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Obama’s Iran Framework – Dangerous to U.S., Israel & Mideast

The deal signed between the P5+1 and Iran last week over Iran’s nuclear weapons program represents a defeat for the cause of stopping Iran becoming a nuclear power, for heading off a Mideast nuclear arms race, for forestalling existential threats to Israel, even threats to America – not to mention that it will dramatically increase Iranian funding for terrorism.
[additional-authors]
April 23, 2015
The deal signed between the P5+1 and Iran last week over Iran’s nuclear weapons program represents a defeat for the cause of stopping Iran becoming a nuclear power, for heading off a Mideast nuclear arms race, for forestalling existential threats to Israel, even threats to America – not to mention that it will dramatically increase Iranian funding for terrorism.
 
The deal doesn’t dismantle Iran’s centrifuges or its nuclear facilities; doesn’t terminate Iran’s R&D on centrifuges and missiles, doesn’t provide for unimpeded inspections; doesn’t require Iranian disclosure of its weaponization program; doesn’t require the removal of Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium; and doesn’t allow inspections of military installations, like Parchin, where many experts believe nuclear R&D is in progress.
 
To the contrary, Iran will be able to continue enrichment with 5,060 centrifuges for the next decade, an active infrastructure that can raise enrichment to weaponization levels in a matter of weeks. 
 
Even Barack Obama has conceded the deal’s likely result by describing it as a “relevant fear … that in year 13, 14, 15, they have advanced centrifuges that enrich uranium fairly rapidly, and at that point the breakout times would have shrunk almost down to zero,” allowing Iran to develop nuclear weapons.
 
Worse, even if this deal stopped Iran going nuclear, Iran will receive tens of billions of dollars in sanctions relief to increase funding to terrorist groups like Hamas, Hizballah and Syria’s Assad regime. 
 
Moreover:
 
  • President Obama says the Arak plutonium facility – something only required of a nuclear weapons program – will be re-purposed. But continued construction of facility components off-site is still not outlawed. Iranian Foreign Minister, Javad Zarif has stated that Iran has agreed only to Arak being “modernized.”
  • In December 2013, President Obama said, correctly, that the Iranian underground nuclear facility at Fordow was unnecessary to any genuinely peaceful Iranian nuclear energy program. Yet he has now acquiesced in Iran’s refusal to close it and it will keep its 500 Fordow centrifuges spinning – centrifuges which can be quicklyrecalibrated for uranium enrichment. 
  • President Obama’s claims that the deal will give us access “to the entire supply chain supports Iran’s nuclear program.” How can that be, when the deal doesn’t address military installations like Parchin?
  • President Obama claims the inspections regime is “robust” and enables “unprecedented verification.” But it does neither, while Iran says inspections are “voluntary” and “temporary.” Moreover, if during 1990–2003, the UN Security Council couldn’t enforce an genuinely intrusive regime of unfettered inspections, anywhere, anytime, without prior notice, backed by a Security Council-sanctioned threatened and sometimes actual use of force in the case of Saddam’s Iraq, what confidence can we have that it will be able to do so with Iran, which is not subject to any such apparatus of inspections and force? 
  • President Obama claims that “If Iran cheats, the world will know.” But this is unlikely. Without unfettered inspections, it can cheat free from any likelihood of discovery, utilizing new, improved centrifuges in secret facilities. Olli Heinonen, a former deputy director general of the IAEA, has observed that Russia’s centrifuge program “went for years without detection despite tremendous intelligence efforts” – as did those of Iraq, North Korea, Syria and others. Even when detected, violations take more than the 12-month break-out period to be established and international action orchestrated to deal with them.
  • In any case, knowing is different from acting and what President Obama didn’t say is that the responsibility to declare a violation will rest with the UN  Security Council. As we know from bitter experience dealing with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the Security Council is hostage to a single veto – for example, that of Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
  • For the same reason, President Obama claim that sanctions to be “snapped back into place” in the event of Iranian violations is absurd. Suspended sanctions can seldom be restored, especially if Security Council permanent members have other ideas. Even if, with hard work and good luck, certain sanctions are reinstated, it would take many months for this to occur and at least a year for them to take their toll on Tehran – more than the 12 months’ proposed break-out time.
  • Iran’s Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) program, whose only purpose is to carry nuclear warheads and would give Iran the capacity to strike the U.S., is no part of the deal.
 
Accordingly, this looks like a replay of the disastrous sequence of negotiations and international concessions with North Korea, which resulted in it becoming a nuclear power. Replaying such  negotiations, which would enable Iran to continue its internal repression and external aggression, its murder of journalists and dissidents, it funding of global terror, its efforts to eliminate Israel, do not represent an effort to stop Iran. They represent an effort to reach an agreement at any cost, including capitulation to Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Indeed, Obama’s opposition to a Senate vote on this agreement proves that it will be a dangerous agreement.
 
Morton A. Klein is National President of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA). Dr. Daniel Mandel is Director of the ZOA’ s Center for Middle East Policy and author of H.V. Evatt & the Creation of Israel (Routledge, London, 2004).
 

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