A Deal But No Bargain

Assuming the science holds up and the restrictions placed on Iran seem sufficient, if we rush past the existential question of “Can a nuclear agreement ever work when a terror state would like to have arsenal of them?”  The agreement may not be so bad in how it restricts Iran but there are some terrible flaws that need to be compensated for. When President Obama first ran for office he poorly expressed a willingness to talk to Iran without preconditions and I thought that’s right, you talk to your enemies but Hillary Clinton chided Barack Obama as being naive and she was also correct but nearly all people running for president are naïve on foreign policy. George H. Bush was the last president who was prepared to wade in international waters, everyone since has had to learn to swim on the job. So here we are today and with a nuclear agreement during the second half of the Presidents second term, so how did we make out?

The President in defense of the agreement is demanding alternatives from his critics, stressing sanctions would fall apart if we back out now but whose fault is that? The sanctions were not in terrible danger before the negotiations and the most stinging parts of them come from the US. Did we get a better deal than sanctions? Sort of, we could have bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities, we even have bombs that could penetrate the most dug in facilities and that may be better than this deal except that it is possible that Iran will now join the world community as a more responsible country, perhaps as an ally against ISIS, which us what the administration appears to have prostrated itself for. Yet I find it hard to believe the world’s foremost exporter of terror is going to suddenly change without a revolution and Ayatollah Khamenei has said as much but one would expect him to appeal to hardliners and yet there is no reason not to take him at his word. If we accept the idea that Iran was about to go nuclear, this agreement is better than a nuclear Iran tomorrow but there is a big difference between exploding a nuclear device in a controlled environment and having one you can put into a Shahab missile. The miniaturization required could take some time, perhaps ten years. So let’s assume Iran needs some years to shoe horn fat man or even little boy into a Korean designed missile, how does Iran want to spend those years? It may want a treasure bath with the freedom to export terror without sanctions to impede and that is what they got and the US may have gained far less than we think we have. There may not even be a significant delay in acquiring nuclear missiles and now Iran has eliminated the purpose of those missiles which is the impediments to the projection of force into the Middle East.  The whole point of developing a nuclear weapon for them was never defensive, they’ve never known a predator that could invade and take over, not on their worst day and we know this as a fact because Iraq did invade on their worst day after the revolution and Iraq failed.

There are two significant draw backs to the agreement, one is that Sanctions are destroyed during the agreement as the EU, US and UN cannot pass resolutions against Iran that affect commerce and all existing resolutions will be phased out. Even US states cannot impose restrictions on Iran. Since many resolutions were passed to prevent Iran from exporting terror, this is a body blow against the Middle East which suffers significantly from Iranian terrorism.  The other failure is the often mentioned 24 days to inspect provision, it’s true that inspections for non-listed facilities can be held up for up to 24 days.  One can’t do much in 24 days except remove the evidence but considering a facility may be hidden for year, maybe several years and then Iran gets 24 days to clear the place out the 24 day delay means it is impossible to prevent Iran from cheating on the agreement and in fact the 24 day loophole is really a path on how to cheat acceptably. A delay of access for more than a week would essentially mean Iran is in breach and we would have to use the remaining time to shore up support for “snap back” sanctions. So a 24 day loophole may seem reasonable but a few bouts getting access on the 24^th day and our allies will get tired of the Chicken Little routine. The truth is “sanctions” will never return without an actual termination of the agreement and even this a full return is doubtful. Russia, China and India will not agree to imposing sanctions again and perhaps the EU won’t agree as well.

The Iran we had before this agreement was brittle, strained, corrupt and deeply unpopular and ripe for collapse, the one we have now may wind up being a nuclear tipped adversary that is living large and causing misery in the Middle East. Despite that, the Kurds of Iran are ready to break away which would create a nice buffer zone between Iran and much of the Middle East.  In ten years a lot could change, there could be a new Ayatollah, this new Ayatollah might be a cross between Gandhi and Pope Francis and Iran decides to head down a path of peace and reform. The gamble is this agreement might make that path easier to take if we just engage the dragon in a dialog but Iran sees itself as a the protector of the Shia and the Shia being the natural leaders of a Pan-Islamic movement and as such not much will change without the regime changing.   Frankly, the Shia have real grievances with no other apparatus but Iran to represent them since Gulf States view the Shia only as a threat and Iraq has neither the polity, the will or the credibility to step outside of Iran’s shadow.

So we have an agreement that will seemingly delay Iran having a nuclear bomb but they can still develop missiles to deliver a bomb with, and they can export any weapons system the want and we can’t sanction them as they try to be the hegemon in the Middle East. As the biggest exporter of terror, the US and its allies are directly threatened by Iran. While the treaty means we don’t have to bomb nukes out of mountains, it may mean the US and Iran will come to blows in Iraq and elsewhere. People mention Iran could be an ally against ISIS but the Kurds are a better ally and we get a better middle east if they are ascendant than if Iran is -- although PKK do need to renounce terror once and for all.  The President may have committed the next president to military action in the Middle East.  Essentially by taking Nuclear weapons and the US ability to use economics against Iran we have limited ourselves to reacting to terror and they may be events over the next ten year by Iran that the US cannot ignore. We can’t sign the agreement and forget about it like we did with North Korea, we will need a full blown containment strategy against Iran which means either getting frisky with Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Shia militias or supporting those who do it for us. If we can’t Iran out of exporting terror, they will have to be rolled back into their borders because now we can’t afford to have places like Lebanon, Gaza and Yemen to places to be hosting a nuclear bombs or even conventional missiles.

Congress needs to extract a lot to agree to the “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action”, we need a containment strategy focused on Iran, we need to protect our allies from Iran and we will need to diplomatically support the military and security decisions of our allies at least until Iran’s proxy forces are no more.  If we don’t we will find terror on our doorstep, it will be because our allies succeed against both Iran and ISIS. How well and successfully we deal with Iran going forward both diplomatically and militarily will decide if this was a good deal after all but make no mistake we have traded our disincentive for Iran not kill innocent civilians with conventional weapons for not developing nuclear weapons for the next ten years. World peace is going to depend on how we make up for that shortfall and Barack Obama has ironically left the US in a position where it may have to commit US forces to fight Iran or its proxies directly making the cost us and the region much higher than sanctions or even the cost of cleaning up a collapsed Iran.