For years, American politicians from all parties have talked about a “threat” from Iran’s uranium-enrichment program. So now that Iran has reached a provisional agreement with the permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany to keep it at non-threatening levels, who’s not happy?
To Iran, the deal will mean a (conditional) end to the international sanctions imposed in 2006. This will greatly improve the lives of ordinary people. Instead of chanting “Death to America,” some danced in the streets of Tehran and posed for “selfies” (self-portraits) with the TV image of Barack Obama.
Iranians posed for selfies with the TV image of Barack Obama
The US president stressed that “Iran has agreed to the most robust and intrusive inspections and transparency regime ever negotiated for any nuclear program in history.” Iran will reduce the number of centrifuges to about one third the number it has now. It will revert to its first-generation technology. It will not enrich uranium beyond 3.67 percent for at least 15 years, and for that time, it will reduce its stockpile of low-enriched uranium by 97 percent. If Iran is even suspected of violating the deal, sanctions will automatically come back into place.
“This is well beyond what many of us thought possible even 18 months ago,” said British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond, who called the framework “a good basis for what I believe could be a very good deal”. The final agreement is planned for June 30.
Whether Iran wants or ever wanted a nuclear weapon, and whether it will now cooperate after some questionable behavior in recent years, is something only Iran’s leaders know. The agreed-upon mechanisms will, however, make it much, much harder for Iran to secretly build a bomb if it wants to.
For Obama, this is a big step towards legitimizing his receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009.
“Gobbling up the nations”
But while Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have been aiming for this breakthrough, their Republican opponents have been doing everything in their power to try to sabotage it.
John Boehner, majority leader in the House of Representatives, invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to make the case to Congress last month that there should be no such deal. This was controversial for several reasons, first among them the rule in the constitution that the executive branch, not Congress, is responsible for foreign policy. Boehner made the arrangements on his own, consulting neither the White House nor the State Department as he ought to have.
John Boehner wants to have his own foreign policy
In his speech, Netanyahu equated Iran with Nazi Germany and, exploiting a well-known mistranslation, insisted that Iran had similar goals in mind with regard to the Jewish people. He conflated Iran with various terrorist groups that Iran supports, but which do not act in its name. “Iran is busy gobbling up the nations!” he said. “We must all stand together to stop Iran’s march of conquest, subjugation and terror.”
Perhaps he really meant the Islamic State, not the Islamic Republic, which has not been territorially aggressive at all. But the rhetoric, however false, earned Netanyahu more than 20 standing ovations from Congress as well as re-election two weeks later in what was expected to have been a very close race.
In Netanyahu’s logic, it follows that if Iran is Nazi Germany, then Kerry is Neville Chamberlain and the mistakes of the past dare not be repeated.
For at least 23 years, Netanyahu has been giving similar speeches, alleging that Iran was very close to having a nuclear weapon. But less than a month after he made this claim to the UN in September 2012, Israel’s own intelligence agency, Mossad, concluded that Iran was “not performing the activity necessary to produce weapons”.
“Unprecedented in diplomatic history”
This hasn’t stopped Republicans from parroting lines from Netanyahu’s most recent speech or from acting on Netanyahu’s behalf. Some compared the Israeli leader to Winston Churchill.
On March 15, Tom Cotton, a newly elected senator from Arkansas, got 47 of the 54 Senate Republicans to sign a letter in which he told the leaders of Iran not to listen to Obama.
“It has come to our attention that … you may not fully understand our constitutional system,” the letter began. The Senate must ratify any treaties, it noted (correctly). Therefore, “we will consider any agreement regarding your nuclear-weapons program that is not approved by the Congress as nothing more than an executive agreement between President Obama and Ayatollah Khamenei.” (Read the full text.)
The ratification of such important treaties has, with a few exceptions, always been seen as a formality, and before Obama’s presidency, Congress approved almost every international treaty put before it.
Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, who was educated in the US, wrote back:
“It is very interesting that while negotiations are still in progress and while no agreement has been reached, some political pressure groups are so afraid even of the prospect of an agreement that they resort to unconventional methods, unprecedented in diplomatic history. This indicates that like Netanyahu, who considers peace as an existential threat, some are opposed to any agreement, regardless of its content.”
He added: “The world is not the United States, and the conduct of inter-state relations is governed by international law, and not by US domestic law.” (Read the full text.)
On March 23, the conservative Wall Street Journal reported that Israel had been spying on the negotiations and passing information on to the Republicans in order to generate ammunition against the US diplomatic position.
Since the Iranian revolution in 1979, the US and Iran have hardly talked to each other. If, under George W. Bush, the US had been open to dialogue instead of labeling Iran part of an “axis of evil”, it might have been able to stop Iran at 164 centrifuges, not the 19,000 it has today or the approximately 6,000 the new agreement will limit it to.
Last week, Boehner led a delegation of Republicans to visit Netanyahu in Israel. And while Cotton went on TV this week, saying the US should have threatened Iran with war in order to get an even better deal, the threat of peace appears to be the one that is getting results.
