The Iranian Agreement is the subject of today’s open thread. I have a simple question to those who so vehemently support Israel that they are confused about which flag they are supposed to pledge allegiance to. Is there any deal with Iran that would garner your approval? Or is the only option that is good for Israel the complete destruction of Iran and its people?
I suspect the answer to the first question, if you are a Netanyahu apologist, is no. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is Israel’s Dick Cheney or John McCain. There are never enough wars to fight, never enough Muslims and Arabs to kill. They are relics of a different time. I no longer listen to those who are always so reflexively pro-Israel that they always, without fail, reject peace. And those who I talk about will now say I am anti-semetic or anti-Israel. No, I am pro-peace. Peace in the Middle East is in the best interests of Israel. War in the Middle East is not.
Ending Iran’s capacity to make a nuclear bomb is in America’s interests. It is also in Israel’s interest. This deal has a chance of that goal. Yet Israel’s government rejects the deal out of hand. Juan Cole:
The only question here is whether the agreement is in American interests. It is. Ever more severe sanctions increasingly risked war with a country three times as big geographically and 2.5 times as populous as Iraq (the American occupation of which did not go well). That danger is now receding, which can only be a good thing. And if negotiations and UN inspections can indeed succeed in allowing Iran a civilian enrichment program while forestalling a weapons program, it is a breakthrough for the whole world and an important chapter in the ongoing attempts to limit proliferation.
Paul Woodward argues that Israel would have objected to any deal. I agree.
At a time when the diplomatic momentum was clearly not moving in Netanyahu’s favor, one might ask: why did he not back down from his maximalist demand on zero enrichment and find a way of offering qualified support for this emerging nuclear accord? Why hold on to a set of conditions that Iran would find impossible to accept?
The reason is that Netanyahu’s goal has never been for the nuclear issue to be resolved. It’s political value resides wholly in this remaining an unresolved issue and in Israel’s ability to cast Iran as a perpetual threat. For Netanyahu, any deal is a bad deal because absent an Iranian threat, Israel will find itself under increasing pressure to address the Palestinian issue.
Indeed. Netanyahu holds onto power so long as he keeps Israelis, and his supporters in America, afraid. There is a name for that kind of government. Starts with an F.
Sheera Frenkel reports on Netanyahu’s bluster:
“There is no doubt that Netanyahu is a big loser in the Iran deal,” said Gil Hoffman, political editor at the Jerusalem Post. “His whole political career is built on two things: number one is that he persuaded Israelis that only he could protect them from Iran, and number two is his image as someone who could speak to the world in his perfect English in a persuasive way better than any other Israelis. And here he failed.”
If I had one single reason for supporting Obama in the last election, it was that he and he alone had the strategy and perseverance to end the Cold War with Iran. He hasn’t done that yet – but he has, with remarkable global unity, started down a diplomatic path that could liberate the forces for moderation and democracy in that country, and unwind a dangerous ratchet toward war. That was always his larger promise from the get-go: not just to end the disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; not just to end the torture regime that made a war criminal of the president and ruined both our moral authority and the integrity of our intelligence-gathering; but to begin to defuse the deeper forces of polarization and conflict that seemed only likely to intensify after 9/11. I have always seen Obama as the antidote to Bush. This weekend, he fully inhabited the role.[…]
Now consider this: in the past few months, Obama has both begun to remove the threat of WMDs in Syria through diplomacy and found a way to ensure that Iran’s irrevocable nuclear know-how will be verifiably channeled into peaceful, civilian use. These two acts of diplomacy compound one another to make the world a much more peaceful place. Yes, there remains a risk. Of course there does.
But there was also a risk in reaching out to Gorbachev in the 1980s, and yet two Cold Warriors, Reagan and Thatcher, chose to do business with him. And they were right to. As with the Soviets and the arms race, there comes a point when the pain inflicted on the other party by sanctions is so great you have maximal external leverage for reform. Too much and the sanctions would be counter-productive; not enough and we would only have military power as a lever. It takes judgment to know if the time is ripe to take yes for an answer. But, in my view, Reagan was as right to embrace Gorbachev as Obama is to reward Rouhani.
Michael Crowley considers the possible longterm consequences:
It’s worth thinking about the long path Obama has trod to get here. When he ran for president in 2008, Obama’s rivals warned he couldn’t be trusted to deal with a nuclearizing Iran. Hillary Clinton would brand him “irresponsible and naïve” for saying he’d meet with Iran’s leader. John McCain later called that a sign of his “inexperience and reckless judgment.”
Six years later, Obama’s Iran policy has the potential to reshape the Middle East and define his legacy. If it proves a success, historians might compare it to Richard Nixon’s breakthrough with China.
Those who preferred Obama to Clinton because of the distinction in their positions on the authorization to use military force in Iraq now have something concrete to point to, to argue that electing Obama would lead to a more peaceful world than would electing Clinton.
John Bolton, the treasonous neocon, urges Israel to strike Iran unilaterally. Now.
Undoubtedly, an Israeli strike during the interim deal would be greeted with outrage from all the expected circles. But that same outrage, or more, would also come further down the road. In short, measured against the expected reaction even in friendly capitals, there is never a “good” time for an Israeli strike, only bad and worse times. Accordingly, the Geneva deal does not change Israel’s strategic calculus even slightly, unless the Netanyahu government itself falls prey to the psychological warfare successfully waged so far by the ayatollahs. That we will know only as the days unfold.
If Israel did strike now, it would become the enemy of the world. A rogue state like North Korea. Mitchell Plitnick explores the motives of those who oppose the deal:
There is only one reason to oppose this deal and that is that, whether with weapons of war or sanctions that will lead to a full-blown humanitarian catastrophe in Iran, an all-out attack on Iran with the hope of regime change is what this is really about. The conclusion is inescapable—if you oppose this deal, you are looking for a lot more than the neutralization of Iran’s ability to construct a nuclear weapon.
Bob Dreyfuss doubts an Israeli strike is in the cards:
Israel’s reaction is, predictably, apoplectic. Naftali Bennett, Israel’s economic minister, said, “If five years from now a nuclear suitcase explodes in New York or Madrid, it will be because of the deal that was signed this morning.” But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will have trouble playing that card for long, since Israel is drastically isolated from the rest of the world and risks an open break with Washington. Already, some Israel leaders, such as President Shimon Peres and the newly installed leader of the Israeli Labor Party, have issued mild to moderate statement that undermine Netanyahu’s bluster. And, ironically, though, the harsh reaction from Israel will help Rouhani and Zarif sell the deal in Iran, since they can point to Israel’s criticism of the deal as a sign that it was, indeed, a victory for Iran’s “nuclear rights.”
Secretary of State John F. Kerry:
“I believe that from this day, for the next six months, Israel is in fact safer than it was yesterday because we now have a mechanism by which we are going to expand the amount of time in which they [Tehran] can break out [toward making a nuclear bomb]. We are going to have insights to their programme that we did not have before,” he added.