Costs of Iran deal piling up

“Gen. Hamedani devoted the final years of his fruitful life to fight against anti-Islam Takfiris and fulfilled his martyrdom wish in the same front,” Khamenei was quoted as saying.

Before coming to Syria, Hamedani was a key leader of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and led the crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in 2009, an act for which he was sanctioned by the European Union.

The death in Syria of such an important figure in Iran’s Shiite Muslim theocracy is one of many recent signs that the nuclear agreement reached July 14 in Vienna has not slowed Tehran’s aggressive policies as the Obama administration had publicly hoped.

Though President Obama and other officials have consistently downplayed the cost of his determination to focus on curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions and avoiding confronting Tehran in other areas, critics say the costs of the concessions made to meet his goal are piling up.

“Is this the progress that proponents of the Iran deal promised?” asked Senate Armed Services Chairman John McCain, R-Ariz., a leading critic of the president’s Iran policy.

“Unfortunately, Iran’s increasing malign behavior in the past few weeks is the dangerous, yet predictable consequence of the administration’s long habit of ignoring and downplaying the broader threat that Iran poses. The president needs to give up on his failed policy of acquiescing to Iranian power and start doing significantly more to counter it,” he said.

Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry and other administration officials have personally and repeatedly assured lawmakers, jittery allies in the Middle East and U.S. voters that they would turn their attention to confronting Iran’s support for terrorism, desire to destroy Israel and imperialistic forays into the Arab world once the deal was done. But a policy to do that has yet to materialize.

Meanwhile, even as Iran’s leaders mourned Hamedani, Iranian state media reported late Sunday that journalist Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post’s bureau chief in Tehran, had been convicted. Rezaian had been charged with espionage, and Iran has been thumbing its nose at attempts by Washington to free him since he was arrested in July 2014.

Obama has consistently refused to link Rezaian’s case, and the cases of three other Americans either jailed or missing in Iran, to the billions of dollars in sanctions relief promised to Iran under the nuclear deal, in spite of congressional efforts to force him to do so. Now that the deal is done, the administration finds itself without leverage to pressure Iran to release Rezaian, Christian pastor Saeed Abedini and former Marine Amir Hekmati, and account for the fate of missing former FBI agent Robert Levinson.

At the same time, one of the most controversial concessions in the deal has come back to bite the administration: the last-minute decision to agree to ending a U.N. arms embargo and restrictions on ballistic missiles to get Iran to accept curbs on its nuclear ambitions.

During two years of negotiations, Obama and his international partners agreed to keep discussions of ballistic missiles out of the nuclear talks after Tehran refused to continue them if that issue was not excluded. But then, at the last minute, they agreed to lift U.N. restrictions on ballistic missiles along with the arms embargo when Tehran, backed by Russia, suddenly brought the issue back into the talks.

The arms embargo is set to be lifted in five years, and restrictions on ballistic missiles in eight.

Still, U.S. officials insist that Iranian Defense Minister Brig. Gen. Hossein Dehqan’s announcement Sunday of the successful test of a new generation of Iranian-made long-range missile, dubbed “Emad” (Pillar), did not violate the nuclear deal, though it was seen as a violation of the U.N. resolutions still in force.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest, in keeping with longtime administration policy, noted Tuesday that “this is altogether separate from the nuclear agreement that Iran reached with the rest of the world.”

But even many Democratic lawmakers who supported the deal have found the administration’s position on Iran’s missile program hard to swallow. It was a major obstacle for administration officials in lobbying Democratic senators to prevent a vote of disapproval of the deal, even though that effort eventually succeeded.

The Emad missile has a claimed range of 900 to 1,100 miles, enough to reach Israel, and a maneuverable warhead to improve accuracy and complicate anti-missile defenses. Officials and experts are concerned that any breach by Iran of its obligations under the deal, combined with further development of its missile program, would give the theocracy in Tehran a nuclear strike capability.

That’s why the Pentagon pushed back against the last-minute concessions in the deal.

“The reason that we want to stop Iran from having an ICBM program is that ‘I’ in ICBM stands for intercontinental, which means having the capability to fly from Iran to the United States, and we don’t want that,” Defense Secretary Ash Carter told the Senate Armed Services Committee at a July 7 hearing.

“Under no circumstances should we relieve pressure on Iran relative to ballistic missile capabilities and arms trafficking,” added Gen. Martin Dempsey, then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the same hearing.

What Iran has done has exploited the Obama administration’s focus on the nuclear deal to maintain its other policies while benefiting from a cooperative attitude in the talks with the United States and other world powers, former Democrat-turned-independent Sen. Joe Lieberman told the Senate Armed Services panel last week.

“We have to learn from the Iranians. They haven’t changed anything else about their behavior and I think we should not,” he said, calling on the administration to take a harder line on Iranian troublemaking