Obama sat down in the Oval Office on Saturday with his preferred midwife, the reliable sycophant Thomas Friedman, to expound for 46 minutes why the recent tentative agreement negotiated with Iran over its nuclear program is the best deal possible. Friedman's account, "The Obama Doctrine and Iran," was featured prominently on the home page of The New York Times yesterday; at the top of the story is a video of Friedman's interview of Obama in its entirety.
I watched all of it last night. And what I can tell you if you have yet to view the interview but plan to do so is prepare to be aggravated. Obama wholeheartedly embraces all the lies that have the resulted in the current ongoing destruction of the Middle East, principal of which is that Iran is a hostile, terrorist aggressor in the region and that America's "friends and allies," Israel and the Gulf sheikhdoms, are positioned in a merely defensive posture.
This is of course a Bizarro world retelling of facts on the ground. The fact is that Israel is an undeclared nuclear power with an arsenal of over 500 warheads that unilaterally attacks its neighbors in the region (Syria and Lebanon), while the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is the global export king of Wahhabi extremism -- from Fredrikstad, Norway to Bloomington, Minnesota, and myriad points in between -- the chief source of terrorism in the world today. It is Iran and its allies in Hezbollah and Syria that are playing defense.
Not once in Obama's discussion with Friedman did I hear a pitch to the American people as to why peace and prosperity with Iran is in their best interests. Most of the pitching was done to Israel, more specifically the hard-line American Jews who have been funding an exodus to the Republican Party; then after that an obsequious sales job to the despotic Gulf kleptarchies that Obama slickly re-branded the "Sunni states."
In both cases -- Israel and the Gulf monarchies -- Obama made a significant commitment to their defense and territorial integrity. Peter Baker in his frontpage recapitulation of the interview this morning, "President Obama Calls Preliminary Iran Nuclear Deal ‘Our Best Bet’," highlights the commitment to Israel at the top of his story -- "we've got their backs" -- but ignores the commitment to the Wahhabi despots entirely.
This omission bodes ill for the future of nuclear agreement. As long as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, U.A.E., Qatar are allowed to skirt any official responsibility for instability in the region they will continue to export their maximally destabilizing terrorism. The Iranians will be blamed by the United States, the despots have their guarantee of protection from the U.S., and the endless cycle of death and destruction will continue.
In March, after the Netanyahu soft coup in his speech to a supine Congress and the Cotton letter to Iran, I thought that Obama was locked into an agreement for purely tactical domestic reasons. Failure at this stage would guarantee very little presidential leverage in his remaining two years in office. But in the last couple of weeks I thought that Kerry might walk away over the issue of how quickly sanctions would be removed.
It turns out, as Baker ably sets forth, the sanctions issue was fudged in the tentative agreement, along with the issue of how invasive inspections would be. (You'll recall from Scott Ritter that the Iraq inspections were completely compromised by spooks from Israel and the United States; that recent experience makes it hard to believe that Iran will agree to intrusive inspections of its military facilities):
Under the agreement, Iran would limit enrichment of uranium at its Natanz facility to a level useful only for civilian purposes; cut back the number of installed centrifuges by approximately two-thirds; convert its Fordo deep-underground enrichment facility into a research center; and modify its Arak heavy-water reactor to render it incapable of producing plutonium for a bomb.
But the structure of international inspections was left vague, as was the timing for lifting sanctions.
Mr. Obama said that inspectors would be able to watch “the entire nuclear chain” and that a “procurement committee” would examine Iranian imports to be sure equipment would be appropriate for peaceful nuclear uses, not a weapon. Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, he said, “can go anyplace.”
But the administration has been vague about how to define “anyplace,” and Iran has said it would not be required to allow inspections of military bases.
“Iran could object,” Mr. Obama acknowledged, “but what we have done is to try to design a mechanism whereby once those objections are heard, that is not a final veto that Iran has but in fact some sort of international mechanism will be in place that makes a fair assessment.”
Mr. Obama said sanctions would be lifted only after Iran lived up to its commitments. “There are still details to be worked out,” he said, “but I think that the basic framework calls for Iran to take the steps that it needs to around Fordo, the centrifuges and so forth. At that point, then the U.N. sanctions are suspended.”
He said the United States would “preserve the ability to snap back those sanctions if there is a violation.” And he added that separate sanctions imposed for other reasons, namely Iran’s sponsorship of terrorists and its ballistic missile program, would remain in place.
Administration officials said they envisioned Iran being able to take the required steps within months or a year of an agreement, at which point nuclear-related economic sanctions would be removed. But a major sticking point in the coming months will be the issue of additional sanctions imposed for other reasons.
Mr. Obama said almost nothing about how the United States and its allies would force Iran to answer questions about suspected past work on weapons designs. For years, Iran has blocked inspectors from visiting laboratories where such work is believed to have been conducted.In the final paragraph you will notice the way forward for the neocon warmongers who want to hijack the nuclear deal. They will force Iran to answer to falsified evidence, the famous pilfered laptop containing evidence of weapons of mass destruction.
No, the game is not finished for the neocons, not by a long shot. Lindsey Graham has promised Obama that he will back off until a final agreement is revealed in June. But Obama's bowing and scraping to Bob Corker, calling the Tennessee senator who takes his orders from Israel and Saudi Arabia, a "good and decent man," is a very bad sign. Obama is weak. His interview with Friedman proves it. At this point I don't think he can deliver a final agreement.
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