In Re: Friedman on the Iran Deal

This post isn’t intended so much as a fisking of Tom Friedman’s most recent column on the Obama Administration’s incipient deal with Iran as much as an interlinear commentary.

From the minute Iran detected that the U.S. was unwilling to use its overwhelming military force to curtail Tehran’s nuclear program — and that dates back to the George W. Bush administration, which would neither accept Iran’s right to a nuclear fuel cycle nor structure a military or diplomatic option to stop it — no perfect deal overwhelmingly favorable to America and its allies was ever going to emerge from negotiations with Iran. The balance of power became too equal.

That is absolutely true, insightful, and I wonder if Mr. Friedman or, indeed, the president understands the larger implications of that on our entire deterrence posture. Successful deterrence depends on several components the most notable being a) you’ve got to have the ability to back up a threat and b) the other party must believe you’ll follow through on a threat. We have more than enough ability to back up any threat but both the Bush and Obama Administrations have done their darnedest to convince Iran in particular (but not limited to Iran) that we won’t use it which undermines the very idea of deterrence. Kiss deterrence, non-proliferation and any number of other perennials in our defense policy good bye. They have been inoperative for some time.

In both the cases of the Bush Administration and the Obama Administration that’s incredibly ironic. How could anyone doubt that George W. Bush was willing to use force? Or that Barack Obama wouldn’t (given Libya, the “Afghan surge”, the drone strike program, etc.)? And yet that’s what’s happened.

Some of that’s inevitable in the modern world when you have a country like the United States in which national deliberations on matters of state are carried on in the public media. President Obama’s bold talk without the will to follow through, cf. Syria, Russia, and Iran just to name a few, probably hasn’t helped.

But there are degrees of imperfect, and the diplomatic option structured by the Obama team — if properly implemented and augmented by muscular diplomacy — serves core American interests better than any options I hear coming from the deal’s critics: It prevents Iran from producing the fissile material to break out with a nuclear weapon for 15 years and creates a context that could empower the more pragmatic forces inside Iran over time — at the price of constraining, but not eliminating, Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and sanctions relief that will strengthen Tehran as a regional power.

As I’ve said before, it only ensures that Iran will not “break out with a nuclear weapon for 15 years” if you don’t believe they have a nuclear weapons development program. In other words, the deal is only worth having if it’s unnecessary.

Supporting this deal doesn’t make you Neville Chamberlain; opposing it doesn’t make you Dr. Strangelove. Both sides have legitimate arguments.

I agree with that, too. But try and convince the partisans of one side or another of it. As I’ve said for weeks, it’s neither the parousia nor a disaster. My main concern is the prospect of the sanctions lifting without our getting enough for it.

That would be a mistake that would isolate us, not Iran, and limit our choices to going to war or tolerating an Iran much closer to nuclear breakout, without any observers or curbs on the ground, and with crumbling sanctions.

People keep saying that the sanctions are crumbling but no one is producing any evidence of that. I have no doubt that China, Russia, and Germany are chafing at the restrictions the sanctions impose. And in the absence of any other activity on our part I agree that the sanctions will evaporate. But those aren’t the only alternatives. IMO we can maintain the sanctions regime as long as we care to. And that’s the crux of it.

“The nuclear agreement is a deal, not a grand bargain,” argued the Wilson Center’s Robert Litwak, author of “Iran’s Nuclear Chess.” “Obama and Iran’s supreme leader Khamenei are each making a tacit bet. Obama is defending the deal in transactional terms (that it addresses a discrete urgent challenge), but betting that it will empower Iran’s moderate faction and put the country on a more favorable societal trajectory. Khamenei is making the opposite bet — that the regime can benefit from the transactional nature of the agreement (sanctions relief) and forestall the deal’s potentially transformational implications to preserve Iran’s revolutionary deep state.”

We can, though, do things to increase the odds that the bet goes our way: 1. Don’t let this deal become the Obamacare of arms control, where all the energy goes into the negotiation but then the implementing tools — in this case the verification technologies — don’t work. President Obama should appoint a respected military figure to oversee every aspect of implementing this deal.

He must be talking about some other Obama Administration. Can you name any of its major accomplishments that hasn’t been subjected to benign neglect? Until the brink of disaster or beyond? I will not speculate on why the administration’s attention span is so short. It may just be the affliction of most administrations—the inability to walk and chew gum at the same time. But pick a subject. ARRA. PPACA. The multiple IRS transgressions. They were all allowed to go on auto-pilot.

2. Congress should pass a resolution authorizing this and future presidents to use force to prevent Iran from ever becoming a nuclear weapons state. Iran must know now that the U.S. president is authorized to destroy — without warning or negotiation — any attempt by Tehran to build a bomb.

That would almost certainly be viewed by China and Russia as a violation of our treaty obligations. I also feel compelled to note that such action would not meet the standard for a just war.

3. Focus on the Iranian people. The celebrations of this deal in Iran tell us that “the Iranian people want to be South Korea, not North Korea,” notes Karim Sadjadpour, Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment. We should reach out to them in every way — visas, exchanges and scholarships — to strengthen their voices. Visiting Iran taught me that Iranians have had enough Islamic fundamentalism to know they want less of it and they’ve had enough democracy to know they want more of it. (Iran’s hard-line Revolutionary Guards know this well, which is why they are still trying to persuade Iran’s supreme leader to reject this deal and its opening to the world.)

I wonder if he means as we did following the 2009-2010 demonstrations in Iran? The sad reality is that the mullahs are willing to do whatever they need to do to hold on to power. The opinion of the people is irrelevant.

4. Avoid a black-and-white view of the Middle East. The idea that Iran is everywhere our enemy and the Sunni Arabs our allies is a mistake. Saudi Arabia’s leadership has been a steadfast U.S. ally in the Cold War; many Saudis are pro-American. But the Saudi leadership’s ruling bargain is toxic: It says to the Saudi people that the al-Saud tribe gets to rule and in return the Saudi Wahhabi religious establishment gets billions of dollars to transform the face of Sunni Islam from an open and modernizing faith to a puritanical, anti-women, anti-Shiite, anti-pluralistic one. The Saudis have lost control of this puritanical-Salafist transformation of Islam, and it has mutated into the ideology that inspired the 9/11 hijackers — 15 of 19 of whom were Saudis — and the Islamic State.

Do we really want to engage in a Kremlinology of the religious, tribal, ethnic, and political factions of the Middle East? I have a much simpler strategy in mind: he who sups with the devil should use a long spoon.