The Art of Undoing the Iran Deal: Lee Smith, Weekly Standard, Nov. 21, 2016 — The election of Donald Trump signals bad news for the Iran nuclear deal, Barack Obama’s signature foreign policy initiative.
Yes, Trump’s Going to Dump the Iran Deal: Fred Fleitz, National Review, Nov. 14, 2016 — In the days following Donald Trump’s victory, a variety of experts — mostly Trump critics — pronounced that, despite Trump’s frequent statements during the presidential campaign that the July 2015 nuclear deal with Iran is one of “the worst deals ever made by any country in history,”…
How Iran’s Pet Terrorists Won Lebanon: Benny Avni, New York Post, Nov. 1, 2016 — ‘You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” sang Bob Dylan. And this week, the winds of change in the Middle East kept blowing Iran’s way.
The Synergies of Palestinian Statehood and Iranian Nuclear Weapons: Joseph Berger, New York Times, Nov. 9, 2016— To maximize security benefits of their planned analyses and assessments, Israeli strategists must consider the presumptively separate threats of Palestinian statehood and Iranian nuclearization as two intersecting and interactive perils.
Repairing the Iran Nuclear Deal’s Damage: Ephraim Asculai & Emily B. Landau, Times of Israel, Nov. 15, 2016
Incoming CIA Director Has Reputation for Confronting Iran: Adam Kredo, Washington Free Beacon, Nov. 18, 2016
In Trump Era, Israel Sees Opportunity to Shift Iran Approach: David Wainer, Bloomberg, Nov .20, 2016
Disarming Iran: A Story of Cybersabotage and Sanctions: Suzanne Maloney, New York Times, Sept. 28, 2016
THE ART OF UNDOING THE IRAN DEAL
Lee Smith
Weekly Standard, Nov. 21, 2016
The election of Donald Trump signals bad news for the Iran nuclear deal, Barack Obama’s signature foreign policy initiative. Calling it "the worst deal ever negotiated," the author of The Art of the Deal has threatened to tear up the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on day one of his presidency.
Supporters of the agreement and Obama allies warn that shredding the deal will only benefit Iranian hardliners, the very people it was supposed to restrain. "The big winner in the aftermath of a Trump victory is Iran's Supreme Leader," Suzanne Maloney, an Iran expert at the Brookings Institution, told Reuters. Ali Khamenei, she explained, "will be able to walk away from Iran's obligations under the JCPOA while pinning the responsibility on Washington."
Well, it's true that the nuclear agreement is in big trouble, but Trump's election has little to do with it. Indeed, the agreement would likely have collapsed under a Hillary Clinton administration as well. The problem, as the commander in chief-elect correctly noted, is the deal itself. And that's why the Obama administration has gone to extraordinary lengths to protect its "achievement"—by bribing Iran, drumming up business for the clerical regime, blocking Congress from imposing non-nuclear sanctions, and turning a blind eye to Iranian violations of the deal.
Last week, Iran was again in violation of the JCPOA. According to a report from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Iran exceeded the deal's threshold for heavy water, a material used in the production of weapons-grade plutonium. The White House acknowledged Iran had exceeded the limit and then, bizarrely, praised the regime for its forthrightness in "making no attempt to hide" the violation. In other words, the Obama administration is not just protecting the nuclear agreement, but also rationalizing the Iranian regime's violations of it. All that needs to happen for the deal to fall apart is for the Trump White House to do what the Obama administration has refused to do—enforce its provisions.
The history of the agreement shows a series of deceptions by the Obama administration. Just to keep the Iranians at the negotiating table, the White House bribed Tehran. Every month from January 2014 through July 2015, when the JCPOA was signed, the administration facilitated the transfer of $700 million to Iran from its frozen escrow account in the United States. Since the deal was signed, the administration has given Iran more money to persuade it not to walk away. Among other sums, the White House paid Iran $8.6 million for 32 tons of heavy water after it was found to have exceeded the threshold stipulated in the agreement last February. The purpose was to protect the deal—even as it gave Iran an incentive to keep overproducing heavy water as a revenue earner.
Most spectacularly, the administration paid Iran $1.7 billion in ransom for four Americans illegally detained by the clerical regime. Iran is holding at least two more American citizens hostage and reportedly demanding money in exchange for their release, a deal the current administration will almost surely make in order to keep Iran from trashing Obama's prize foreign policy win. If the Trump White House simply stops bribing Iran, the regime will walk away from the deal.
To justify inking the agreement with Tehran, the Obama administration contended that the sanctions regime was about to collapse. We couldn't keep our European and Asian allies on board much longer, claimed White House officials. Iran was such a promising market and everyone around the world was in such a hurry to get back in that we had to get a deal signed before sanctions started to backfire.
As it turns out, European and Asian banks and corporations have proven very reluctant to do business with Iran. Why? Because unlike the Obama administration, private industry stakes its own money, not that of the American taxpayer. Global financial institutions and companies were concerned that a post-Obama White House might reimpose sanctions, thereby putting their investments at risk. More important, CEOs realized that dealing with a state sponsor of terror developing a nuclear weapon and at war throughout the Middle East was a risky investment, regardless of who sits in the Oval Office.
Hence the Iranians are unhappy, because they're not seeing all the money the White House promised would come to them from Asian and European investment. That's why a large part of Secretary of State John Kerry's brief in the last year has been to travel the world to drum up business for Iran. If the Trump administration doesn't act like Iran's investment banker, the regime will walk away from the deal.
The Obama administration told Congress that the deal did not eliminate non-nuclear sanctions, like those related to terrorism, ballistic missiles, and human rights. After it was signed, however, and Iran was emboldened throughout the Middle East, the White House blocked congressional efforts to enforce existing non-nuclear sanctions and impose new ones. If the Trump administration doesn't block Congress from reinstating and imposing sanctions, as member have wanted to do over the last year, the regime will crash the deal.
The same holds for overlooking Iranian violations of the JCPOA. Last week's transgression was a repeat of the regime's February violation of the heavy-water threshold. When the White House coughed up cash for the 32 tons, it legitimized a state sponsor of terror as a nuclear supplier. If the Trump administration merely stops overlooking Iranian violations of the JCPOA, the regime will very likely opt out of Obama's chief foreign policy achievement.
The Obama administration was able to sustain its agreement with Iran only because it repeatedly deceived Congress, the American public, and the press about the deal—it bribed Iran, lied about the imminent failure of the sanctions regime, lied about imposing non-nuclear sanctions, and defended Iran's violations. In the next two months, the Obama administration can be expected to try to protect the JCPOA, perhaps by trying to put Iran beyond the reach of U.S. economic pressure. Still, all the next White House has to do is enforce the strict terms of the agreement, and it is the Iranians themselves, not President Trump, who will undo the deal.
At that point, the next White House will have an important decision to reach, one made even more urgent by the mendacious tactics of its predecessor. What happens if the master of the art of the deal can't get Iran back to the table for an agreement that better suits American interests? What if the regime pushes ahead with its nuclear weapons program? Estimates suggest the Iranians are about a year from a nuclear breakout. Will the next White House take action to stop it or will it, too, push a phony agreement and put American citizens, allies, and interests at risk?
YES, TRUMP’S GOING TO DUMP THE IRAN DEAL
Fred Fleitz
National Review, Nov. 14, 2016
In the days following Donald Trump’s victory, a variety of experts — mostly Trump critics — pronounced that, despite Trump’s frequent statements during the presidential campaign that the July 2015 nuclear deal with Iran is one of “the worst deals ever made by any country in history,” he has no choice but to stick with the agreement after he assumes office. Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif was one of the first to insist as much, claiming a Trump administration cannot back out of the nuclear deal because it is not a bilateral agreement between the United States and Iran but “an international understanding annexed to a Security Council resolution.”
Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council (which The Weekly Standard’s Lee Smith once described as “the tip of the spear of the Iran lobby” in the United States) echoed Zarif’s statement. In a November 11 Foreign Policy article, he argued Trump can undermine the Iran deal but cannot directly dismantle it because the JCPOA is a multilateral agreement “codified by the UN Security Council.” Any attempt by a Trump administration to renegotiate the deal would violate international law and isolate the United States, Parsi said.
Even some conservative experts have suggested Trump probably won’t try to significantly modify or discard the nuclear agreement, but will instead try to goad Iran into withdrawing by strictly enforcing the deal. But Trump senior national-security adviser Walid Phares poured cold water on speculation that Trump plans to walk back his statements about the Iran deal, when he commented on Facebook over the weekend that the “Iran Deal will be dismantled.”
This firm statement by Phares confirmed previous statements he and Mr. Trump have made that the deal is a dangerous agreement that needs to be either significantly renegotiated or abandoned. As an expert who has followed the Iran nuclear program for many years inside and outside of government, I would like to expand on their statements by offering three key points about the nature of the deal and ten guidelines for renegotiating it.
1. The Iran deal is a dangerous fraud. Donald Trump was exactly right when he called the Iran deal a “horrible” and “disastrous” agreement. The U.S. agreed to huge concessions to get this agreement, from no restrictions on Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism to no inspections of military facilities. There were secret side deals withheld from Congress that permitted Iran to inspect itself for past nuclear-weapons work and receive secret planeloads of cash in exchange for freeing U.S. hostages. To get the $150 billion in sanctions relief Iran wanted, there was another secret side deal — also withheld from the U.S. Congress — which granted Tehran exemptions for failing to meet some of the agreement’s key requirements.
So what did the United States get for these concessions? Not much. The Obama administration claims the deal keeps Iran a year away from a nuclear deal for ten to 15 years. But in fact, the time to an Iranian nuclear bomb will drop dramatically under the deal, since Iran will be able to enrich uranium, develop advanced centrifuges, and, with Chinese assistance, finish construction of a heavy-water nuclear reactor that will produce one-quarter of a weapon’s worth of plutonium per year.
It will be very hard to verify the agreement since military sites — where Iran is likely to conduct covert nuclear-weapons work — are off limits to inspectors. The deal dumbed down the IAEA’s quarterly Iran reports, making it difficult for the world to know the true extent of Iran’s compliance. Certainly, there already have been reports of significant Iranian cheating. Further, the deal was supposed to improve Iran’s international behavior. Instead, from ballistic-missile tests to increased support to Hezbollah, Bashar al-Assad, and the Houthi rebels in Yemen, Tehran’s behavior in the Middle East has significantly worsened. Just in the last year, Iran has captured and held at gunpoint ten U.S. sailors and fired anti-ship missiles at American and UAE ships. Is this what a new era of cooperation with Iran was supposed to look like?
2. The deal is not legally binding on us. Knowing that a bipartisan majority of Congress opposed the nuclear deal and that the U.S. Senate would never ratify it as a treaty, the Obama administration arranged to go around the Senate by negotiating the deal as an executive agreement endorsed by the U.N. Security Council. Because Security Council resolutions are binding on all U.N. members, it could therefore be argued that the nuclear deal was binding on the United States even though it had not been ratified by the Senate. But that is not how our constitutional order works. American presidents historically have decided which international agreements are to be treated as treaties, but the Iran deal specified that it be ratified by the Iranian parliament.
If President Obama wanted to make a long-term international agreement binding on the United States, he needs consent from Congress. Anything else is a serious affront to the Constitution, and no U.N. endorsement changes that. (This is not the only example of President Obama’s lawless approach to international agreements: The Paris climate-change agreement was deliberately negotiated to make it binding on the United States without Senate ratification and difficult for a future U.S. president to cancel. The same principles apply, however, and I expect President Trump pull out of the climate agreement as soon as possible.)…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
HOW IRAN’S PET TERRORISTS WON LEBANON
Benny Avni
New York Post, Nov. 1, 2016
‘You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” sang Bob Dylan. And this week, the winds of change in the Middle East kept blowing Iran’s way. The latest: Lebanon’s selection Monday of Michel Aoun as president ended a long impasse that left Beirut’s presidential palace vacant for 2 ¹/₂ years. The victory of the 81-year-old former general seals — via its proxy Hezbollah — Iran’s dominance over Lebanon. It’s the latest outcome of 1) President Obama’s attempt to reorder the Middle East through Iran’s empowerment and 2) Russia’s reassertion of power through an alliance with the mullahs.
Meanwhile, Iran’s strongest foe, the Saudis, have bigger fish to fry than Lebanon. They’re involved in Yemen’s civil war (on the opposite side of the Iranians) and also financing Sunni foes of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. So the Saudis all but gave up on Lebanon, which once served as the region’s banker and a major cultural leader. In those days, Gen. Aoun was a fierce enemy of Syria. So much so that he was forced to flee the country for fear of being assassinated by Assad’s father, Hafez. Much to everyone’s surprise, however, he returned home from Paris in 2005, this time as Damascus’ bestie.
In Lebanon, everyone in power has a regional patron — and that patron can change at a moment’s notice. Aoun switched allegiances to Iran, and it paid off. Now he’s president. Assad is elated. He owes much of his survival to Iran, which finances his bloody bid to hold onto power, and Hezbollah, whose Lebanese Shiite troops serve as Assad’s most effective foot soldiers and cannon fodder. Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah chief, meanwhile is beaming like a groom on his wedding day. Some Lebanese, including Nasrallah’s own Shiite supporters, have questioned his decision to go all in for Assad in Syria, but he wasn’t swayed. Now Lebanon is his for the foreseeable future.
As Tony Badran, the astute Lebanon watcher at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, notes, in the past, Hezbollah may have had a say — and even veto power — over the selection of president. But Aoun became “the first president that Hezbollah [chose] directly,” Badran says. Sure enough, while Aoun’s victory speech was peppered with high-minded talk of unity and Lebanese patriotism, he sent clear messages, most notably a promise to support the “resistance.” That’s a reference to Hezbollah’s unchallenged — and illegal — army. As Iran’s ISNA news agency reports, when Iranian President Hassan Rouhani called to congratulate him, Aoun promised him Lebanon “is ready to stand against any threat from terrorist groups or the Zionist Regime.”
Aoun is far from Nasrallah’s only power lever. Hezbollah is the most powerful faction in Parliament, where a Shiite is guaranteed the speaker’s role (long held by Nabih Berry). It has much sway over the Lebanese Armed Forces, the country’s legitimate army. And now, with a hand-picked president who’s also a former general with strong ties to the military, the Iran-backed terrorist powerhouse all but controls that national army. Next for Lebanon is the selection of a national cabinet. Sunni politician Saad Hariri reportedly made a deal to support Aoun in return for Hariri becoming prime minister. But Hariri will be hamstrung in office by Hezbollah, which will continue to control the cabinet.
Lebanon, in other words, is now the fiefdom of Nasrallah and, by proxy, Iran. And it’s but a symptom of the Mideast’s maladies. Lebanon won’t escape from Iran’s spell by itself. Too few Lebanese have the will or power to push back on Nasrallah. A reversal of Iran’s fortunes, if any, will come in Syria, Yemen, Iraq or elsewhere in the “Shiite Crescent” that now spreads from south Asia to the Mediterranean…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
THE SYNERGIES OF PALESTINIAN STATEHOOD
Louis Rene Beres
Israel Defense, Nov. 14, 2016
To maximize security benefits of their planned analyses and assessments, Israeli strategists must consider the presumptively separate threats of Palestinian statehood and Iranian nuclearization as two intersecting and interactive perils. “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” (Archilochus, Ancient Greek Poet, Fragments) Always, Israeli strategists treat Palestinian statehood and Iranian nuclearization as altogether separate perils. This is a potentially grave mistake, however, as the two evident threats are actually intersecting or even “force multiplying” in their calculable security implications. A nuclear Iran, however unwitting, could enlarge the regional stability costs to Israel of any Palestinian state. Reciprocally, at least in the plausible future, a Palestinian state could expand certain risks to Israel of an opportunistic nuclear attack from Iran.
We can even be more precise here. The relationship between these two seemingly discrete threats is apt to be expressly synergistic. In essence, therefore, the “whole” of its injurious effect upon Israel could sometimes prove greater than the simple sum of its constituent parts. Since 2012, the Palestinian Authority has been recognized by the UN as a “Non-member Observer State.” Looking ahead, if the Palestinian Authority and Hamas should sometime be able to restore a functional level of cooperation and unity, a fully-sovereign Palestine could emerge. In notably short order, this twenty-third Arab state could rapidly become an optimal platform for expanded war and terrorism against Israel, and also against assorted area allies of the United States.
Always, it follows, Israel and the United States must remain keenly aware of pertinent “force multipliers.” Among expected regional consequences, distinctly virulent synergies between Iranian nuclearization and Palestinian statehood could create an authentically existential threat to the Jewish State. Oddly, perhaps, these potentially lethal and multiplying interactive effects remain unhidden, yet are still largely unrecognized. In their response, Jerusalem and Washington must more systematically consider vital issues of geostrategic context. In the chaotic Middle East, certain core adversarial patterns remain unchanged. Most conspicuously, Israel still endures undiminished international pressures to (1) renounce its “ambiguous” nuclear forces, and (2) join in periodically resuscitated plans for a “Nuclear Weapon Free-Zone.”
If Iran and its allies should ever come to believe that Israel had been sufficiently weakened by coordinated “nonproliferation” demands, a previously worked-out strategy of annihilation against Israel could proceed. This lethal strategy could expectedly advance in stages, from terror to mega-terror, and then, in successively added increments, from mega-terror to war and mega-war. For many reasons, nuclear weapons are still generally regarded across the world as destabilizing. Nonetheless, in the specific case of Israel, the recognizable possession of such weapons could sometimes become all that actually protects civilian populations from various catastrophic aggressions. Maintaining successful nuclear deterrence – whether still ambiguous or newly disclosed – will thus ultimately prove indispensable to Israel’s physical survival.
In its authoritative Advisory Opinion of July 8, 1996, the International Court of Justice at The Hague ruled: “The Court cannot conclude definitively whether the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be lawful or unlawful in an extreme circumstance of self-defense…” “Where the very survival of a State would be at stake…” continued the ICJ, even the actual use of nuclear weapons could at times be permissible. Core distinctions must be made. Israel is not Iran. Israel makes no threats of aggressive war or genocide. For the moment, at least, it does not publicly acknowledge its plausibly advanced nuclear capabilities…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
Repairing the Iran Nuclear Deal’s Damage: Ephraim Asculai & Emily B. Landau, Times of Israel, Nov. 15, 2016 —The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) between the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany (P5+1) and Iran remains a controversial and potentially dangerous deal.
Incoming CIA Director Has Reputation for Confronting Iran: Adam Kredo, Washington Free Beacon, Nov. 18, 2016 —President-elect Donald Trump’s selection of Rep. Mike Pompeo (R., Kan.) to serve as the next CIA director is garnering early praise from senior congressional insiders and foreign policy experts, who told the Washington Free Beacon on Friday that the lawmaker has won plaudits for taking a tough line on Iranian intransigence and investigating the Obama administration’s secret negotiations with Tehran.
In Trump Era, Israel Sees Opportunity to Shift Iran Approach: David Wainer, Bloomberg, Nov .20, 2016 —Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is working to win from Donald Trump what he failed to wring from Barack Obama: a harder line against Iran.
Disarming Iran: A Story of Cybersabotage and Sanctions: Suzanne Maloney, New York Times, Sept. 28, 2016—Three years ago, after a decade of failed talks and costly international sanctions, the effort to prevent Iran from expanding its nuclear program finally took the form of a diplomatic process. The resulting July 2015 comprehensive nuclear accord had the effect of shaking up a Middle East that was already in turmoil and shifting the tectonic plates of the troubled relationship between Iran and the United States.
