Iran’s Closed Covenants Congress Should Insist on Public Disclosure of Secret Nuclear Side Deals.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/irans-closed-covenants-1438386706
The Obama Administration insists there’s nothing secret about the Iran nuclear deal, even as it claims not to have read two crucial side deals Tehran has struck with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). “Confidential agreements, but no secrets” is the way top U.S. negotiator Wendy Sherman describes the deals, which are thought to concern the military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear programs.
Try parsing that distinction. And while you’re at it, consider that there might be additional separate agreements we haven’t heard about. We raise the possibility after speaking with Rep. Mike Pompeo, the Kansas Republican who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, and who more-or-less stumbled on the two side deals when the deputy director of the IAEA disclosed their existence to him and Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) in a meeting in Vienna.
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“When you ask [the Administration] if there are other [side deals], you don’t get a yes or no answer,” Mr. Pompeo tells us. The Congressman adds that he and his colleagues have been frustrated by the Administration’s failure to answer their questions even in classified sessions. What does Mr. Pompeo know about the two side deals the Administration does acknowledge? “Nearly nothing,” he says, “and we’ve been briefed four times.”
The Administration claims this is no big deal because Iran and the IAEA are entitled to reach a non-disclosed understanding to resolve their differences. “This is pretty standard,” says Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz.
Now there’s an epic dodge. If the U.S. isn’t privy to Iran’s dealings with the IAEA, it’s because Secretary of State John Kerry and other negotiators conceded the point to Iran at the 11th hour. He might have done so figuring that punting to the IAEA gave him the chance to seal the deal without having to know exactly what’s in it. To adapt Nancy Pelosi’s phrase, if you pass the deal you still won’t know what’s in it. So much for President Obama’s assurances that the deal isn’t based on trust but on “unprecedented verification.”
All of this is vital because Iran hasn’t answered the IAEA’s questions regarding the so-called Possible Military Dimensions of its nuclear program. The IAEA has also been seeking access to Iran’s military site at Parchin, which inspectors haven’t visited for a decade and where Iran is suspected of carrying out experiments and tests on weaponizing a nuclear device.
But unless the world can have a clear understanding of what Iran is already capable of doing, there’s no way to know how long it would take the regime to build a bomb if it decides to do so. This also undermines Mr. Obama’s central claim that the deal puts Iran at least one year away from a bomb if it walks away from the agreement.
There’s also the question of the reliability of the IAEA. Though the agency has been admirably non-political under current Director General Yukiya Amano, that was not the case during the 12-year tenure of predecessor Mohamed ElBaradei, who regularly sounded off on political questions and often acted like Tehran’s lawyer.
Mr. Pompeo adds that the agency has no mechanism for enforcing the agreements it signs with Iran: “Is there an independent penalty for violations of the side deals?” Iran’s deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has already said it won’t allow U.S. or Canadian inspectors to be part of any verification team, and that the IAEA will not be allowed to see “sensitive and military documents,” according to an Associated Press report. Other than that, we guess, the access is unprecedented.
Beyond these details is a larger question about the conduct of American foreign policy. U.S. diplomats are often involved in secret diplomacy, but we can think of no instance in U.S. history where the results of so consequential an agreement were closed to public inspection. No U.S. secrets are at stake, yet the Administration insists on briefing Congress on the Iran-IAEA deal only in closed session.
It’s nearly a century since Woodrow Wilson insisted, as the first of his Fourteen Points, on “open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in public view.” That standard has served Americans well as they debated the merits of complex and controversial treaties, whether over the Panama Canal, relations with Taiwan, or arms control with the Soviet Union.
That’s the standard President Obama appears to have abandoned. He has already evaded the constitutional obligation to submit consequential foreign commitments as treaties requiring ratification by two-thirds of the Senate. He will deem his Iran deal to be U.S. policy if merely one-third of either house of Congress doesn’t object. There’s no excuse to compound that evasion with side deals that Americans aren’t allowed to see.
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