IAEA was tasked with verification of actions by Iran. In the first six months after the agreement was signed in November 2013, Iran was required to fulfill a number of specific requirements that IAEA would have to be able to verify.

Was IAEA up to the task? Did Iran comply with those terms?

Tomorrow: Verification of the Substantive Clauses of the JPA

Responses on Public Intellectuals

Feb17

I want to thank everyone who responded to my open letter to my son on public intellectuals. I include three that significantly contribute to the discussion.

Howard

Michiel Horn

Thanks, Howard, you made me think. As the historian of one group who might be described as public intellectuals, the League for Social Reconstruction — you mention Frank Scott, Frank Underhill and David Lewis; I would add Eugene Forsey, King Gordon, George Grube, Eric Havelock, Escott Reid, Gregory Vlastos among others — and briefly an adherent of another, the University League for Social Reform. I found your exposition fascinating.

Were I to write a comprehensive critique, I would note that the rootedness of Canadian intellectuals in the parliamentary system made a real difference. This contributed to the absence of anything like a McCarthyite witch-hunt in the universities. (There was something like it in the federal public service and the National Film Board, aimed at possible communists, but even more at homosexuals or bisexuals, believed to be vulnerable to blackmail — John Holmes and Douglas LePan come readily to mind — but it was carried on discreetly.) The reasons for the differences between Canada and the US with respect to this matter I’ve listed in my book Academic Freedom in Canada: A History, pp. 217-8, and I won’t repeat them here, except for my final point: “The most important reason for the absence of a anticommunist witch-hunt in Canadian universities was a lack of real or apprehended witches to be hunted.” Even the dismissal of the biochemist George Hunter from the University of Alberta in 1949 was probably less for his opinions, which were well left of centre, than for his troubled relations with the university’s president and with some of his colleagues (pp. 195-203).

Enough! I have other things to do today. Again, thanks!

Peter Warrian

A Letter to Howard

Well done as a statement and characterization of the CUCND/SUPA student activist and disarmament generation.

The “1968-ers” next generation of student activists, in whose leadership I shared, was significantly different. While Universal Access to Education was a major thrust of the Canadian Union of Students (CUS) in my time as President 1968-69, it was soon overwhelmed by the media drama and immediacy of the Anti-Vietnam protests. This came to dominate all else and Americanized much of the rhetoric and politics of the student movement in Canada. It also made a single issue protest into a romantic metaphor for social “revolution”. I thought then, as now, that it was ultimately a distraction from the challenge of social reform. The hard work of the community organizing wing of SUPA ultimately withered as the energies of the movement returned to campuses, with the residual being absorbed into government programmes like the Company of Young Canadians (CYC).

From 1968 to 1973, the movement succeeded in forcing US withdrawal from Vietnam, but then imploded into ideological and counter-cultural splinter groups. For the latter, the public and the intellectual were irrelevant. The social reform leadership, for the most part, did not go into academic life. Nor did they follow the previous generation into the CBC or CYC. A large faction entered the labour movement, without the “Intellectuals going to the Masses” motif. In following this path, the Canadian 68ers were very different than their US counterparts.

Former student activists had a major impact in the labour movement in the UAW, USWA and CUPE, in moving CLC and NDP policy and campaigns towards a much more nationalist and interventionist policy from the 1976 CLC Convention onwards. However, Canadian Left intellectual currents have never been able to successfully resolve the inherent challenges, if not contradictions, in academic, union, community and electoral politics. As a result, the only unitary project of the Left is Healthcare. While we still have unions and there is, thankfully, collective bargaining, there is no Labour Movement in any sense in which there was when I joined in.

Without new intellectual currents, social media and forums, the cycle will only repeat itself.

Jeremy Adelman: An Open Letter to my Father:

This morning I drove through the frozen exurban New Jersey dawn to get my son to a chess tournament knowing that a letter awaited me – open no less – from my father. As I had no time to read it before my own fatherly task was done, it had to wait till I got home. In the meantime, my familiarity with a certain authority voice that any of your readers will surely recognize was already ringing in my ears.

The letter isn’t actually about me. Thank God. It’s aimed at someone else, though it does address a book I am writing about thinkers and the global public sphere.

I sent you Greif’s essay because I thought it a fascinating glimpse into how Partisan Review is being remembered several generations removed as an icon for a particular moment in intellectual history. And as a somewhat nostalgic view of the intellectual in history.

Your issue is the national perspective and the role of intellectuals in giving it shape – or speaking fdor it, even when they don’t realize they are. This is something Greif does not interrogate and you are right to cast the spotlight on it.

Your reaction to Greif’s Americanist voice – the hubris, the presumption about the marketplace, the absent planet (except insofar as Europe is a background for recycling American exceptionalism myths – which run through Partisan Review, and Greif, like lifeblood) – is a reminder that Americans have a distinctive voice. Some would say aversively imperial. Others are jealous of the bravura and confident ability to speak in universals as if everyone shared them. For those misfortunate enough not to share these universals, their inability to grasp the essential wisdom of Americana helps explain, well, their misfortunes. One has to admire the circularity.

Canadians have often found themselves uncomfortably entangled in jealousy and derision. This is what happens when you are made aware of your location by being on the margins of power. It’s what happens when you grow up on McLuhan, or Creighton, or Atwood.

But it’s important to remind ourselves that the national perspective everywhere had its moment, which correlates with the rise and fall of Partisan Review and the Canadian Forum (which is what we had around the house, along with that impressive pile of NYRB’s and Commentary before it lurched rightwards.) It also correlates with the welfare state, as you note in your letter, that cause which so mobilized generations of Canadians and their own understanding of justice. Americans’ version of the welfare state was anemic, of course. Americans are still, unbelievably, trying to make sure people have access to a decent doctor; south of the border, it was the struggle for civil rights that was more electrifying. More heroic. More tragic. Ongoing.

That national perspective came apart everywhere. Not always with the same speed, or for exactly the same reasons. But it came. The French have been grappling with it, and in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo murders the issue is burning a white flame in the public sphere; what do you do when 10% of your population is Muslim and many of them living in squalid conditions? The 1980s was not just a splintering of the national readership; it was the demise of the very integrative concept that was once attached to the nation and its conveyer, the welfare state: society. Nation. State. Society. These were the three keywords for a style of mobilization, collective imagination, and policymaking for the era that ran from the horror of World War One to 1979. (In case you are wondering why I choose that date, the Iranian Revolution, Trudeau’s defeat to the risible but absolutely decent Joe Clark, Thatcher’s victory in Britain, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and I’ll throw in the Sandinista Revolution, too because it was also important to me personally, were elements of a fundamental unhinging of the 20^th century).

We didn’t know it at the time, but an implicit coalition of intellectuals and Bay St. market-nichers plunged forth to challenge the idea of an integrated “society.” In its place came disaggregated forms. What became called “identity politics” was one expression of the dismantling of the social. I remember Uncle Stan railing about the new Toronto street signs labeling neighbourhoods as if they needed baptizing; Stan was furious because he just wanted Toronto to be a city, a polis, not some pastiche of invented micro-communities. But perhaps the most important erosive force was the redefinition of citizens as consumers. It’s not surprising then that the implosion of the Liberal Party – and the eclipse of our poster of the engagé thinker, Pierre Trudeau – coincided with this basic shift. When I started studying political economy at the University of Toronto in that fateful 1979, we all read George Grant (how could you leave him off the list????), Trudeau, Levesque, Porter’s Vertical Mosaic. (My own quarry was Harold Innis). But what we did not realize was that while we debated the national question and campaigned for Ed Broadbent, what was bubbling underneath was: what’s English Canada?

Once it’s no longer the remaindered space between American chest-thumpers to the south and joyous “sovereingtists” to the east (or west, if you were from the Maritimes), what is English Canada?

Is there such a thing as a national perspective in the dawning, post-national, age?

I can’t speak for your other children. But I suspect they experienced (and still do?) a variation of my own response, which was not to resolve the question. I left; though it was always my goal, I never returned. Now, I look at Canada from its diaspora. Yes, Canada has its own disapora. And it’s actually large. For instance, as often as I can, I go to see the Toronto Maple Leafs when they play in New York or in New Jersey. (And it always feels weird that I have seen “my” team play in Madison Square Gardens – which celebrates itself, in very American argot, as “the most famous arena in the world” — but never in its fancy new home, the “ACC;” “my Leafs” will always belong to Carlton St. and never be known by some mediatized acronym.) The arena stands are full of displaced Torontonians all wearing, as I do, Leafs sweaters. There is no team in the NHL with such a vast diasporic following; it keeps the two Florida franchises alive, even in our collective misery as we watch one more season wind down in a pathetic display of mismanagement. The point about the Canadian diasporic perspective is that I see the margins from its own margins. And I am not alone. Where do these diasporic voices fit into the national conversation?

Also, as a historian, I think in terms of phases or periodization. What was “Canada” from the 30s to the 80s is not what it was before, when, to be an intellectual you often had to leave – Innis went to Chicago, many went to Britain. And it was not what came after, in which many also left. Me included. Shon, Eric, and Rachel, too. (Eric did go back though one has to wonder what would have happened if he’d decided to stay at the University of Michigan).

The point about being uprooted is that we came at the tail end of the national moment. We witnessed its coming apart, and so could never quite share that same attachment to Bob Fulford and Hart House; my memory of 1967 is of some weird buildings in Montreal. I don’t think my siblings recall it at all. Gordon Lightfoot was never my music. Tommy Douglas was a secular saint. There was something ironic to it all because, though we came late to the party when all the best food was gone, there was this thing called “Canadian Studies” that was taking off. In retrospect, that was unfortunate bad timing; a Canadian foible, I guess, to be a little out of synch.

We came at the end of one conversation and were around for the beginnings of a new one, though we did not know it. Such is the Cunning of History, no doubt.

When you say, “That would not be Canadian” at the end of your letter to me, I know what you mean. I know what you are saying to Greif. I agree with you; Greif has no sense of place in the world.

But what do those words – “be Canadian” – mean to those who came at the end of the national debates and conversations about being, not to mention that margins of a margin? Not the same for your generation as ours; not the same from your location from ours. I suspect that Daniel and Gabriel would probably add that to be Canadian feels different in BC than in Toronto. But I am not sure.

It can be brutal to lack certainty in a global age that rewards conviction and celebrates the mindless confidence of the “entrepreneurial” age, when innovation has eclipsed insights. So: there’s despair about the future of intellectuals, the public sphere, the relevance of ideas. But lest we get too caught up in the self-serving drama of intellectuals who populate the public sphere and then use it to bemoan its irrelevance, let me conclude with a comment from the margins about the margins. Our words still matter. A lot. Last year, Ken Dryden sent me a special edition of the Toronto Star that he’d edited for Canada Day. He and I had been talking on and off about the meanings of the future. His curated newspaper was a fascinating mosaic, horizontal, not vertical. I remember the words that rang out from the chorus of Canadians whom he profiled, from P K Subban to Margaret Atwood. If Canadians had a vocabulary of themselves, it was an amalgam of new and old: diversity, openness, and fairness. Noble words. I like them. Maybe they came from the accumulation of arguments about what it means to “be Canadian” in the national, and post-national, age. Either way, I wish that others used them as often as Canadians do, that one does not have to “be Canadian” to value them.

Mark Greif and The Partisan Review

Feb16

Mark Greif and The Partisan Review

Howard Adelman

This is an open letter to my son, Jeremy Adelman, and a response to the article he sent me by Mark Greif’s on the history of The Partisan Review in particular and, more generally, both the character and role of the public intellectual as the phenomenon emerged over the last eighty years. (See “What’s Wrong With Public Intellectuals,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 13 February 2015 – http://chronicle.com/article/Whats-Wrong-With-Public/189921/)

Granted I came on board as a minor activist and quasi-public intellectual after the heyday of The Partisan Review in 1955 “when it started to lose energy.” omentary in America had taken its place as the premium read, when The New Left Review was read for thought even more distant from the mainstream, and just before The New York Review of Books began publishing. But in my university days, The Partisan Review was still a major reference for discussion, though, in Canada, we also had Canadian Forum and, in the sixties, This Magazine and Our Generation as nationalist reference points.

Quite aside from his relative youth, as well as from my age and spatial location, I am bound to have a different take on Greif’s interpretation of intellectual history in the mid-twentieth century and how that history reflects on the present. Further my comments, of necessity, will not be about his observations about The Partisan Review and whether it was “impossibly good” and retained “a taut momentum for a score of years.” Rather, they will be about Greif’s analysis and conclusions about the significance and role of pubic intellectuals, about the historical conditions that brought them into being and influenced their outlook, and about how their ideas impacted upon history and how that history was transformed by the world of ideas.

In light of your current book project, Greif’s statement that, “we don’t have convincing speculative histories or insightful accountings of the qualitative effects on ideas,” is a propos. I do not think Greif’s efforts provide an adequate sketch of the interaction between historical causes and conditions and how they affect and are affected by the world of ideas. But, at least, it is a stimulating and well-written try.

As Canadians, we had a much more modest view of the role of the public intellectual. In my recollection, we were not elitists at all. We did not adopt “a slightly superior pose.” Perhaps we were not entitled. Though we batted around and wrestled with ideas and conundrums, only a very few postured as sophisticates. Nor did we believe our work in the public sphere had the same exactitude and precision of scholars like C.B. Macpherson. Northrop Frye or even Marshall McLuhan. On the other hand, neither were we dumbing down. We were merely engaged in public life with the intellectual tools endowed by our university education. And we highly respected people like Bob Fulford, who, without such an endowment, brought into the public sphere a superior intellect, acuity of insight and rigour of argument that we all, and I mean all, admired.

Fulford never stood in opposition to the university nor did we. However, we were critical of the staid silo mentality that the professions – including the humanity and social science professions – had found for themselves. We sought university as well as public reform so that the university should become more engaged in society. This was not the same in the United States where the universities were much more diverse and many of its great public universities had a century earlier defined themselves as oriented to and focused upon problems within society rather than addressing society as a mass in need of uplifting. Thus, even though only 3% of the population in Canada at the time went to university, we were in the process of championing the university to be open to more of the population. Thus, whereas Greif saw the opposition to the university as a myth compared to the reality – the vast majority of these public intellectuals were not only products of the university, but employees of such institutions – I do not believe we were ever caught up in such a mythology. We always appreciated what the university had done for us while retaining a very critical posture.

Not all of us. Dimitri Roussopoulos in Montreal stridently stayed out of any university position. Though he attended university in Montreal and London, where he came under the influence of Bertrand Russell, I do not know if he ever got a degree. Our Generation that he founded in 1961 was a rare journal founded by the new left instead of inheriting an old left tradition. However, perhaps because it lacked that inherited historical rigour, it never emerged as having anywhere near the quality, profundity and influence of its American competitors.

Dimitri made a career of founding one movement after another, and usually taking full credit for their initiation in true anarchist trope and in contrast to the fellowship that founded the CCF and its successor, the NDP. He was a conspiratorial type and adopted a conspiratorial mien and we never knew where his funding came from for all his activities and travel. While he took sole credit for organizing the big protest in Ottawa in 1964 against Bomarc missiles in Canada, he never gave credit to the Toronto chapter that raised two-thirds of the funds to transport and feed people on that march. So there were those who defined themselves as other, and such people, such as Rick Waern, would achieve control in such institutions as Rochdale, and with their anarchism help drive them into the ground. All in all, however, these were as peripheral as the activists who stayed away from any involvement in universities as in the U.S. But we Canadians did not have the mythology that surrounded the memory of public intellectuals in the U.S.

Further, I cannot ever recall us having a sense of an uneducated mass that needed us. We knew that we were read by relatively few. And, further, the public had many other sources to influence them. We were just a very minor faction hoping to have some influence. It is not that such elitist posturing before and towards the masses could not be found. They were plentiful. The most important in Canada was perhaps the National Film Board. John Grierson, its English founder in partnership with Prime Minister Mackenzie King, was a socialist elitist who believed in agitprop, who believed in using film as propaganda to make us all aware we are Canadians while all along celebrating the common man in films like Coaltown. And he brought his message to the common man in a way none of us could aspire to – through the quality of the filmmaking, through the outreach programs to schools and communities. The message was not a sophisticated one. It totally lacked critique and was ridden though with racism and class consciousness. It was the epitome of Fabian socialism totally at odds with the view of “the equalizing power of the Great Depression” that Mark Greif describes.

How different two decades make! We were born in the later years of the Great Depression, but our lived experience was of the prosperity and enormous growth after the war. We were not levelers so much as strivers eager to stay near the top as the high tide increased everyone’s income and lifted us all. Though our family was left behind, it was seen as the fault of an irresponsible father not of a failed capitalist system. Though communism was an integral part of our milieu – Gerry Bain was a communist, David Berger was a Bundist and socialist, others in our class were conservatives (Donsky) or Liberals (Cheskes) or Labour Zionists (Ricky Rappaport) or religious (Judy Ochs). Though the class was intensely political in many varied ways, it was taken as part of our family heritage rather than as a matter of fundamental difference. So we went on the marches organized by the United Jewish People’s Order (UJPO) to protest the execution of the Rosenbergs in the mistaken belief that they had been framed by anti-Semites even though most of us were not communists.

There was another major difference. Greif writes: “first-generation Jewish founders linked up with young American intellectuals, like Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy, educated at Yale or Vassar, who brought in money and connections to keep the magazine afloat; PR, was launched by this combined demographic.” Though we came into the intellectual period of our lives fifteen years later, I do not believe we had any sense of a union of a WASP establishment linked with Jewish intellectuals. Rather, our predecessors like David Lewis, a Rhodes scholar and other Jewish socialists, linked up with Methodists from the British and Scottish working class movements to create a real political and public socialist party, the CCF, with such greats as Stanley Knowles and Tommy Douglas who followed the path set by Woodsworth and Coldwell and such public intellectuals as Frank Underhill and Frank Scott.

So we had a direct political entry for our activism. And Canada was a relatively small place with less than the population of New York at the time. Further, though we were not immune from its contagion, we did not go through the McCarthyism of America. Our member of parliament was J.B. (Joseph Baruch) Salsberg, a communist, and the only result was that when we undertook military duty as militias at school between 1950 and 1955, we were not allowed uniforms or guns. Premier Frost of Ontario, a small-town conservative from Lindsay, Ontario, and J.B. Salsberg remained friends throughout their lives.

Thus, America may have had the Partisan Review, but Canada had the Regina Manifesto advocating public ownership, universal healthcare, en route to eradicating capitalism. I could become involved in co-operative housing with the support of the state, for we never conceived of our activities as “revolutionary”. Another public issue peculiar to Canada dominated our lives – the English-French issue. While CBC and the NFB stayed one with two different branches, even when the NFB moved from Ottawa to Montreal, we pioneered in the development of two parallel systems. I led the Ontario delegation at the national meeting of the Combined Universities Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CUCND) supporting developing two cooperative but different institutions working to stop nuclear testing.

I always remember how angry Dimitri Roussopoulos, the national head based in Montreal, was with me. He charged me with betrayal. But as I explained my position, when we sit around a long table as delegates from across Canada and listen to speakers who cannot speak French stating how much they do for their French colleagues in Quebec in ensuring everything was translated into French, when all the French-Canadian delegates could speak English and did not require the translation services, the arrogance and patronizing attitude of English Canadians even on the left stared us in the face.

So we had political outlets for our activism that got us out of our academic and intellectual silos. The most important in my period was the doctors’ strike in Saskatchewan when your uncle Al, and a small coterie of our close friends graduating from medical school, went out to Saskatchewan as strikebreakers and founded community medical clinics that helped break the strike.

I believe another major difference in Canada was the relationship with Europe. I think Greif is correct in characterizing Europe in the thirties as still centering the world of ideas. As he wrote, “War which pitched Europe into New Yorkers’ laps; the bulk of established European Jewish, leftist, or simply antifascist scholars and artists were on American shores, as refugees in the orbit of New York or Hollywood.” Canada received only a dribble, in part a relic of the anti-Semitic Canadian immigration policy of, “None Is Too Many.” But we did get some. They made the Pontifical Institute for Mediaeval Studies at the University of Toronto the most advanced centre of its kind in the world. Etienne Gilson, who helped found it ten years before the war broke out, was a major attraction. The Institute attracted Catholic and non-Catholic scholars from all over the world. Emil Fackenheim, a Jewish refugee from Germany interned in Canada, encouraged Gregory Baum, another German-Jewish internee, to attend. Gregory converted to Catholicism and became a leading light in the reform movement in the Catholic Church. Emil himself moved from the rabbinate in Hamilton to becoming a philosophy professor at the University of Toronto. So we had far fewer Jewish refugees and they followed a radically different trajectory.

Greif’s main thesis, however, is not about these intellectuals on the left as it is about the public they addressed. The New York intellectual scene had become Americanized. Public intellectuals then spoke to an American public. During the thirties to the sixties, the Canadian intellectual scene also became nationalized (in Québec it became provincialized.) But Canadians never saw themselves as the intellectual centre of the universe as heirs to Europe’s tradition. We just became marginal to the American centre, both participating in it and resisting its magnetic attraction and strong bear hug.

A much more important difference is that the mainstream of pubic intellectuals did not enter into the history of schismatics inherited from the Trotskyites. This was true whether the organization was the CUCND, SUPA or Praxis. The latter was the activist research centre on democracy we established in the seventies that the RCMP broke into and burned, after first sending our files to the editor of The Sun newspaper. It exemplified a Canadian trope. We not only tried to include all leftists. Canadian organizations tried to reach across the political spectrum and be inclusive rather than self-identified leftist organizations.

That also illustrated one of the fundamental paradoxes of the history of Canadian public intellectuals. We were always beholden to the state – whether it was for the mortgage provided to Rochdale College or the support the Canadian government gave to our small publishers – House of Anansi, New Press, Coach House Press, and even Demitri Roussopolus’ Black Rose Press. At the same time, the most iconic institution of the Canadian state, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, had become an organization that made the political shifty characters in the Watergate scandal. How naïve we were in how out-of-control the Mounties would become. But however bad, they never harnessed the power or role as saboteurs of dissent as the FBI, as much as the Mounties tried to emulate their American cousins. So we never lived under a dark cloud with theirs of McCarthyism and instead inherited some of America’s best who headed north to escape the underhanded methods of the American intelligence agencies.

Both American and Canadian public intellectual life, however, shared in a development that was more important than all the others: “vocational integration in which formerly independent literary arts (fiction, poetry, even cultural criticism) came to be taught as for-credit courses and degree-granting programs.” Writers, critics and activists did not have to remain outside the university to follow their muse. Though many did, like Margaret Atwood, others found a secure position in the university from which to pursue their critical and aesthetic vocations.

But one difference remained. Greif wrote re his experience with the journal N+1 that he founded. Speaking of the graduate students and young assistant professors he sought to write for the journal, “When these brilliant people contemplated writing for the ‘public,’ it seemed they merrily left difficulty at home, leapt into colloquial language with both feet, added unnatural (and frankly unfunny) jokes, talked about TV, took on a tone chummy and unctuous. They dumbed down, in short—even with the most innocent intentions. The public, even the ‘general reader,’ seemed to mean someone less adept, ingenious, and critical than themselves. Writing for the public awakened the slang of mass media. The public signified fun, frothy, friendly.” In my terms, they may not have sold out to an establishment elite; they did sell out to populism, which has a much deeper strain in the American social fabric than in Canada. Our Prairie and Québecois populism was of a very different order, far less dumbed down and much more committed to the rising tide of intellectual resources and helping raise the public with that rising tide rather than via a chummy camaraderie.

The part of the story I found missing in Greif’s peace was the role public intellectuals, both in the U.S. and Canada, perform in citizens forging a common understanding of who they are – heroic winners, I believe, in Americana, and beautiful losers in the Canadian intellectual ferment. We have no illusions that the public needs us and without us would bumble and stumble. Canadian public intellectuals are simply adjuncts in the process of social change, not strident explorers marking a new path, even though Innis, McPherson, Frye and McLuhan did precisely that. Our mission was not to convert the masses to our way, as John Grierson believed, but to interact and learn as well as teach so that we all became better as a result of the exercise.

In our quest for social justice, Canadian academics and intellectuals, with some clear exceptions, have, and I believe most of us, would not view themselves as the repository of truth and virtue to be shared with the plebs and the bourgeoisie equally, We are just workers tolling in intellectual fields and do not see our task as facing off against them on farms or in factories. We do not see ourselves as marshalling our resources “against the pseudo-public culture of insipid media and dumbed-down ‘big ideas,’ and call that world what it is: stupid.” That is Greif’s most stupid idea.

So the lesson I take from Greif’s piece and my reflections upon it is not, “to participate in making ‘the public’ more brilliant, more skeptical, more disobedient, more capable of self-defense, and more dangerous again—dangerous to elites, and dangerous to stability; when it comes to education, dangerous to the idea that universities should be for the rich, rather than the public, and hostile to the creeping sense that American universities should be for the global rich rather than the local or nationally bounded polity.”

That would not be Canadian.

The Build-Up to the Washington-Tehran Nuclear Negotiations

Feb15

The Build-Up to the Washington-Tehran Nuclear Negotiations

Part IV: The Washington-Jerusalem-Buenos Aries-Tehran Quadrangle

Howard Adelman

Where has Howard been going with this series? The trajectory has been simple if somewhat roundabout. I began with the brouhaha over Netanyahu’s planned visit to Washington to address a joint sitting of both houses of Congress, a visit that was against the explicit preferences of the Obama administration. My thesis was simple. I argued that Netanyahu openly risked a further breach with Obama because he deeply believed that the Washington-Tehran negotiations were more than just misguided, but were leading the West into a terrible cul-de-sac.

I wanted to convince my fellow liberals that this was not a deep division between Israel and America, but that the response to the planned visit was a manifestation of the deep divisions between Israel and the Obama administration over the Iran talks. Netanyahu was not coming to Washington either to poke Obama in the eye OR to advance his election prospects in the coming Israeli elections. This cynical interpretation of Netanyahu’s motives mischaracterized the serious issues at stake. Further, the risks of going to Washington against the wishes of the U.S. President were more likely to jeopardize his election chances than enhance them.

To give some foundation to an alternative Republican and Israeli right-wing view of Iran, I took a side journey via the fracas in Buenos Aries over the investigations into the 1994 blowing-up of the Jewish cultural centre by Iranian agents and the charges that the present Argentinian administration was undercutting that investigation via a side deal with Iran. Those charges came to a head on Friday when the federal prosecutor in Argentina, Gerardo Pollicita, formally requested that charges be brought against Argentina’s current President, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, for obstructing an investigation into the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish centre in Buenos Aires. This is unprecedented. Though I hope the backgrounder on Argentinian fascism and anti-Semitism helped provide some depth of understanding to the issue, my main angle was to document the Buenos Aries-Tehran connection and focus on the treachery of even the so-called moderates in the Iranian government. I did not discuss my suspicions that either the Argentinian intelligence service or, more likely, Iranian agents, were responsible for the death of thee prosecutor, Albero Nisman.

Iran will certainly manipulate and negotiate, but this regime, except, ironically, when the extremists have been in power, has always been able to hide behind lies. Yet the Prophet taught: “Be honest because honesty leads to goodness, and goodness leads to Paradise. Beware of falsehood because it leads to immorality, and immorality leads to Hell.” Surah 40:28 of the Quran reads, “Truly Allah guides not one who transgresses and lies.” However, for the conciliation among and between people and peoples, lying is preferable to telling the truth, especially when it is in service of the good. The Prophet says: “He is not a false person who (through he lies) settles conciliation among people, supports good or says what is good.” Lying is NOT even the exception in Islamic, let alone Iranian, foreign policy, but a norm. The great statesman, Anwar Sadat, was a master of deceit in service of the good, and good did finally emerge from the 1973 Yom Kippur War when Egypt finally agreed to a peace with Israel. But if the Other is the embodiment of evil, lying is not only permitted but encouraged, for The Good requires extermination of a disease. And it is the end point, the telos, that determines the worthiness of a lie.

In contrast to Islam which incorporates lying into diplomacy, Machiavellianism is an outlier to Christian teaching. However, it is a central element in Western foreign policy. Even Machiavelli, who was no Machiavellian but a humanist, believed that, although religion served a useful purpose in providing social order, the rules of morality were disposable when security was at stake. If the moral universe taught by Christianity was allowed to trump all other principles, then Christians would become passive and impotent allowing evil men to rule the world. In Islam, by contrast, lying becomes a virtue not a necessary prerequisite for survival as much as it may harm your chances for entry into heaven. Allah may prohibit lying, but his Prophet taught that there were exceptions. When the powerful Jewish tribal leader, Kaab Ibn al-Ashrf of the tribe of Banu al-Nudair was aligning with his enemy, Mohammed had a spy infiltrate his entourage, win his trust and assassinate him. A practice integral to the foreign policy of all countries is religiously sanctioned in Islamic ones. In that sense, Islam is less hypocritical than Christianity. Allah may not sanction lying, but if the intention is lofty, it is the intention in your heart that counts.

In Judaism, when the shofar is blown on Rosh Hashanah and at the end of the Day of Atonement (or when Joshua fought the battle of Jericho to make the walls come tumbling down), one of the four sounds made is tekiah. It is a plain deep bass sound with an abrupt ending, often interpreted to be the base line of the Jewish character – blunt and to the point. It is the sound that also stands for forgiveness for your debts. The almost identical Arabic word, Al-Takeyya, in Islam refers to the right to be deceptive in signing any accord when the intention is to serve the higher interests of Allah. Al-Takeyya means to prevent or guard against. The principle of Al-Takeyya conveys the understanding that Muslims are permitted to lie as a preventive measure against anticipated harm to one’s self or fellow Muslims.

In the above sense, it is at the very least understandable that Netanyahu and the Republicans fear a treacherous Iran, and that belief might have a deep rational foundation. It is also why Obama can be excused for being so Machiavellian – though he is not very good at it – in trying to cut a deal that will avoid having to go to the Senate for approval as long as possible. (See Michael Doran’s Republican-oriented but astute and excellent analysis of the U.S.-Iran negotiations – http://dev.mosaicmagazine.com/author/michael-doran/; Doran is a senior fellow of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense and a former senior director of the National Security Council. For his more general critique of Obama’s Middle East policies, see: http://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2014/07/the-new-middle-east-war/)

All this must be seen in my own continuing analysis of the nuclear negotiations between the P5+1 and Iran in which I both tried to dispense with some of the misrepresentation of the negotiations by its critics while retaining a supportive but skeptical appreciation of the process itself. My last blog was published on my wordpress website, howardadelman.com, on 21 November 2014 entitled, “Iran: Three Days Before the Nuclear Negotiations Deadline.” That was my latest attempt to keep readers informed in an attempt to provide a balanced interpretation of those negotiations. After summarizing the build-up to the current negotiations, the agreements thus far, the current status, the divisions facing both sides, the significance of the negotiations and agreements reached, and current prospects, I will return to Netanyahu’s coming visit and the deep split within Washington over the negotiations.

There is absolutely no debate over the importance of these negotiations for the Obama administration. The discussions are, by far, the most important foreign policy initiative of his second term. Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national-security adviser for strategic communication, said that the nuclear negotiations with Iran are “probably the biggest thing President Obama will do in his second term on foreign policy.” Though the process began much earlier, the negotiations are underway at a time when Obama has been in his weakest position in relationship to Congress where the Republicans now hold a majority in both houses. On the other hand, Obama has nothing to lose. He does not face re-election. But his weak position vis-à-vis Congress also restricts what can emerge out of the negotiations.

For both Tehran and Washington recognize that the Obama administration cannot deliver on the possibility of permanently lifting sanctions, but will only be able to offer a series of six month waivers. This has a double effect – it weakens what the administration can extract from Tehran at the same time as it frees Washington up in making an agreement without Senate approval. The Arab Spring, the military withdrawal from Iraq and, ironically, in the wake of the latter, the explosive rise of Islamic State that has led to a covert cooperation between Washington and Tehran to confront this menace, have all facilitated holding negotiations and the progress thus far, without even taking into consideration the economic pressures the sanctions have posed for Iran, especially difficult in a time of rapid and extreme declines in oil prices.

Two other regional changes have also been helpful. John Kerry’s tremendous efforts to push forth an Israeli-Palestinian deal tanked, and tanked badly. Since the administration blamed Netanyahu’s stubbornness more than the immobility from the side of the Palestinian Authority, the Obama administration felt far freer in its opening to Iran. Second, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia consistently and persistently urged the United States to attack Iran to destroy its nuclear program. Abdullah felt so frustrated with Washington that he opened his own diplomatic track to Tehran and last March issued an unprecedented invitation to Foreign Minister of Iran, Mohammad Javad Zarif, to visit Saudi Arabia. These two major rivals in the Middle East, these two leading heirs of the Sunni and Shi’a branches of Islam respectively, these two countries so deeply buried in a cold war, these two who are in such opposite corners vis-à-vis Assad’s regime in Syria, suddenly took a totally unexpected approach to the rivalry with Iran, not because Saudi Arabia had suddenly fallen in love with Iran, but because it had lost all trust in the ability of America to back it in its conflict with its main rival.

Further, Saudi Arabia was staring at an Iran that, with its proxies, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Assad holding on in Syria, the Shiites now dominant in Iraq, and Bahrain and Yemen also under Iranian influence, Saudi Arabia’s oil fields were surrounded. King Abdullah is now dead. Defence Minister Prince Salman, who was named as Abdullah’s successor back in June of 2012 after the death of Salman’s two older brothers, was also named Deputy Prime Minister while continuing to hold the defence portfolio. Previously, he had been the orchestrator of the new policy. He is now king.

The Obama administration chose to revive diplomacy rather than war. This fits in with its efforts to wind down military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Obama administration also embraced diplomacy because, as it analyzed the situation, sanctions may have had a devastating effect on Iran, but these were considered insufficient to bring Iran to its knees. All they could do was bring Iran to the negotiating table. As well, the sanctions were interpreted as having a perverse effect, reinforcing Iranian resistance while, at the same time, undercutting the so-called moderates now in positions of power.

Let’s review the essential elements and backstory in Obama’s negotiating strategy with Iran.

The strategy is not just about containing Iran’s nuclear ambitions; it envisions reinstating Iran, the sponsor of terrorist regimes like Hezbollah and Hamas, the backbone of the repressive Assad regime, and the Shi’ite spoiler in Iraq – not to speak of Bahrain and Yemen – back into the international system of nation-states as a full participating member instead of enhancing its international isolation.
Obama not only aims to accept Iran back into the community of nation-states as a full member, but he would recognize it as a regional power: “They have a path to break through that isolation and they should seize it,” because “if they do, there’s incredible talent and resources and sophistication…inside of Iran, and it would be a very successful regional power.”
The policy was intended as a resurrection of the “grand bargain” that Iran purportedly offered the U.S. at the beginning of the 21^st century but which George W. Bush had dismissed out of hand.
This was even part of a much larger strategic vision that intended to bury Henry Kissinger’s policies of a global balance of power and replace it with a positive sum game with very decentralized loci of power – incidentally, precisely the phrase repeated in the Ayatollah’s guideline for the negotiations. In Obama’s address to the United Nations General Assembly in September 2009, he said, “our destiny is shared, power is no longer a zero-sum game. No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation…No balance of power among nations will hold.”
The policy had excellent bi-partisan credentials since it was the fourth plank of the 2006 strategic plan of the Iraq Study Group’s chaired by Howard Baker and Congressman Lee Hamilton in which withdrawal from Iraq, reinforcing the troops in Afghanistan, and reinvigorating the Israeli-Palestinian peace process were the first three planks.
In this new world of multi-centred strategic blocs, Iran would become a significant player in eradicating the real danger of radical Islamicists.
In inflating the Islamicists, the repressive policies of the Ayatollahs in Iran against the Bahá’is and the dissidents of the June 2009 Green Movement could be ignored even as Obama acknowledged and offered verbal recognition to their insistence on rights.
Just when Obama was offering his invitation and open hand instead of a clenched fist, Tehran began to operationalize its secret underground uranium enrichment facility at Fordow, the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant (FFEP) near Qom, after it was revealed to the IAEA by Iran on 21 September 2009, but that information was only released after it was discovered and documented by Western intelligence services, based, in part, on information from Israel’s Mossad, which had installed a listening device in the Fordow plant, a device discovered after the September 2012 explosion in the plant; Iran’s failure to inform IAEA was in blatant violations of its obligations under the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and its 2003 agreement with IAEA;
In 2009, Iran told the IAEA that the 16 cascades of 3,000 centrifuges were to be run to enrich U-235 up to 5%; instead, they were operating to enrich U-235 to 20% bomb-grade nuclear fuel. Further, though required to give 180 day advance warning to IAEA in September 2011 of implementing the upgrading, they starting the upgrading in three months in December of 2011.
As a result of the 2009 betrayal, Obama introduced the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act (CISADA) as the foundation for an escalating program of sanctions against Iran to pressure Iran to enter into negotiations.
In July 2009, Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal reiterated its belief to Hilary Clinton, then Secretary of State, that negotiations with Iran will not lead to a dismantling of its military nuclear program and that the only way to deal with Iran was “to cut off the head of the snake,” a position later repeated directly to Obama by King Abdullah.
In March 2010, in a culmination of disputes between Israel and Washington, bad blood between President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel clotted over discussions on Israeli settlements when Obama abandoned a private meeting with Netanyahu and left him stewing while Obama joined his family for dinner.
In 2011, Ehud Barak, Israel’s Defense Minister, informed the U.S. as well as the world that Iran was approaching a “zone of immunity” making its nuclear program impervious to Israeli military attack and time was short before Israel would have to strike.
In 2012, Obama, feeling betrayed again by Iran, not only Iran’s nuclear program, but over its support for the Assad regime in Turkey, blew up and threatened appropriate aggressive retaliation, echoed both by France and Israel.
The U.S. reassured Israel that it was committed to preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons capability and, at the same time, increased its military and intelligence cooperation with Israel.
At the same time, Obama reached out to Tehran by refusing to arm the rebels in Syria seeking to bring down Iran’s satrap, Assad; this, in turn, lead to secret bilateral meetings between Jake Sullivan, Hilary Clinton’s director of policy planning, and Iranian foreign affairs and defence officials in the Ahmadinejad regime.
November 2012, Obama is reelected.
In 2013, many Track II and backchannel meetings with Iran were held.
In April 2013 in the meeting of the P5+1 with Iran in Almaty, Kazakhstan, the basis of the deal to enter negotiations was put in place: sanctions relief in return for Iran degrading its 20% enriched nuclear bomb grade U-235 to 5%, while allowing more uranium to be enriched to 5%, instead of, as UNSC sanctions required, ceasing all processing and enrichment of U-235.
Critics lambasted Obama for not insisting on a cessation of all enrichment processes.
Washington was convinced that its carrot and economic stick approach helped facilitate the election in Iran of “moderates” led by Hassan Rouhani in Iran in June 2013.
When Khamenei offered Obama his hand and a promise to negotiate, though opposed by both Israel and Saudi Arabia, Obama withdrew the military threat and acquiesced in more moderate sanctions; Obama accepted Tehran’s offer to degrade or, alternatively, transfer the 20% enriched uranium to Russia. Israel regarded itself as betrayed by the policy turn to engagement without Iran agreeing in advance to dismantle its nuclear capabilities as allegedly promised to Israel.
As Israel held off from bombing Fordow and other nuclear production sites in Iran, the U.S. reassured Israel that sanctions would not be lifted until Iran’s nuclear capability was dismantled.
CISADA proves even more effective than anyone had thought and Iran was quickly in dire economic difficulty.
In November of 2013, the five permanent members of the Security Council, P5 +1 (Germany), agreed on a Joint Plan of Action in dealing with Iran.
Senate hawks, mostly Republican and Democratic, and Obama Democratic doves, had very different goals in the ensuing negotiation; the first wanted to use Iran’s weakened position to force Iran’s hands into the fire to accept the need to dismantle its facilities, while the Democratic doves were willing simply to accept a lower degree of enrichment, leaving Iran with its core production facilities intact, in an effort to keep Iran’s breakout time at over a year instead of the three months that many believe Iran had achieved.

Tomorrow: The Joint Plan of Action: Terms and Results

Howard Adelman

Politics, philosophy, film, and other things…

Monthly Archives: February 2015

Consequences of an Iranian Nuclear Deal on U.S.-Israel Relations

I’m in Mourning

IAEA 19 February Report on Iranian Compliance

Sanctions and Relief Implementation

The First Six Months of Compliance with the JPA

Monitoring and Verifying the JPA in a Duplicitous Environment

The Joint Plan of Action: P5+1 and Iran

Mark Greif and The Partisan Review

The Build-Up to the Washington-Tehran Nuclear Negotiations