Netanyahu slips, Reveals reason for Opposition to Iran Deal
By Juan Cole | Apr. 7, 2015 |
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) –
US television news isn’t very good and it has clearly gotten worse over the past 20 years. In the aftermath of the Kerry-Zarif initial framework deal on nuclear energy in Iran, it seems obvious that an interview with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif would be newsworthy. But to my knowledge none of the networks or major cable news shows had him on.
Or you could have talked to the British, French, German, Russian or Chinese foreign ministers, all of whom were principals and all of whom would have had interesting insights.
Instead, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was given repeated access to millions of Americans to talk trash about the deal over the weekend and to make mostly false allegations about its contours. Israel is a small country of 8 million with a gross domestic product in the range of Portugal. Netanyahu isn’t a party to the deal. He doesn’t have more riding on it than Britain or France. Israel isn’t even threatened by Iran, since Israel has several hundred nuclear weapons and submarines to deliver them. Iran has only old, conventional weapons. Even if it someday had a nuclear weapon, which its leaders say would be un-Islamic and that they don’t want it, Israel has a powerful deterrent.
--- “Secondly, Iran is going to have sanctions lifted, including crippling sanctions, pretty much up front. And that’s going to have billions and billions of dollars flow into the Iranian coffers, not for schools or hospitals or roads, but to pump up Iran’s terror machine throughout the world.
And it’s a military machine that’s now engaged in conquest throughout the world in Iraq and Syria and Yemen, around the borders of Israel elsewhere.” ---
In other words, Netanyahu wants to keep Iran poor and undeveloped. He wants to make sure that “crippling” sanctions aren’t lifted. He wants to keep Iranians in grinding poverty.
Is it true that the Iranian state would not spend the money that it garnered through a lifting of sanctions on schools or hospitals?
Look, I am no fan of the Islamic Republic or its system of government or its censorship and authoritarianism. But let us say that Netanyahu, in standing for permanent military rule over 4 million stateless Palestinians .. http://www.juancole.com/2015/02/surprising-better-israel.html , and in launching disproportionate military campaigns with disregard for non-combatant life, is not obviously superior.
And, as far as social spending goes, Iran is in principal as progressive as Israel, though not as rich per capita. The Iranian state has built enormous numbers of schools since 1979, especially in rural areas, and [pdf] has brought literacy among the over-15 population from 65% in 1990 to 90% today .. http://www.uis.unesco.org/Education/Documents/UIS-literacy-statistics-1990-2015-en.pdf . In the 15-25 age group, literacy is fully 98% .. http://wenr.wes.org/2013/04/wenr-april-2013-an-overview-of-education-in-iran/ .. and there are nearly 4 million university students. Iran has done better in educating its women than most other Middle Eastern countries, and a majority of Iranian college students is women.
Literacy rates were low in the 1970s and relatively few Iranians went to university then. You can’t produce an impressive change in literacy that way without investing substantially in schools.
The crippling sanctions on Iran that make Netanyahu’s mouth water so much have badly hurt the 60,000 Iranian students studying abroad, making it difficult for them to transfer money and causing the value of the riyal to plummet. Those students are not politicians and ought not to have their futures held hostage to geopolitics.
So it simply is not true that the Iranian state does not spend on schools and hospitals, as Netanyahu alleged. His purpose in making this false claim is to deflect an obvious critique of “crippling” sanctions, which is that they harm ordinary people, not just the state.
His allegation that an Iranian commander pledged to destroy Israel is unlikely to be true. The Iranian leadership doesn’t like Israel, but they have a no first strike policy and don’t have the slightest intention of attacking anyone with conventional military forces. Iran is too far away to attack Israel and it would be madness to strike at a nuclear power. Typically Iranians say things like “the Occupation regime must end,” and people like Netanyahu interpret that to be a threat to roll tanks (Iran has actually made no such threats [my b] .. http://www.juancole.com/2006/05/hitchens-hacker-and-hitchens.html , whatever you have been told).
As for his charge that Iran is using its oil money to spread terrorism or conquer the Middle East, this claim is mostly also for the most part not true .. http://www.thenation.com/blog/202905/iran-conquering-middle-east . Netanyahu counts a national liberation organization that fought Israeli occupation such as Lebanon’s Hizbullah as a “terrorist organization.” What he really means is that it interfered with Israel annexing 10% of its neighbor Lebanon’s territory (which it held 1982-2000). He counts Iran’s help to Iraq in fighting Daesh (ISIL or ISIS) as a “conquest” of Iraq! in all this verbiage, the major legitimate knock against Iran with regard to its foreign activities is that Iran has helped the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria to survive, something it has done through odious practices such as barrel-bombing its own population. But Netanyahu doesn’t even say anything about that except to complain that Iran is active near Israeli borders with Syria.
“Crippling” sanctions haven’t in any case stopped Iran from arming Hizbullah and there is no reason to think they ever will. Moreover, given the weakness of the Lebanese military, someone needs to keep the Israelis from trying to annex Lebanese territory again.
Netanyahu has showed his hand. He wants to use the USA and the Treasury Department to sanction Iran into penury, to keep its middle classes small and shrinking and to cut people’s income, education and health care. He wants a total war on Iran, including on Iranian women, children and non-combatants. It isn’t a plausible aspiration, and it isn’t a worthy one.
What everyone gets wrong about Iran nuclear negotiations
Updated by Max Fisher on March 31, 2015, 1:00 p.m. ET @Max_Fisher max@vox.com
Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif after a rough day of nuclear negotiations RONALD ZAK/AFP/Getty
The nuclear negotiations with Iran started to make a lot more sense to me when I realized that a lot of the disagreements are over things that aren't actually that crucial.
In Washington, for example, you hear people insist — insist! — that any final deal make Iran's "breakout time" as long as possible, meaning that an agreement so limits Iran's nuclear infrastructure that if Iranian leaders decide to construct a nuclear weapon, it will take them nine months rather than six, or 12 rather than nine. And American negotiators indeed appear to be holding up talks over this issue. But no one can really articulate why that's so important, what happens in those three additional months. Meanwhile, Iranian politicians in Tehran and Iranian negotiators in Switzerland are making their own bizarre-seeming demands.
To try to understand what was going on, I spoke to Jeffrey Lewis, the director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Monterey Institute of International Studies (Lewis also runs an excellent arms control blog network .. http://armscontrolwonk.com/ .. and arms control podcast .. http://www.vox.com/2015/3/29/8308033/podcast-reviews-recommendations ). He explained what's actually important to prevent Iran from building a nuclear bomb, what the negotiators in Switzerland are fighting over, and why those two sets of issues seem to be so different.
A big reason that the conversation around the Iran nuclear deal can feel so confusing is that it often focuses, Lewis says, on the wrong things. By obsessing over things like breakout time and the number of centrifuges Iran is allowed to have, we're totally misunderstanding how and when Iran would try to build a nuclear bomb — and we're also making it harder to reach an agreement.
What follows is a transcript of our conversation — which left me feeling like I really finally understood what was going on with Iran negotiations, and what has to happen to reach a deal — edited and condensed for clarity.
**
Max Fisher: So the impression I've gotten is that the two main goals of the Iran talks, at their most basic level, are, first, to block Iran's pathways to a nuclear weapon, in other words reduce their ability to make a bomb, and second, to make it tougher for them to build a bomb, so that if someday they wake up and decide that they want one, it will take them longer. Is that wrong?
Jeffrey Lewis: Totally.
Max Fisher: So what's the right way to think about it?
Jeffrey Lewis: I'm way more worried about, like, the covert facility problem. I'm not as worried that they're going to use Natanz [or another known nuclear development site] to break out. I think if the Supreme Leader [Ayatollah Ali Khamenei] wakes up one morning and is really feeling it, they're gonna dig another hole under a mountain someplace.
So, to me, the value of the agreement is not just "does it lengthen the breakout time" but does it make less likely they can build a secret facility.
Max Fisher: The way Americans have talked about the Iran deal is that the ultimate goal is to limit Iran's nuclear infrastructure, so that if Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei wakes up one morning and decides he wants to build a nuclear bomb, it will take him a long time to build it.
It sounds like you're saying that's the wrong way to think about it, because it assumes Khamenei would use publicly declared facilities and equipment to build a bomb, and those facilities would be under pretty heavy monitoring. Rather, he would do it by building new secret facilities somewhere, where he could develop a program unencumbered. So in that thinking, the goal of the nuclear agreement should be to get nuclear inspectors so up in Iran's business that they can't cheat on the agreement without us knowing. But how do you do that?
Jeffrey Lewis: Some of it is through traditional, safeguards stuff. Like giving the [International Atomic Energy Agency, which manages nuclear inspections] access to Iran's centrifuge workshops.
We have this crazy situation right now where the IAEA has basically no access to the places where the centrifuges are made. And so Iranian put those centrifuges on a truck, and if they drive them to [a publicly declared nuclear site such as] Natanz and install them there, then they're safeguarded. But, if they, you know, drive them to some hole in a mountain then, no, they're not safeguarded, we don't see them. The Iranians have provided some limited access to the centrifuge workshops. But [expanding that access] would be a big achievement.
--- "YOU DON'T WANT THEM TO BE ABLE TO GET A BOMB THE WAY PAKISTAN DID, LITTLE BY LITTLE" ---
And there are just other things. There is this question of dual use goods [that could be used for peaceful purposes or for a clandestine nuclear program] that they import; there is a whole bunch of stuff sanctions will come off of. And it would be good to have, like, a registry or database of those things, so we can at least check to see if they are importing, say, specialized ball bearings, and make sure those are not going to a facility under a mountain.
What we want is for Khamenei to know, for certain, that if he wakes up and decides to build a bomb, we're going to know about it, and there's going to be a showdown.
And that's not perfect, but this is real life and that's as good as you get. You don't want them to be able to get a bomb the way Pakistan did, which is little by little, in itty-bitty pieces, and by the time we really get around to dealing with it, it's too late.
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks in Tehran in 2004 (BEHROUZ MEHRI/AFP/Getty)
Max Fisher: It seems like the key things, then, are having an alert system to know exactly what's happening inside of Iran, and then having the enforcement mechanisms in case they cheat.
On the alert system part, you can have lots of inspections and safeguards so that we know if Iran is cheating, and Iran knows that we'll know, so they don't think they can get away with it.
But how do you handle the enforcement, which I feel like I have actually heard very little about in the talks? How do you tell Iran, "If you cheat, not only will we know, but it'll be bad for you?"
Jeffrey Lewis: Because we never do that in treaties or international agreements. No treaty ever, ever has any enforcement mechanisms in it, ever. There has been some talk about putting some automatic enforcement in the NPT [the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons, barring illegal new nuclear programs worldwide], but nobody likes that.
Max Fisher: Why?
Jeffrey Lewis: It's easy to support automatic enforcement mechanisms [on nuclear treaty violations] until somebody points out that the South Koreans had a safeguard violation. And then [people inevitably say], "These things should be done on a case-by-case basis."
So these treaties never really have an enforcement mechanism, which is, from a legal perspective, kind of weird and kind of a bummer but totally understandable in a world of states that jealously guard their sovereignty.
--- "IF YOU TOOK OUT NATIONALISM AND PEOPLE'S TESTICLES, IRANIANS WOULD LOOK AT THIS PROGRAM AND SAY, "DO WE REALLY NEED TO BE DOING THIS?" ---
Max Fisher: I wonder if that's why there's been so much political focus here in Washington on the number of centrifuges or the breakout time. Because those are quantifiable, discrete details in the agreement, and you can debate them.
But it's hard to have a debate about, "How do we make sure Khamenei believes we really mean it when we say we'll punish him if he cheats on the agreement?" That threat of enforcement is really important, but it's not something you can debate about how to put in the text, since it's not something that can go in the text at all. So instead of talking about enforcement, we're talking about less important things like the number of centrifuges.
Jeffrey Lewis: Right, I think that's right. So here's the thing about the conversation focusing so much on breakout time [and how to maximize the amount of time it would take Iran to build a nuclear bomb]. I don't think Khamenei wakes up and says, "Ugh, did you see the breakout calculation today? Nine months! That's too much. If we can get it down to about six and a half months, then I'd be willing to go [build a nuclear bomb]."
He won't do that. But since we can't get inside his head and know what he's thinking, then we're going through these bizarre DC wonk thought experiments to satisfy ourselves. "If we make it a year, then he'd have to know that we'd have enough time to respond." But a year is a totally arbitrary amount of time. It's one of these things where we try to take the abstract and unknowable and impressionistic and we try to put a number on it.
Nobody ever specifies what they would do with all this time. And keep in mind, the breakout calculation is for one bomb.
That's why I'm much more worried about covert [nuclear] sites. Because if you're Iran, you wanna do what Pakistan did, which is to get a whole bunch of fissile material [prepared in secret]. So that by the time the world really figures out [that you're running a clandestine weapons program], they're like, "Oh, I think they have an arsenal. How many? I have no idea." And then it's an unsolvable problem.
Max Fisher: Is there a counter-argument that you do actually need the long breakout time, because if Iran does decide to cheat and to break out to a nuclear bomb, it might take us a few months to find out? So the longer that breakout time, the longer we have to find out before it's too late?
Jeffrey Lewis: People will game this out. They'll say, "Well, maybe Iran would start [breakout] the day after the IAEA was there. And they visit every month, so we'd know a month and a half in, but it would be ambiguous they'd stall for three weeks." I get that people want to give themselves some time.
--- "A lot of the iranian demands are nutty" ]/i] ---
But I don't think it's time that is going to cause a leader of Iran to [decide to break out to a nuclear bomb]. I think it's the thought that they could get away with it. A leader is going to make a gut call: "Can I get away with this?"
I'm trying to imagine, like, the little conference room with the supreme leader where he's looking at the calculations on breakout time. And it says, I don't know, 238 days. And he's going to decide whether or not to build a nuclear bomb based on moving that number. I've just never seen a government that works like that.
I care about whether the IAEA can look at Iran's centrifuge workshops and can make sure that they're getting information about all of the different mining locations, so there's not another source of natural uranium that could be enriched some place else.
So the agreement will have verification provisions. But our confidence in the agreement will also be based on an assessment of our intelligence capabilities. And give the intelligence community credit. I mean, they caught Iran with [secret nuclear sites at] Lavizan, Natanz, and Fordow.
Max Fisher: There also seems to be a lot of fighting over the number of centrifuges Iran is allowed to have — that's something Netanyahu is really upset about — and over how much research and development they're allowed to do. The New York Times reported that a big remaining disagreement is over how much R&D Iran can do in the final five years of the 15-year agreement. How important are those?
Jeffrey Lewis:This is one of the reasons I don't like the focus on breakout time. So, the IR-1 centrifuges that the Iranians have are crappy centrifuges. This stuff is old. We're acting like, "Oh, the Iranians are developing these centrifuges!" This is 1970s stuff.
But the degree of technical improvement on them that is possible is really, really big. It's not like a super-advanced centrifuge would be just 50 percent better — we're talking orders of magnitude more capable. So if I were a really clever Iranian negotiator, I'd argue that 1,500 centrifuges is actually enough, but I'd insist on keeping R&D going. And so then Iran would have fewer centrifuges, but they'd be so much more powerful.
So there's some effort to try to put some, I don't know if I would call them limitations, maybe conditions or constraints on R&D. Like, you want them to only sort of do it at a few places, you want to make sure you know about it. But verification for that is hard.
Whatever number of centrifuges you agree to — I heard 6,000 last — [the important thing is] that they're the old generation, and that you're not letting them deploy new stuff.
Max Fisher: Let me ask about you another issue that's getting a lot of attention, about what to do with Iran's stockpile of low-enriched uranium. The concern is that Iran could decide to take this low-enriched uranium and then start turning it into highly enriched uranium for a bomb.
So the Americans want to solve this by having Iran ship all of their low-enriched uranium abroad, or something like that, and it's become a big sticking point.
Jeffrey Lewis: Oh yeah, this makes me crazy. So, okay, if the Iranians have a bunch of low-enriched uranium sitting around, they could conceivably feed it back in [to enrich it until it was weapons-grade], and that shortens their breakout time, right?
But, why do that? Why take material that's under IAEA safeguard and pop off the seals? And then have the IAEA show up and be like, "Hey, where'd all it go?" That, to me, would be so dumb. Like, if I'm the Iranians, I'm going to try to find a source of uranium that's off the books, and I'm going to do this in secret.
I don't know if you've ever been to an enrichment facility. But there's a room and like all these casks of uranium and they've measured them and they have all these little IAEA tags and seals on them. So if the IAEA shows up and is like "Hey, where's cask 472839?" "Oh, uh, I think it's over here in a closet and oh gosh we can't find it." That's gonna trigger a huge crisis.
Max Fisher: This makes me realize that, in my mind, I've sort of separated out the negotiations in Switzerland from the problem of domestic politics in the US and Iran. The way I, and I think a lot of people, have been thinking about it, is that maybe they'll reach a deal on the technical merits in Switzerland, and then after that you have a separate process of selling the deal politically in Washington and Tehran.
But it sounds like those processes are actually happening at the same time: domestic political pressures in Washington and Tehran are pushing the American and Iranian negotiators to demand unreasonable things, or to insist on provisions that are nice to have don't really matter so much. And that's how domestic politics could make a deal fall apart.
Jeffrey Lewis: Yeah, I think that's precisely the problem. The Iranians are going to go home, and they're going to have to say, "Hey, this doesn't really impinge on our nuclear program at all." We're going to have to come home and say, "This is a deathblow to the Iranian nuclear program."
It's not just the rhetoric of it; it's going to be the concessions that you demanded to prove this. It's what makes me really frustrated, because my guess is we could get a lot more transparency out of the Iranians if we weren't spending our time demanding they do stuff like ship the uranium out of the country.
If I were an Iranian hardliner [who wanted to torpedo any nuclear agreement with the US], that's a really useful symbolic humiliation. "Oh, we had to send all our uranium that we spent billions of dollars to acquire, we had to send it away." That's a great talking point if I'm a hardliner.
Max Fisher: But it's not just the Americans pushing for unreasonable things, or demanding things that are not actually that important but are holding up the talks, right?
Jeffrey Lewis: A lot of the Iranian demands are nutty. They don't need Natanz. [Iranian negotiators have reportedly demanded the right to continue using their hardened facility at Natanz.] Natanz is not big enough, even with 50,000 centrifuges, to be like a useful plant, given the centrifuges they have. It's unclear to me that Iran will ever be a competitive player in the international market for enriching uranium.
The entire Iranian program is like a national airline. It's this incredibly expensive, preposterous thing that makes people feel better about their country. But there is just no reason that they need to do this.
If you took out nationalism and people's testicles, you would look at the centrifuge program and be like, "Ah, this is really expensive and causes us a lot of anxiety, do we really need to be doing this?" And the answer would be, "No."
Israeli Army Chief Eisenkot: Iran Isn’t the Main Threat to Israel
Hezbollah and Hamas are most immediate threats to Israeli security, according to strategic document issued by IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot that outlines army plans for next five years.
Amir Oren Aug 15, 2015 9:53 AM
IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot attends an officer training graduation ceremony, June 17, 2015.Eliyahu Hershkovitz
Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot has issued a unique document entitled “IDF Strategy,” which reveals, either overtly or by allusion, the ways in which the Israel Defense Forces plans to build its forces in the coming five years under conditions of severely restricted resources.
The document, which can be seen as Eizenkot’s doctrine, recognizes that the army is subservient not only to the government, but to Israeli civil society and the members of that society who wear the IDF uniform, whose opinions impact the funding available to the military. Within these levels of command, the military doctrine states that “every commander has the possibility and obligation to make decisions during battle that differ from the preliminary planning.”
Contrary to what might be expected of a man who spent 37 years in the army before reaching its top position, Eizenkot is not conservative. He is impatient to make changes and knows how much the army suffers from disciplinary problems and lack of oversight of operational decisions.
And he has no time. In January 2016 the army’s multiyear plan will be implemented, or not, depending on funding. Every branch of the IDF has a brigadier general whose task it is to mark where to slash the budget. The direction being discussed in the Kirya military headquarters’ corridors is slashing a quarter of the staff in units not at the core of military action. A quarter from the rabbinate, a quarter from the Military Advocate General, a quarter from the Education Corps.
The very public dispute between the multiyear plan and the Locker Committee report focuses on the margins, albeit broad margins – pensions and shortening the period of compulsory service in the years ahead. The IDF is vying with the civilian market and other security agencies to hire and keep quality officers. However, generally speaking, Eizenkot not only agrees with most of the Locker Committee’s recommendations, he also contributed to them when he was deputy chief of staff.
But when it comes to the IDF’s strategy there is no place for ambiguity. In the 1950s and 1960s, the army was built to face an all-out assault by all the countries on Israel’s borders, led by Egypt and assisted by Arab countries that do not have a common border with Israel, headed by Iraq. After peace with Egypt and Jordan, with Syria next in line as a “failed, disintegrating state” and with nuclear Iran on vacation until 2025, Israel’s main enemies today, according to the document, are the Islamist organizations – Islamic State, but especially Hezbollah and Hamas, although the abilities being developed and their implementation are intended in large part to meet the challenge of battle against armies and states.
Victory, according to the IDF interpretation, means “achieving diplomatic aims set for the battle in a way that will lead to the improvement of the security situation after the conflict.” However, the details of the achievements do not include bringing down Hezbollah in Lebanon or Hamas in Gaza, or long-term control of territories taken over in these arenas.
Eizenkot formulated the IDF Strategy document with the assistance of a team of officers he established in the Operations Branch. A secret version of the document was given to the top brass last month. An unclassified version, with sensitive operational and political details filtered out, was then prepared. That document is important as a binding military concept influenced by the emphases of the current chief of staff, because of its public nature, and as a kind of bond that Eizenkot will have to make good on in the coming conflicts until the end of his term.
As a graduate of the U.S. Army War College, Eizenkot brings to the IDF the dimension of “national military strategy” of the chairman of the U.S. Army Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon.
In Israel, because the government evades presentation of an overarching strategy, of which military power is only one part, the IDF has figured out what is expected of it. Thus it becomes enmeshed in internal contradictions typical of Israeli policy. The state’s national objectives, Eizenkot quotes from the 2006 report by the Meridor committee on Israel’s defense doctrine, include “ensuring the existence” of the state, and “protecting the territorial integrity and security of its citizens...”
But what is “territorial integrity,” when the status of the territories occupied by Israel in 1967 is not clear, and how does the refusal to exchange territories for peace conform to “seeking peace with its neighbors”?
Eizenkot has determined that Israel is a “state that seeks peace and to avoid conflicts.” But the word “peace” should be supplanted by the term “status quo.” Thus, “the maintenance of long periods of security calm to allow development of society, science and the economy and improve preparedness for emergency and war; creating deterrence toward the region and elements that could generate threats based on maintaining military might and determination to use it to the full extent when needed …”
Iran is mentioned as supporting Hezbollah and Hamas, not as a nuclear threat. Against “countries without a common border” with Israel, Eizenkot foresees “ongoing, multidisciplinary action,” the purpose of which is “a tangible, limited achievement to deter escalation,” whose main components are intelligence, air action, special forces and other security agencies such as the Mossad.
A basic term in Eizenkot’s doctrine is prioritizing, giving up the pretense of maintaining forces for every possible need. The Eizenkot line is the opposite of the Bar-Lev line on the Suez Canal: not standing outposts between which the enemy can break through, surround and destroy, not desperate defense of every acre, but forces relying on sophisticated means used with flexibility.
Civilians in communities threatened by attack tunnels, or by mortars and rockets, will be evacuated, in which case Hezbollah and Hamas might achieve a symbolic foothold, but they will be ejected, because priority will be given to “depriving the enemy of territorial achievements at the end of the conflict.” There will be no cease-fire until the enemy has been ejected.
Ground forces will be built to “focus on deadliness, mobility and survivability,” and will aspire to “low ratios of wear and tear due to advanced protection systems.” Commanders in the field will be “trained to act quickly when challenged (by assault or abduction), so that a situation is created immediately on the ground that neutralizes obstacles to a ground maneuver and causes the enemy a sense of being pursued but also retreat to the border and prevention of escalation.”
In the northern front, Eizenkot expects the Air Force and other forces to attack “tens of thousands of targets” determined in advance, while in Gaza “the objective of the building of the force is thousands of targets.” In the background, “The costs of the weaponry, intelligence and protection of the IDF are huge in the face of the operational challenge the enemy presents at much lower costs.”
The most fascinating section of Eizenkot’s doctrine deals with the chief of staff. Eizenkot states that the “general command” – i.e., the chief of staff – “is the supreme command in the IDF, the only level in the IDF that communicates with the political level and the only one authorized to translate its directives into military actions.” The document adds that the chief of staff is “the only commander in the IDF. He determines all efforts, tasks, the idea and the interaction between the chief commanders.”
“The political level [the government? The ministerial committee on defense? The defense minister? This was not stated, and not by chance] is to guide the army in dialogue with the chief of staff and in mutual consideration of the goals of the battle and the required end situation, constraints and general context. read more: http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/.premium-1.671121
As the real work of the Iran nuke deal begins, we should bear in mind the lessons of the failed North Korea nuke deal. I should know — I was there.
By Joel Wit August 14, 2015
While the debate over the landmark Iran nuclear deal will grow even more rancorous as the U.S. Congress rakes it over the coals, the real work won’t really start until afterwards: when we begin the long, arduous process of putting the agreement into practice.
Twenty years ago, my bosses at the State Department tasked me with implementing an equally controversial Rubik’s cube-esque nuclear deal between the United States and North Korea. I didn’t understand then how difficult the job would be; and looking back, I see how many of the lessons I learned then could help whoever is asked to implement the Iran deal.
After a simmering crisis over Pyongyang’s weapons program almost triggered a second Korean War in June 1994, we reached the North Korea agreement, known as the Agreed Framework .. https://www.armscontrol.org/documents/af , which was seen by former President Bill Clinton’s administration as a significant foreign-policy achievement. Like the Iran deal, it too involved a nuclear agreement with a recalcitrant rogue state — the denuclearization of the North in exchange for large-scale energy assistance, including two modern nuclear reactors. Also involved were a sometimes contentious American partner, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and a hostile Congress.
The deal eventually collapsed but not before staving off our worst nightmare: a North Korea capable of producing enough fissile material for 75 bombs by the early 2000s.
The deal eventually collapsed but not before staving off our worst nightmare: a North Korea capable of producing enough fissile material for 75 bombs by the early 2000s. Instead, it barely had enough material for five bombs when the collapse came in January 2003. Pyongyang’s bomb production program is only now getting back on its feet with experts projecting that it will produce anywhere from 20 to 100 weapons by 2020.
Without question, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, regarding the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear program — as it’s formally known — is in our national interest. On its merits alone, the deal will head off the near-term threat of an Iran armed with nuclear weapons. But even more important is, as U.S. President Barack Obama said .. http://www.wsj.com/articles/obama-challenges-mindset-of-force-1438815172 .. in commentary following his American University speech, that the United States underestimates “our power when we restrict it to just our military power.” Diplomacy can serve American interests.
While the JCPOA is in our national interest, its success will require rigorous attention to implementation. The JCPOA is, to its credit, a far more detailed agreement. Coming in at a hefty 159 pages .. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2165388-iran-deal-text.html .. of provisions, clauses, sub-provisions and sub-clauses, the JCPOA edges out many uncertainties about what needs to be done. That’s versus the four-page Agreed Framework that was essentially a phased roadmap with tasks for both countries to perform every step of the way. The JCPOA’s complexity, however, covering a much wider scope of activities than the North Korea agreement — such as extensive on-site inspections and restrictions on Iranian procurement activities — will create added challenges, making it all the more important that we understand the past. As we gear up for the long implementation process, here are some of the hard lessons I learned from my experience.
Organize for success
A nuclear deal with a rogue state should not be treated as “business as usual.” Organizing for success means appointing a senior implementation czar (or should I say shah?) to lead the charge, something we didn’t have until four years into the North Korea deal. That person should have access to the secretary of state and the president, engage with the Iranian leadership, work closely with other involved countries and the IAEA, charged with inspections, and manage relations with a hostile Congress. This czar also needs a “war room,” particularly as implementation starts to take off, stocked with representatives from the White House, State Department, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, and the intelligence community, to monitor developments and react quickly.
In the Agreed Framework, we established a new international organization known as the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization .. http://www.kedo.org/ .. to handle key implementation tasks. Despite employing a permanent staff, its work was difficult, time-consuming, and unpredictable. The Iran deal provides for a less elaborate organizational approach, in the form of a Joint Commission — essentially a committee that will meet periodically. That’s a good start, but we should take added precautions. For example, the Joint Commission should meet continuously until the first deadline in the agreement (“Implementation Day”) to ensure work moves forward and to serve as a multilateral focal point for problem solving. Depending on how implementation proceeds in this initial phase, the partners may also want to consider further adjustments to strengthen the commission’s performance over the long haul and make sure it has access to the expertise and resources it will need.
Hit the ground running, not stumbling
Less obvious but almost as important will be dealing effectively with seemingly mundane “implementing agreements” covering the legal, logistical, and technical “nuts and “bolts” necessary to get joint projects off the ground. Big deals sometimes falter because of equally big problems. But it’s also possible to “die a death by a thousand cuts.” Implementation can go south even when seemingly small things are overlooked or ignored.
With the North Korea agreement, we managed to close the big deal but then got bogged down negotiating a series of small technical, legal, and logistical implementing agreements with Pyongyang and our allies. For example, the United States agreed to deliver 500,000 tons of heavy fuel oil every year to the North. But then we had to negotiate not only a schedule for deliveries but also the technical specifications for the type of fuel oil with the North Koreans and then contract a private company to provide it. As a result, we hit the ground stumbling over the minutia of this secondary agreement instead of running.
Avoiding the Iran deal’s myriad “small” landmines will be essential. While it establishes a multilateral working group and technical provisions for preventing the Arak heavy water reactor from producing plutonium that could be used to build a nuclear bomb, the partners will still face the difficult task of producing a document that defines their different near-term responsibilities. Other potential flashpoints are the project to convert the Fordow enrichment facility into a nuclear, physics, and technology center, which will likely be a joint effort between Russia and Iran, and Iran’s shipment of excess low-enriched uranium out of the country as mandated by the agreement. The partners will have to closely monitor progress in making these arrangements and be prepared to react quickly if talks begin to bog down in the detailed minutia.
Keep your friends close…
Dealing with your friends can sometimes be as dicey as dealing with your foes. But the former will be essential if we’re to keep Iran’s feet to the fire. Implementation of the Agreed Framework was slow, not just because of problems with the North Koreans but also because it was sometimes hard to reach consensus with our two main partners, South Korea and Japan, over a raft of issues, particularly the financial, technical, and other details of jumpstarting the agreement’s multibillion-dollar nuclear reactor project. Today’s challenge will be even greater, given Washington’s testy relationships with Beijing and Moscow.
First, successful diplomacy will require extending past close cooperation with our European friends on negotiating strategy to new implementation challenges, such as the lifting of sanctions, dealing with potential compliance problems, and resolving disputes. Second, we can’t ignore the other players. One key task will be working with Russia and China to make sure their companies respect restrictions in the agreement on “dual-use” technology for civilian or military purposes that could, for example, contribute to producing enriched uranium or plutonium.
And your enemies closer
The Iran deal does the Agreed Framework one better. It not only gives us positive leverage over Tehran, since it has to enact the deal’s restrictions on its nuclear program in order to secure the agreement’s economic and other benefits, but it also establishes a mechanism for addressing any potential cheating and snapback provisions for sanctions in the event of a major violations — something we didn’t have in the Agreed Framework.
History tells us that well-conceived contingency plans for dealing with violations are essential. The plans themselves may amount to nothing, but planning is everything .. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=10951 , to paraphrase former President Dwight Eisenhower. The Agreed Framework collapsed because former President George W. Bush’s administration was caught flat-footed by Pyongyang’s development of a uranium enrichment program for producing bombs in violation of the Agreed Framework. (U.S. intelligence had detected suspicious activities in 1998, and the Clinton administration warned its successor of the potential danger in 2001.) When Pyongyang withdrew from the agreement and restarted its nuclear program in early 2003 after being accused by Washington of cheating on its commitments, all the administration could do was sulk and revert back to talks.
Most importantly, the North Korea experience teaches us that technical agreements built on political quicksand can be tenuous.
Most importantly, the North Korea experience teaches us that technical agreements built on political quicksand can be tenuous. The Agreed Framework suffered because we couldn’t insulate its implementation from the lingering Cold War hostility on the Korean Peninsula, failing to recognize the critical importance of improving U.S.-DPRK relations. When we reached a crisis in 1998, in part because of Pyongyang’s first long-range rocket test, which did not violate the agreement but called into question its true intentions, it became clear that improving political relations was essential to saving the framework. Then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright started that process by traveling to Pyongyang. And President Clinton considered going there, a bold step that would have propelled the two countries further down that road, building a firmer foundation for implementation. But time ran out on his administration.
In short, without establishing stronger ties beyond the narrow confines of the Iran agreement, a lethal combination of violations and political hostility could undermine implementation and even result in its collapse, just like it did with North Korea.
It ain’t over until it’s over
The Iran deal may turn out to be the foreign-policy equivalent of Obamacare, with opponents seeking to destroy it even after losing the congressional debate. In the case of North Korea, Republicans in Congress continued to undercut our leadership by limiting U.S. funding for its implementation .. http://38north.org/2015/05/jlewis051415/ . When they won back the White House in 2000, Republican neoconservatives in the new administration seized on North Korea’s breaching the agreement to “shatter” the Agreed Framework by presenting Pyongyang with an ultimatum — we aren’t going to talk to you anymore until you come clean.
That possibility exists today, particularly with a presidential campaign underway in which Republican candidates will try to outdo each other to condemn the deal. Mike Huckabee’s risible comment about leading Jews to the “oven door” is only the opening salvo. The nakedly partisan nature of the attacks may shore up Democratic support for the agreement, while our multilateral partners will oppose any politically driven moves to undermine it.
Still, we should take steps to further erode the opposition’s support. One possibility would be to take a page out of the Cold War arms control experience .. https://fas.org/pir-pubs/evolution-senate-arms-control-observer-group/ .. by creating a bipartisan “Iran Observer Group,” made up of members of Congress who would be briefed regularly on implementation, engage in candid and confidential exchanges of ideas and information with government officials, and meet informally with other parties, including the Iranians. The group’s effectiveness may be limited, however, by the sharp partisan divide in Congress today, a divide that didn’t exist during the final years of the Cold War.
Implementation of a nuclear deal with a rogue state is a dirty job, but someone has to do it. That was certainly the case with the Agreed Framework, but unfortunately we didn’t have past lessons to learn from. Today, it’s a different story. But unless those pitfalls are clearly understood, the chances for success are likely to dramatically decline.
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