The latest from the negotiations with Iran over a deal blessing its nuclear program indicates that the catastrophe should arrive on schedule, before the March 31 deadline. In the New York Times Michael Gordon reports that “Iran’s top negotiator says accord can be drafted.” Gordon’s report should be read in the light of Adam Kredo’s March 26 Free Beacon story “US caves to key Iranian demands as nuke deal comes together.”
None of this comes as any surprise. So far as we can tell, the Obama administration has capitulated to every significant demand made by the Islamic Republic of Iran. Negotiations that were premised on the objective of foreclosing Iran’s path to nuclear weapons will produce an agreement that finances and facilitates them. As Winston Churchill said of the Munich Agreement, “we have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road.”
Unlike the British in 1938, however, most of us have our eyes open. We are not fooled by Hassan Rouhani or the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran. We do not share the vision of the Supreme Leader of the United States
The negotiations have produced one surprise this weekend: the defection of a close media aide to Iranian President Rouahani. The defecting man is Amir Hossein Mottaghi. The Telegraph reports that Motaghi managed public relations for Mr Rouhani during his 2013 election campaign and is said to have quit his job at the Iran Student Correspondents Association. He has sought political asylum in Switzerland after traveling to Lausanne to cover the nuclear talks.
Mottaghi appeared on an Iranian opposition television channel based in London. In his television interview, Mottaghi nicely summed up the negotiations: “The US negotiating team are mainly there to speak on Iran’s behalf with other members of the 5+1 countries and convince them of a deal.”
Omri Ceren emailed two reports from Lausanne overnight. Here is the first:
The P5+1 meeting with Iran got out a little while ago. Total running time: 1 hour, 14 minutes.Functionally nothing happened this weekend from a news perspective – very little came out of talks, foreign ministers were still en route, etc. – which gave people plenty of time to muse over the Iran talks debate in the broadest terms. Short version: a 1 year breakout time is too short, and what the P5+1 are agreeing to won’t even be a 1 year breakout time.1 year breakout not enough – Last week I sent around an email on this, which had the Hayden/Heinonen/Takeyh overview on why a one-year breakout time is too short to prevent an Iranian dash across the finish line. . The theoretical scenarios saying that the US could act in a year don’t work when you introduce real-world constraints: how long it takes the IAEA to detect cheating, how the IAEA referral process works, how the U.S. intelligence community would go about confirming a breakout, how the diplomatic debate would play out, etc. And even if the U.S. could mobilize in a year, there wouldn’t be any options available short of military action, because sanctions take much more than a year to being to work. So: detection time plus action time equals more than one yearIt won’t even be 1 year – Then over the weekend Olli Heinonen – former IAEA deputy director-general – published a primer on how breakout calculations work (posted here). You should read the whole thing – it’s tightly written, and as good an explanation of this issue as I’ve read. He expands on the original argument that 1 year breakout time is inadequate, and gets into the nitty-gritty of IAEA detection and action. But he also adds the second part of the argument, about how the breakout time won’t even be 1 year. Given all the concessions that are likely involving centrifuges and R&D, it’s no longer tenable to suggest that it would take the Iranians that long to break out or sneak out. The way he describes the sneakout scenario is particularly specific.
Here is the second of Omri’s two messages, referring to the proceedings today:
It’s probably a make or break day in Lausanne. Technically the deadline is tomorrow night, but the parties should know by today whether they’ll get to an agreement in time. The full P5+1 met last night – Lavrov and Hammond didn’t get in until fairly late – and there’s a full meeting going on right now between the P5+1 and Iran. If things proceed the way they’re supposed to, they’ll get out of that meeting, then there will be a series of bilateral meetings, then they’ll be able to announce they’ve made it by tonight – in which case everyone will head off to Gevena for the announcement either this evening or tomorrow morning (and incidentally, look out for an email in a few hours on “why Geneva,” because that actually has the potential to become a Thing).The NYT has the scoop driving the morning here. The Iranians appear to have pulled a very heavy-handed, last minute bait-and-switch. They bargained up their centrifuge numbers for months by saying that they’d ship out whatever material they enriched, the assumption being that who cares how much uranium they enrich to 3.5% as long as they don’t have it physically available to enrich further. Now that they’ve ratcheted up the number of centrifuges to over 6,000, they’re saying they won’t ship out the material.In addition to being disastrous from a policy perspective, because it makes securing a 1 year breakout time almost impossible, it’s going to be a political problem: it looks like the administration got outplayed by Persian negotiators… again.The NYT says the administration is doing damage control by floating that the Iranians will “dilute” their stockpile. Usually that implies they’ll commit to downblending their enriched stock – e.g. taking 20% enriched uranium and make it into 5% – but that doesn’t seem right in this context. The Iranians shouldn’t be enriching above 3.5% under a final deal, and what would downblending look like in this scenario anyway? The Iranians would enrich uranium, then dilute it, then enrich it, then dilute it? It’s the equivalent of digging a hole and filling it back up. How would they justify running the centrifuges?Instead, “diluting” might mean that the Iranians will commit to turning the new uranium into uranium oxide, a form in which it can’t be enriched further. But that’s a chemical process that takes at most a couple of weeks to reverse, which means the Iranians would be making multiple nuke bombs’ worth of enriched uranium and putting it on the shelf. The debate over reversal has the potential to get mind-numbingly technical (right after the JPOA was announced, supporters of the deal tried to argue that Iran can’t reverse the oxidation process because of a hurdle involving piping technology; I ran the argument by one of the IAEA guys, who responded by literally laughing out loud and saying “how do they know what the Iranians have?”) But the debate isn’t really a close one. Here’s one assessment by Mark Hibbs, who is one of the top supporters of an agreement with Iran:“Yadlin, cited as having told the Institute for National Security Studies that in Iran the reconversion of U3O8 to produce bomb fuel could be ‘completed in less than a week,’ walked back this estimate in a subsequent radio interview to ‘between one and two weeks.’ That’s more realistic. Experience from the uranium conversion industry and R&D sector outside Iran would suggest that Iran might be able to convert about 100 kg of U3O8 to UF6 in about two weeks–provided, however, that the work was carried out in a small facility using a dry process without purification, whereby perhaps three batches would be consecutively processed.”Either way – downblending or oxidation – makes it difficult to see how the parties could stretch Iran’s breakout time to a year. Combine this new position with the Iranians’ demand to keep their fortified underground enrichment bunker at Fordow open, and the administration’s sales pitch on the Hill becomes that much harder.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/03/losin-in-lausanne-5.php
The Washington Post reports that a “clear majority” of Americans support President Obama’s proposed nuclear deal with Iran:
By a nearly 2 to 1 margin, Americans support the notion of striking a deal with Iran that restricts the nation’s nuclear program in exchange for loosening sanctions, a new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds.
As always, we need to know what question was asked. Here it is:
Q: Thinking now about the situation with Iran – would you support or oppose an agreement in which the United States and other countries would lift major economic sanctions against Iran, in exchange for Iran restricting its nuclear program in a way that makes it harder for it to produce nuclear weapons?
So the question assumes that Iran would, in fact, “restrict its nuclear program” so that it would be “harder for it to produce nuclear weapons.” Heck, I might answer that question Yes, in the abstract. The WaPo poll also shows that most respondents doubt whether an agreement would, in fact, prevent Iran from going nuclear. Presumably, hardly any of those telephoned by the pollsters realized that the objective of the agreement, assuming that Iran abides by it–a laughable assumption–is to extend the time it will take Iran to build a bomb to one year. Even assuming that objective could be achieved, which most experts do not believe, it would be a small payoff for ending sanctions, which will entrench the mullahs’ regime and increase the resources they can devote to nuclear enrichment and ICBM development, which will not be addressed in the prospective deal.
For the Obama administration, this is all about politics (unless Obama really is the Manchurian President, and he wants to empower Islamic extremists). The Hill reminds us how disconnected from reality many observers are:
Obama entered the talks as part of an effort to shift the U.S. posture in the Middle East toward diplomatic engagement — and not military involvement.
Sure, it’s either this or invade a couple of countries. What could be simpler?
“Stopping Iran’s nuclear weapons program would be a major accomplishment for this or any other administration,” said Robert Einhorn, a former non-proliferation adviser at the State Department under Obama.
But of course, “stopping Iran’s nuclear weapons program” isn’t even contemplated by the agreement being hammered out in Switzerland.
“There is no getting around Iran’s rise,” said Hillary Mann Leverett, a former Iran adviser at the National Security Council under George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. A deal would allow the U.S. to “recover its strategic position in the Middle East, which is now in free fall.”
I agree that our influence is now in free fall, but why, exactly, would a bad deal with Iran, which allows it to continue enriching uranium and building ICBMs, permit us to “recover our strategic position”? This is known as a non sequitur.
There are two principal parties to the negotiations that are now reaching a climax. The Iranian mullahs are determined to build nuclear weapons and ICBMs that will carry those bombs to the United States, the “Great Satan.” The Obama administration is determined to sign a paper agreement that will boost Obama in the polls for a week or two. (This is the most charitable assumption.) For the radical clerics, a year, ten years, twenty years mean little: they can wait. Who do you think is going to come out on top in that negotiation?
If, ten years from now, fifteen or twenty Iranian ICBMs deliver nuclear bombs to Manhattan, and Chicago, and Los Angeles, and elsewhere in the “Great Satan,” no one will remember that by a two to one margin, Americans favored an agreement that would “restrict [Iran's] nuclear program.”
No comments:
Post a Comment