FuzzyLumpkins
07-31-2015, 08:55 PM
The security consequences — both nuclear and conventional, for the United States and the world — of whether the deal lives or dies are the most obvious and have been the subject of robust debate. And critics have reasonably flagged some concerns. Some leading nuclear security experts including Olli Heinonen, former deputy director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and former American weapons inspector David Albright have pointed out the deal’s flaws: a prolonged waiting period before inspectors can enter suspicious sites and the failure to compel full transparency on past nuclear activity. It is also true that an end to sanctions will fill Iranian coffers with more than $100 billion, some of which will likely be used for a variety of nefarious purposes, including funding terrorism and regional proxy wars.
With this deal having been inked and signed, however, it’s hard to see how congressional defeat doesn’t make the threats posed by the deal’s flaws even more imminent than they are now. In his Senate testimony on July 23, Kerry claimed it was a choice between “this deal or war” — a juxtaposition for which he was accused of hyperbole. Kerry dismissed the prospect that another, stronger deal could theoretically have been struck as “some sort of unicorn arrangement involving Iran’s complete capitulation. That’s a fantasy, plain and simple.”
Iran’s leaders, for their part, have already made clear that the failure of a deal will redouble their commitment to their nuclear ambitions. As Kerry noted in his testimony, the pace of enrichment will quicken, and new reactors and centrifuges will be built. Instead of an admittedly overlong 24-day waiting period for inspections, there will be no inspections at all. In fact, inspections would be pointless because there will be no doubt of what Iran is doing and no way to stop them short of military action, a course that many experts say simply won’t work. Transparency on the past would also be a non-starter without the deal.
In terms of the cash bonanza Iran will enjoy once sanctions are lifted, at this point that check is headed toward the mail. The European Union has already begun the process of suspending its sanctions on Iran, and the U.N. Security Council likewise wasted no time in passing a resolution for sanctions relief, though it delayed implementation for 90 days. French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius arrived in Tehran on Wednesday, warming the seats for French businesspeople and investors. U.S. officials have made clear that in the face of congressional rejection of the deal, the international will for tough sanctions will evaporate. While congressional naysayers now trumpet the success of sanctions and demand that they remain in place, experts uniformly affirm that their effectiveness depends on wide multilateral support. The United States has had its own unilateral sanctions in place since 1979 with little discernible impact, but Iran only began to feel the bite once the United States mustered international compliance with sanctions enforced through American banking institutions, and then secured increasingly potent Security Council mandates to create bans on oil, gas, conventional weapons, and other areas that were effective around the world. That multilateral support, in turn, could be summoned only because of Iran’s evasiveness and recalcitrance — qualities in full display during the tenure of former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The minute Iran began to shift gears toward a more open and accommodating posture after the 2013 election, those international sanctions began living on borrowed time.
mas @ http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/07/30/congress-iran-nuclear-deal-obama-veto-kerry-mccain/
With this deal having been inked and signed, however, it’s hard to see how congressional defeat doesn’t make the threats posed by the deal’s flaws even more imminent than they are now. In his Senate testimony on July 23, Kerry claimed it was a choice between “this deal or war” — a juxtaposition for which he was accused of hyperbole. Kerry dismissed the prospect that another, stronger deal could theoretically have been struck as “some sort of unicorn arrangement involving Iran’s complete capitulation. That’s a fantasy, plain and simple.”
Iran’s leaders, for their part, have already made clear that the failure of a deal will redouble their commitment to their nuclear ambitions. As Kerry noted in his testimony, the pace of enrichment will quicken, and new reactors and centrifuges will be built. Instead of an admittedly overlong 24-day waiting period for inspections, there will be no inspections at all. In fact, inspections would be pointless because there will be no doubt of what Iran is doing and no way to stop them short of military action, a course that many experts say simply won’t work. Transparency on the past would also be a non-starter without the deal.
In terms of the cash bonanza Iran will enjoy once sanctions are lifted, at this point that check is headed toward the mail. The European Union has already begun the process of suspending its sanctions on Iran, and the U.N. Security Council likewise wasted no time in passing a resolution for sanctions relief, though it delayed implementation for 90 days. French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius arrived in Tehran on Wednesday, warming the seats for French businesspeople and investors. U.S. officials have made clear that in the face of congressional rejection of the deal, the international will for tough sanctions will evaporate. While congressional naysayers now trumpet the success of sanctions and demand that they remain in place, experts uniformly affirm that their effectiveness depends on wide multilateral support. The United States has had its own unilateral sanctions in place since 1979 with little discernible impact, but Iran only began to feel the bite once the United States mustered international compliance with sanctions enforced through American banking institutions, and then secured increasingly potent Security Council mandates to create bans on oil, gas, conventional weapons, and other areas that were effective around the world. That multilateral support, in turn, could be summoned only because of Iran’s evasiveness and recalcitrance — qualities in full display during the tenure of former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The minute Iran began to shift gears toward a more open and accommodating posture after the 2013 election, those international sanctions began living on borrowed time.
mas @ http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/07/30/congress-iran-nuclear-deal-obama-veto-kerry-mccain/