RUTHFULLY YOURS

It was a week for nuclear options for the Obama administration. In Washington, U.S. President Barack Obama lobbied Democratic senators to support the so-called “nuclear option,” to kill the ability of the minority party in the Senate (the Republicans) to filibuster and block appointments made by the president for certain high-level administration jobs and lifetime federal court appointments. 

Of course, the president and Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had argued against exactly such a nuclear option by the Republicans when they were both senators in the minority eight years earlier, and wanted to preserve their ability to block appointments by then President George W. Bush.

Obama has been at war with Republicans since he took office. His rhetoric attacking the opposition party has been one of the constants of his five years in office. He has never sought their counsel for any important legislation, whether the stimulus package or the healthcare reform bill (“Obamacare”) or the new banking and financial regulations (Dodd-Frank). Obama wanted to defeat Republicans, not negotiate with them.

And then there is the other nuclear option in Geneva this week, when the Obama administration, as represented by Secretary of State John Kerry, chose to sign a very bad deal with Iran, to ensure that there was a deal that almost certainly puts the Islamic republic on a path to a nuclear weapon. The deal also commits the United States to a course that will make it much more difficult for Israel to stop Iran’s nuclear effort in the six-month period of the “interim agreement,” and also makes it much harder for opponents of the deal in the U.S. Congress to step up sanctions and force a better deal.

It is obvious that the Obama administration never had any real interest in using any of the tools at its disposal to slow Iran down in its effort to join the nuclear weapons club. In 2009, the administration took a pass when millions of Iranians took to the streets to protest the stolen elections in that country. The Obama team argued that taking sides, as it did in Egypt and other countries (which facilitated regime change in those countries) would have destroyed the diplomatic outreach then underway, a fruitless effort of course, but one it did not want to harm (or more likely admit had failed). Maintaining the mullahs’ hold on Iran, or getting the mullahs to become better behaved (as all good nations should), has always seemed to be a bigger interest of this administration than assuring that Iran does not get the bomb. So much for regime change as an option.

There has always been the afterthought, added to all discussions about U.S. policy to prevent Iran from going nuclear, that “all options remained on the table. No one has seriously believed this. At a time when the U.S. is in full flight retreat around the world — withdrawing from Iraq, pulling almost all forces out of Afghanistan, ignoring our own red lines in Syria and allowing the wholesale slaughter of innocents to continue year after year, and failing to protect our State Department personnel in Libya, the likelihood that the U.S. would use whatever is left of its degraded and underfinanced military power to strike Iran, was an empty threat. It is a 100 percent certainty now that no such action will be forthcoming whatever Iran’s behavior during the remainder of the president’s term.

Then there is the new deal (or sellout). What has the West gained with this interim agreement? Not much, it turns out. In the five years of the Obama administration, Iran has increased its centrifuges by almost 1,000 percent, and may now have enough nuclear material for several bombs. Various estimates of the time for Iran to “break out ” to weapons grade capability at this point are a month to a few months. 

The deal signed in Geneva deals only with facilities and sites that are known to the U.S. and Western nations, and not those that Iran has hidden from view, much as the current sites were once hidden from view. The Iranians can take the stocks of 20% enriched uranium and turn it into an oxide or degrade it to the 5% level, and that will add a week to a few weeks to the time it will take them to make such material weapons grade when they choose the date for the breakout. Centrifuges that we do not know about may continue to enrich to the 20% level (or higher) as the president and his dupes, like New York Times columnistTom Friedman, talk about a strategic restructuring in the Middle East and a new Iran on the world stage.

Skeptics of the deal do not trust Iran or accept the transparency it is selling with new inspections regimes. For anyone who has watched the behavior of the Iranians since the Khomeini revolution in 1979, trusting Iran to live by the terms of the deal is a laughable notion at this point. It takes a Kerry, an Obama, or a Catherine Ashton to believe it. And they believe it, because they want to believe it. As Eli Lake has argued, the P5+1 has now accepted the right of Iran to enrich uranium, and to continue to do so during the six months of the interim agreement, despite its violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and its defiance of a series of U.N. resolutions prohibiting them from doing so. Iran says it has the right to do so and we will no longer challenge them, but will rely instead on lawyerly like wording finesses to claim we have not changed the rules of the game.

Then there are sanctions. The truth of the matter is that the Obama administration has attempted to block each and every attempt by Congress to pass new sanctions, and then lobbied hard with its Democratic allies to water down new sanctions and allow for presidential waivers to override sanctions that are passed (exactly what the administration will choose to do after signing the current agreement, and allowing somewhere between $10 billion and $20 billion, now blocked from the regime, to begin to flow to the Iranian economy). Most importantly, the momentum of sanctions has been broken. Nations and companies will begin to set up new deals in anticipation of a further sanctions relaxation ahead. And what promises will the Kerry/Ashton team get in exchange for the next set of sanctions relief?

Iran will not send any of its enriched uranium out of the country. It will not destroy any centrifuges, and in fact will continue to build more, though supposedly none of them will be brought online during the six-month period (at least at the sites we know about). If the next set of negotiations falters, Iran will have the nuclear fuel it needs for a bomb or bombs in the country, tens of thousands of centrifuges to continue and expand the program, and a heavy-water reactor in Arak not far from completion for plutonium production. John Bolton has pointed out that there is nothing whatever in the agreement that limits Iran’s ability to work on all parts of a weaponization program other than enrichment — centrifuge manufacturing and testing; weaponization research and fabrication; and ballistic missile development.

One country, however, most certainly has drawn the short end of the stick from this pathetically unbalanced deal. That country, of course, is Israel. The Obama administration made it very clear a little over a year ago that Israel should not even think about conducting a military operation against Iran before the presidential election in November 2012. Such a military action might have drawn the U.S. into the conflict, disrupted the narrative of Obama the peacemaker (and bin Laden killer), and endangered the president’s re-election campaign. There are many important events on the world stage, but in the president’s mind, the fate of the world depended above all on his having four more years to work his magic at home and abroad.

Now, with a six-month interim deal signed, the pressure on Israel not to act will come not only from Obama but all of the signatories to the deal. Israel is truly on its own now with regard to stopping the Iranians from changing the power equation in the region and becoming a truly existential threat to Israel. The Israeli unhappiness extends of course to Iran’s Sunni enemies — Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, and probably Egypt and Turkey as well. Nuclear proliferation in the region is now a near certainty — whether from new development of nuclear programs or purchased nuclear programs (think Pakistan).

If Israel chooses to act, and does so with a quiet assist from some of its Arab neighbors who share its concerns, the Obama administration is almost certain to sit it out rather than join in the effort, and U.S. pressure on the Palestinian track, in retaliation for Israel’s “bad behavior,” will greatly increase.

Israel has always had lots of friends on Capitol Hill. The next few weeks will reveal how deep these friendships are. The friends are always out there in force for easy votes, like foreign aid, or to cheer Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he speaks to a joint session of Congress. Most members from both parties in both the House and Senate have been strongly supportive of sanctions directed at Iran, though several Democrats acceded to administration pressure to slow walk sanctions bills in the past few years. What are the chances that a fierce partisan like Reid will choose to align himself with Republicans and pass new tough sanctions now that this deal has been signed, putting him in opposition to the president of his own party and to Kerry, a former Senate ally? 

One possibility is that Reid will allow the new sanctions to pass, and then have the bill vetoed by Obama. If that happens, an educated guess is that in either the House or the Senate (more likely the Senate), the necessary two-thirds vote to override a presidential veto will fall a few votes short. Reid and Nancy Pelosi will have their Democrats on record on the first vote, and in some cases on the override vote, in order to preserve good relations with the pro-Israel community. But Obama will win and the new sanctions will be killed.

There are now a series of reports from journalists in several countries, according to which, even before the supposedly new moderate Iranian leadership of Hassan Rouhani was elected, Obama sent State Department officials to hold secret negotiations with Iran. This set up the current round of talks that proceeded so quickly to fruition. Israel, of course, was not informed. 

America seems to have chosen a new ally in the region and the two nations, the U.S. and Iran, now seem to be on the same page on the issues that matter. The president has also made it pretty clear which country no longer really matters as his rush to a deal with Iran has greatly increased the risks for Israel, America’s traditional ally. The president was negotiating behind Israel’s back. It was never a back that he “had.”