The Obama administration has been campaigning on behalf of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran since it was announced last week—even as the exact details of the proposed deal are still unclear. What we do know is that the JCPOA will turn Iran into a nuclear threshold state. Even Obama says so. The deal pushes Iran’s breakout time back to a year, Obama told NPR, but that’s only for the first ten years. “In Year 13, 14, 15,” Obama said, “they have advanced centrifuges that enrich uranium fairly rapidly, and at that point, the breakout times would have shrunk almost down to zero.”
In other words, the deal guarantees that a future White House is going to have to deal with an Iranian bomb within at least 15 years.
This afternoon the administration tried to do some damage control, with spokesperson Marie Harf ”clarifying” Obama’s comments in a press briefing. What the president meant, said Harf (scroll to 9:25), is that the breakout time will be zero after 13 years if there is not an agreement. As one reporter deftly noted, Harf’s attempt at a clarification seemed to contradict the very point of striking a deal: If the breakout time is 2-3 months now, how is it that without a deal it will take Iran not 2-3 months, but 13 years to get to zero breakout time?
As Bret Stephens wrote this week, it’s hard not to conclude that the White House is playing to obfuscate in order to throw critics off the scent. And it’s true that the administration has been misleading the American public as well as U.S. allies like Israel the last several years, but there’s also the fact that administration officials are making stuff up as they go along. What they know about the proposed deal is that the president wants to secure his foreign policy legacy and this is how he intends to do it—even if they don’t know exactly what the agreement stipulates and signifies.
Here are links to several articles, approaching the issue from different angles, that explain what’s wrong with the JCPOA and why the White House should hold out for a better agreement with the regime in Tehran.
—Mark Dubowitz, executive director at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and Annie Fixler, a policy analyst at FDD, cut right to the heart of the matter when they note that even if the deal does push the breakout time back to a year, that may not help stop a state sponsor of terror from acquiring a nuclear weapon. “We don’t have the best track record stopping countries from developing nukes (we didn’t stop the Soviet Union, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and we seriously underestimated Iraq’s nuclear weapons development in 1990 and then went to war when we seriously overestimated it in 2003); and our current abilities, according to Obama’s own Defense Department, are “either inadequate, or more often, do not exist.”
—Perhaps the clearest and easiest to follow critique of the proposed deal comes from a party with quite a bit at stake—the government of Israel. On Monday Israel’s minister of Strategic Affairs Yuval Steinitz released a document asking ten (so far unanswered) questions about the JCPOA, such as: Why are sanctions that took years to put in place being removed almost immediately? Why doesn’t the framework deal with Iran’s intercontinental missile program, whose sole purpose is to carry nuclear payloads? Will the deal not encourage nuclear proliferation in the Middle East?
Steinitz recommended changes to the deal that would make a final deal “more reasonable,” like: “Barring further Iranian R&D on advanced centrifuges; significantly reducing the number of centrifuges Iran would have available to press back into service if it violates the deal; shuttering the Fordo underground enrichment facility; requiring Iran’s compliance in detailing previous nuclear activities with possible military dimensions; shipping its stockpile of lower-enriched uranium out of the country; and ensuring ‘anywhere, anytime’ inspections of Iran’s facilities.
—The Associated Press offers a notably clear-eyed analysis explaining the potential problems with the deal. “Could Iran cheat? Possibly. Would the U.S or anyone else be able to respond in time? In theory, yes. Are they prepared to use military force? Questionable. Would a final deal settle global fears about Iran’s intentions? Almost surely, no.”
“The limits are vague on Iran’s research and development of advanced technology that could be used for producing nuclear weapons. Inspectors still might not be able to enter Iranian military sites where nuclear work previously took place. The Americans and Iranians already are bickering over how fast economic sanctions on Iran would be relaxed. And Obama’s assertion that the penalties could always be snapped back into force is undermined by the U.S. fact sheet describing a ‘dispute resolution process’ enshrined in the agreement.”
—More detailed analysis comes from Olli Heinonen, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s former top official for monitoring nuclear proliferation. In an interview with the Times of Israel, Heinonen explained how the current framework is weak on “Iran coming clean about its entire nuclear program heretofore, including the actual number of centrifuges in operation. Such information, Heinonen says, is of central importance to monitors’ ability to enforce and monitor the current nuclear program.”
If the Iranians don’t come clean on the full dimensions of their program, Heinonen cautioned, “You may have a combination of secret and non-secret development.” Accordingly, with secret dimensions to the program, Tehran would be able to conceal certain aspects of the program and manage a breakout much more quickly than in a year’s time. “One must be careful with timeliness,” said Heinonen, “it is quite a challenge to maintain one-year breakout time for the known and the unknown,” he warned. “There is never absolute assurance about activities and undeclared material, and there are other examples from the past in which intelligence was unable to find nuclear projects.”
—A Washington Post editorial sets out clearly how the deal falls “well short of the goals originally set by the Obama administration. None of Iran’s nuclear facilities — including the Fordow center buried under a mountain — will be closed. Not one of the country’s 19,000 centrifuges will be dismantled. Tehran’s existing stockpile of enriched uranium will be ‘reduced’ but not necessarily shipped out of the country. In effect, Iran’s nuclear infrastructure will remain intact…. That’s a long way from the standard set by President Barack Obama in 2012 when he declared that ‘the deal we’ll accept’ with Iran is that they end their nuclear program’ and ‘abide by the U.N. resolutions that have been in place.’”
—In Politico, the former special advisor to the Director of Central Intelligence for Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, Charles Duelfer, explains that the agreement would be vulnerable to the greed of other international actors, particularly Vladimir Putin. If the Russians, among others, cheated when it came to monitoring Saddam Hussein’s activities, you can be sure they’ll do the same with Iran.
Saddam, writes Duelfer, gave some members of the Security Council “a stake in his survival. We know all this from debriefings of Saddam and his top lieutenants following the 2003 war as well as from the regime documents we obtained, particularly those concerning disbursement of oil allocations during the so-called Oil-for-Food program…At the same time as inspectors were struggling to gain access to sites in Iraq, some members of the Security Council were strategizing with Baghdad on how to get rid of sanctions. Saddam knew that some members of the Security Council would not vote to authorize force against Iraq. His downside was thus limited. He worked to maximize his upside, i.e. get the sanctions officially removed, but alternatively cause them to collapse. The role of Russia stands out in this regard.”
“If I were John Kerry,” writes Duelfer, “I would not want to be defending a deal that depends upon Vladimir Putin.”
