By REUEL MARC GERECHT And
MARK DUBOWITZ
The lines are clearly drawn in Washington on President Obama’s
plan for a nuclear deal with Iran. As negotiations for a final agreement
continue well past their June 30 deadline, most Republicans oppose the deal and
Democrats will not block it.
Many
critics claim to believe that a “good deal,” which would permanently dismantle
the clerical regime’s capacity to construct nuclear weapons, is still possible
if Mr. Obama would augment diplomacy with the threat of more sanctions and the
use of force. Although these critics accurately highlight the framework’s
serious faults, they also make a mistake: More sanctions and threats of
military raids now are unlikely to thwart the mullahs’ nuclear designs. We will
never know whether more crippling sanctions and force could have cracked the
clerical regime. We do know that the president sought the opposite path even
before American and Iranian diplomats began negotiating in Europe.
But hawks
who believe that airstrikes are the only possible option for stopping an
Iranian nuke should welcome a deal perhaps more than anyone. This is because
the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action is tailor-made to set Washington on a
collision course with Tehran. The plan leaves the Islamic Republic as a
threshold nuclear-weapons state and in the short-term insulates the mullahs’
regional behavior from serious American reproach.
To
imagine such a deal working is to imagine the Islamic Republic without its
revolutionary faith. So Mr. Obama’s deal-making is in effect establishing the
necessary conditions for military action after January 2017, when a new president
takes office.
No
American president would destroy Iranian nuclear sites without first exhausting
diplomacy. The efforts by Mr. Obama and Secretary of State John
Kerry to
compromise with Tehran—on uranium enrichment, verification and sanctions
relief, among other concerns—are comprehensive, if nothing else. If the next
president chose to strike after the Iranians stonewalled or repeatedly violated
Mr. Obama’s agreement, however, the newcomer would be on much firmer political
ground, at home and abroad, than if he tried without this failed accord.
Without a
deal the past will probably repeat itself: Washington will incrementally
increase sanctions while the Iranians incrementally advance their nuclear
capabilities. Without a deal, diplomacy won’t die. Episodically it has
continued since an Iranian opposition group revealed in 2002 the
then-clandestine nuclear program. Via this meandering diplomatic route, Tehran
has gotten the West to accept its nuclear progress.
Critics
of the president who suggest that a much better agreement is within reach with
more sanctions are making the same analytical error as Mr. Obama: They both
assume that the Iranian regime will give priority to economics over religious
ideology. The president wants to believe that Iran’s “supreme leader” Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei and
President Hasan
Rouhani can
be weaned from the bomb through commerce; equally war-weary sanctions
enthusiasts fervently hope that economic pain alone can force the mullahs to
set aside their faith. In their minds Iran is a nation that the U.S., or even
Israel, can intimidate and contain.
The
problem is that the Islamic Republic remains, as Iranian Foreign Minister Javad
Zarif proudly
acknowledges in his memoirs, a revolutionary Islamic movement. Such a regime by
definition would never bend to America’s economic coercion and never gut the
nuclear centerpiece of its military planning for 30 years and allow Westerners
full and transparent access to its nuclear secrets and personnel. This is the
revolutionary Islamic state that is replicating versions of the militant
Lebanese Hezbollah among the Arab Shiites, ever fearful at home of seditious
Western culture and prepared to use terrorism abroad.
Above
all, the clerical regime cannot be understood without appreciating the
centrality of anti-Americanism to its religious identity. The election of a
Republican administration might reinvigorate Iranian fear of American military
power, as the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 did for a year or two. But it did
not stop Iran’s nuclear march, and there is no reason to believe now that Mr.
Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guards, who oversee the nuclear program, will
betray all that they hold holy.
But a
nuclear deal is not going to prevent conflict either. The presidency of the
so-called pragmatic mullah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani from
1989 to 1997 was an aggressive period of Iranian terrorism. If President
Rouhani, Mr. Rafsanjani’s former right-hand man, can pull off a nuclear
agreement, we are likely to see a variation of the 1990s Iranian aggression.
Such
aggression has already begun. Revolutionary Guards are fighting in Syria and
Iraq, and Iranian aid flows to the Shiite Houthis in Yemen. Wherever the
Islamic Republic’s influence grows among Arab Shiites, Sunni-Shiite conflict
grows worse. With greater internecine Muslim hostility, the clerical regime
inevitably intensifies its anti-American propaganda and actions in an effort to
compete with radical Sunnis and their competing claims to lead an anti-Western
Muslim world.
Iranian
adventurism, especially if it includes anti-American terrorism, will eventually
provoke a more muscular U.S. response. The odds of Tehran respecting any
nuclear deal while it pushes to increase its regional influence—unchecked by
Washington—aren’t good.Mr. Obama may think he can snap back sanctions and a
united Western front to counter nefarious Iranian nuclear behavior, but the
odds aren’t good once European businesses start returning to the Islamic
Republic. Washington has a weak track record of using extraterritorial
sanctions against our richest and closest allies and trading partners. The
French alone may join the Americans again to curtail Iran and European profits.
With a
failed deal, no plausible peaceful alternatives, and Mr. Obama no longer in
office, Republicans and Democrats can then debate, more seriously than before,
whether military force remains an option. Odds are it will not be. When
contemplating the possibility that preventive military strikes against the
clerical regime won’t be a one-time affair, even a hawkish Republican president
may well default to containment. But if Washington does strike, it will be
because Mr. Obama showed that peaceful means don’t work against the clerics’
nuclear and regional ambitions.
Mr. Gerecht, a former Iranian-targets officer in the Central
Intelligence Agency’s clandestine service, is a senior fellow at the Foundation
for Defense of Democracies. Mr. Dubowitz is the foundation’s executive director
and heads its Center on Sanctions and Illicit Finance.
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I do not agree with this analysis. If the agreement is signed and Congress does
not override Obama’s veto following Congress’s initial rejection of the agreement,
Israel will have lost any remaining hope in the US and its political system and
will act. Waiting for the next US President
to take office is too far into the future and there is also the possibility if Hillary Clinton wins that there would be another Muslim Brotherhood supporting president.