Commentary from William O. Beeman:
This excellent article points up the danger of letting
ignorant legislators try to micromanage diplomacy. I use the word ignorant in
three senses. First, for the most part they know nothing about the actual
issues at hand in the Iranian nuclear program--neither the history nor the
actual technical details on the ground.
Second, I am convinced that many of the supporters of the bill haven't read it,
or considered its implications. The bill goes far, far beyond dealing with
Iran's nuclear program, including trying to put restrictions on conventional
weapons. Iran's "rocket" program would conceivably be covered by this
agreement--rockets that are currently used to launch communications satellites.
Third, the supporters are ignorant of the implications this bill has for all
American diplomatic efforts going forward. Pre-configuring the outcomes of
diplomatic negotiations effectively renders them moot. Why even have
diplomats if their hands are tied in this way?
The bill is a fantasy desire on the part of Israel and its supporters, such as
Senator Kirk, whose ideological biases are quite evident, to cripple Iran's
general technology. It is overreach, and if it passes, will backfire in really
terrible ways. This is a bad bill in every sense of the word.
William O. Beeman
University of Minnesota
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
15 January 2014
The war bill
Hugh Gusterson
Just when it seemed we might escape
the political tides pushing the United States toward war with Iran, a group of
senators has introduced a bill that would put us back on the path to war. We
might as well call it the “give war a chance” bill.
Until recently there had been a
general consensus in Washington in favor of sanctions against Iran. Although Washington’s
two foreign policy factions—arms controllers and regime changers—diverged in
their ultimate goals, as long as Tehran kept methodically expanding its uranium
enrichment capability (from a few hundred centrifuges in 2005 to 19,000 today and from 5 percent enrichment to 20 percent),
the two sides could often agree on a policy of economic strangulation
against Iran, backed up with the threat of military attack.
That coalition between Washington’s
arms controllers and regime changers was shattered, though, following the 2013
election victory in Tehran of a moderate, President Hassan Rouhani, who is
aggressively pursuing an entente with the West. While the arms controllers, led
by President Barack Obama, are trying to avert a war by reaching an accord with
Iran, the regime changers are doing everything they can to sabotage such an
accord through a Senate bill, the Nuclear
Weapon Free Iran Act of 2013, co-authored by Sen. Robert Menendez, Democrat
of New Jersey, and Sen. Mark Kirk, Republican of Illinois. Of course, being
against arms control and for an increased likelihood of war is like being
against motherhood and apple pie, so the regime changers are pretending to help
the arms control negotiations they seek to undermine.
The geopolitical landscape first
shifted in November 2013 after an extraordinary icebreaking phone call in
September between Presidents Rouhani and Obama. Iranian and Western negotiators
went on to achieve a modest but—given decades of animosity—historic agreement in Geneva. In exchange for an easing of
sanctions worth about $7 billion, the Iranians agreed to cease work on their
reactor at Arak, freeze the building of new centrifuges, cap uranium enrichment
well below bomb-grade at 5 percent, and allow international inspectors greater
access. This agreement was the appetizer for the more substantial deal Western
and Iranian diplomats are now trying to negotiate—one with the potential to
freeze Tehran’s seemingly inexorable progress toward a nuclear weapon
indefinitely, while reintegrating the country into the international system and
permanently realigning the relationship between Iran, its neighbors, and the
United States.
Rolling back Iran’s nuclear program
has thus far been the publicly stated rationale for sanctions. But a faction of
the US foreign policy community, dominated by the neoconservatives who brought
about the disastrous invasion of Iraq, has always had the more ambitious, if
less candidly avowed, objective of ousting the regime that came to power in
Tehran in 1979. In the run-up to the US invasion of Iraq, neoconservatives
liked to quip that “anyone can go to Baghdad. Real men go to
Tehran.” Neocons like William Kristol, Doug Feith, Eliot Cohen, Paul Bremer,
and Danielle Pletka (all of whom have signed a letter to the Senate endorsing the Menendez-Kirk
approach) have never forgiven the Iranian regime for its humiliating seizure of
American hostages at the US embassy in Tehran in 1979. And they believe that
the removal of Iran’s clerical regime would ameliorate the situation in Syria,
Lebanon, and Iraq; cripple Hezbollah; dispose of the main threat to Israel in
the neighborhood; and re-establish American dominance in the region. Of course,
they had similarly utopian dreams for the invasion of Iraq, and look how that
turned out.
In a recent opinion piece for The Washington Post, Senator
Menendez (or is that Senator Mendacious?) presented his legislation as intended
to help negotiations with Iran succeed. “The proposed legislation is a
clarifying action. It allows all sides to negotiate in certainties and provides
one year of space for the parties to continue talking. It spells out precisely
the consequences should the agreement fail. This should motivate Iranians to
negotiate honestly and seriously. At the same time, these prospective sanctions
play a positive and reinforcing role in negotiations.”
Nothing could be further from the
truth. Even by the currently degraded standards of Washington discourse, this
is a pretzel-shaped representation of reality. It is for good reason that
President Obama has promised to veto the Menendez-Kirk legislation if it
passes, and 10 Senate committee chairs have co-signed a letter
to Senate majority leader Harry Reid condemning it.
Edward Levine, a former Senate
staffer, has posted an excellent analysis of the Senate bill’s dangers on the
Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation’s website. He foregrounds four
poison pills that it contains.
First, for sanctions against Iran to
be suspended, the bill requires the President to certify that “Iran has not
conducted any tests for ballistic missiles with a range exceeding 500
kilometers.” As Levine points out, this moves the goalposts on Iran since
missile tests have not been a part of the negotiations thus far. Furthermore,
since the bill specifies no time period during which such missile tests are
disallowed, and Iran has conducted such tests in the past, by some
interpretations the bill will preemptively exclude lifting sanctions.
Second, the bill would allow
sanctions to be lifted only if the US president certified that “Iran has not
directly, or through a proxy, supported, financed, planned, or otherwise carried
out an act of terrorism against the United States or United States persons or
property anywhere in the world.” Again, no time period is specified. As Levine
observes, this means that “if, say, Hezbollah were to explode a bomb outside a
US firm’s office in Beirut, the sanctions would go into effect (because Iran
gives financial and other support to Hezbollah) even if Iran’s nuclear
activities and negotiations were completely in good faith.”
Third, the bill would preauthorize
sanctions, but waive them every year if the US Congress agreed that Iran was
meeting its commitments. From the Iranian point of view, this would weaken any
agreement by introducing the possibility that Congress could allow it to lapse.
Iran could end up dismantling nuclear infrastructure only to find itself
dealing with a new Congress that decided it had not done enough, or one so
paralyzed it could not prevent the trap it had devised from snapping shut.
Finally, Levine points out that the
bill requires the dismantling of Iran’s “enrichment and reprocessing
capabilities and facilities, the heavy water reactor and production plant at
Arak, and any nuclear weapon components and technology.” While it might be
conceivable that this could happen many years in the future at the end of a multi-stage
process, it is unreasonable in the near term to expect Iran to give up the
nuclear infrastructure, permitted by the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty, for which it has paid so dearly, and in which it
sees a hedge against possible security threats.
As former Deputy Assistant Secretary
of Defense Colin Kahl puts it in The National Interest, “given
the significant financial investment—estimated to be at least $100
billion—and political capital the regime has expended to master uranium
enrichment, the supreme leader will not agree to completely dismantle Iran’s
program as many in Congress demand. Indeed, Khamenei probably fears such a
humiliation more than he fears economic collapse or targeted military
strikes against his nuclear facilities.” In other words, this provision in the
Kirk-Menendez bill, tantamount to a demand for Iranian surrender, is an offer
Tehran cannot accept—but can be blamed for refusing.
There is one more troubling clause
in the Senate bill. It states that "if the government of Israel is
compelled to take military action in legitimate self-defense against Iran's
nuclear weapon program, the United States government should stand with Israel,”
calling for “diplomatic, military and economic” support in such circumstances.
In other words, it effectively outsources to Israel the decision over whether
the United States should go to war with Iran. No wonder the American Israel
Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has been pushing so hard for the bill on Capitol Hill. (Incidentally
the Jewish lobby groups J Street and Americans for Peace Now oppose the bill.)
The Kirk-Menendez bill has 59
co-sponsors—just eight shy of the number needed to override a presidential
veto. It is astonishing that such a disastrous piece of legislation could have
so much support in what we used to be able to call, with a more or less
straight face, the world’s greatest deliberative body. Kahl, the former deputy
assistant secretary of defense, believes the bill would violate the agreement already reached with Iran in
November. The Iran expert Trita Parsi warns that “if the Geneva deal falls apart
as a result of Congressional foul play, the world will view the United States
and not Iran as the main obstacle to a nuclear agreement,” and that the
international sanctions regime may fall apart as a result. Representative Raúl
Grijalva, Democrat of Arizona, and Kate Gould of the Friends Committee on
National Legislation laid out what's at stake, pointing out that "if
Congress isn't careful, it will sabotage our country's best opportunity to
prevent war and a nuclear-armed Iran.” Meanwhile many commentators have
cautioned that the bill will actually strengthen the hardliners in Tehran and,
by sabotaging the chance to reach an agreement, make it more likely that the
United States will face a stark choice between accepting a nuclear-armed Iran
and going to war.
But the bill is above all dangerous
because of the reckless way in which it creates two dead
man’s switches—protocols that automate escalation and weaken the grip of
American decision-makers on decisions about war and peace. One dead man’s
switch is the pre-emplacement of sanctions and the insistence that action must
be taken every year to prevent them from being implemented. One would have
thought that Congress had learned from its experience with the automatic budget
cuts of the 2013 sequester not to play this kind of game with itself.
The second, and even more disturbing,
dead man’s switch is the clause pressing the United States to follow Israel to
war. Reminiscent of the catastrophic alliance obligations that historians now blame for ensnaring Europe in the First World
War, this stipulation incites Israeli hardliners by making them think they
have a blank check from the United States. It also willfully and deliberately
moves the center of gravity of the decision making outside the United States.
Neoconservatives
like to use the rhetoric of patriotism to discredit their opponents. But true
patriots do not outsource national-security decisions to other countries.
An anthropologist, Gusterson is a
professor of anthropology and sociology at George Mason University. His
expertise is in nuclear culture, international security, and the anthropology
of science....
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