About-Face by Obama on Senate Foreign Relations Bill Big Win for Iran

Yesterday after seeing the news (Jonathan Weisman and Peter Baker, "Obama Yields, Allowing Congress Say on Iran Nuclear Deal") of Obama's about-face on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Iran sanctions review bill I said to a coworker, the only one in a office of more than a dozen people who I know at least keeps an eye on the headlines, "This guy is even weaker than I thought." 

What other conclusion can we draw? Obama and Kerry had been promising to fight to the last gasp any encroachment by the Senate on the administration's agreement with Iran on its nuclear program only to meekly acquiesce to a Congressional role after a vote count revealed overwhelming Democratic support for Senate Foreign Relations Chair Bob Corker's draft legislation.

But this morning I think differently -- not that Team Obama is any stronger, but that Team Obama clearly won this round by its tactical retreat. A protracted fight over a veto of a sanctions review bill would have revealed a president without a party and accentuated Obama's lame duckness, at the same time undercutting negotiations on a final agreement in the remaining two months of the P5+1 talks in Switzerland. As Weisman and Baker point out:

White House officials blitzed Congress in the days after the framework of a nuclear deal was announced, making 130 phone calls to lawmakers, but quickly came to the conclusion that the legislation could not be blocked altogether. 

Moreover, officials increasingly worried that an unresolved fight could torpedo the next phase of negotiations with Iran. 

“Having this lingering uncertainty about whether we could deliver on our side of the deal was probably a deal killer,” said a senior administration official, who asked for anonymity to describe internal deliberations.

No, Obama won this one. The sanctions review period was cut in half from 60 days to 30 (though after the time for a presidential veto and Congressional response is added, it comes to 52 days) and the White House does not have to certify every 90 days that Iran is not sponsoring terrorism. In the end, sometime in July, Congress will get to vote on the nuclear deal. A majority will vote against lifting sanctions. Obama will veto, and he will only need 34 Democrats in the Senate to maintain that veto, something I think he will be able to do:

As Congress considers any accord on a very short timetable, it would essentially be able to vote on an eventual end to sanctions, and then later take up the issue depending on whether Iran has met its own obligations. But if it rejected the agreement, Mr. Obama could veto that legislation — and it would take only 34 senators to sustain the veto, meaning that Mr. Obama could lose upward of a dozen Democratic senators and still prevail.

Proof that Obama got the best of the deal is the testy Congressional insistence that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee got everything it originally intended, which is clearly not the case:

White House officials insisted they extracted crucial last-minute concessions. Republicans — and many Democrats — said the president simply got overrun.

“We’re involved here. We have to be involved here,” said Senator Benjamin L. Cardin of Maryland, the committee’s ranking Democrat, who served as a bridge between the White House and Republicans as they negotiated changes in the days before the committee’s vote on Tuesday. “Only Congress can change or permanently modify the sanctions regime.”

***

“We’ve gone from a piece of legislation that the president would veto to a piece of legislation that’s undergone substantial revision such that it’s now in the form of a compromise that the president would be willing to sign,” Mr. Earnest said. “That would certainly be an improvement.”

Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee and the committee’s chairman, had a far different interpretation. As late as 11:30 a.m., in a classified briefing at the Capitol, Mr. Kerry was urging senators to oppose the bill. The “change occurred when they saw how many senators were going to vote for this, and only when that occurred,” Mr. Corker said.

Mr. Cardin said that the “fundamental provisions” of the legislation had not changed.

An important point to weigh here is that Obama would not have made this tactical retreat unless he had vetted it with his Iranian counterparts. The mild response by President Rouhani to the 19-0 Senate Foreign Relations vote shows that the Iranians can live with the bill and that the P5+1 talks will move along to a final agreement.

This does not mean that Obama will be able to deliver a final agreement even if he can maintain a veto of Congressional obstruction. Congress is controlled by the Saudi and Israeli interests. How else to explain the absurd statement by Tom Cotton?

The agreement “puts Iran, the world’s worst state sponsor of terrorism, on the path to a nuclear weapon,” said Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, as he emerged from the briefing. “Whether that’s a matter of months or a matter of years, that’s a dangerous outcome not just to United States and allies like Israel but to the entire world.”

But the end game here appears to be isolation of Congress and its Saudi and Israeli paymasters from the rest of the world. As the Gray Lady makes clear in an unsigned editorial today, "A Reckless Act in the Senate on Iran":

Mr. Obama’s acquiescence might be a tactical move. He could veto the congressional vote on the final agreement, which is supposed to be concluded by the June 30 deadline, rather than expending political capital in vetoing this measure if it were to pass both chambers of Congress. But the Senate committee’s action puts him in an weakened position as the only leader involved in the negotiations who may not be permitted to fully honor commitments that were made.

The nuclear deal is the product of a multinational negotiation with Iran conducted by the United States, France, Britain, China, Germany and Russia. In no other country has a legislative body demanded the right to block the agreement. Even if Congress barred Mr. Obama from waiving American sanctions, the European Union and the United Nations Security Council could lift the sanctions they imposed, thus undercutting the American decision.

This is the bottom line: Unless Obama gets cold feet and kills the talks in the next two months, an international agreement on Iran's nuclear program will be concluded; at which time, even if Congress can prevent the U.S. from ratifying the agreement, it will not be able to block the rest of the world from doing business with the Islamic Republic.

That is why I think it is a pretty safe bet that Israel and al-Saud will gin up some sort of attack on Iran.

Obama's Weakness on Full Display in Interview with Tom Friedman: Too Many Lies Make Delivering Final Nuclear Agreement Unlikely

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.

GOP Plans To Run the World from Congress + Good News Out of Tikrit

Hillary should thank her lucky stars that her Tuesday press conference, where she defended the use of her personal email account to conduct official USG business while she was Secretary of State, coincided with an open letter to Iran penned by junior Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of  Arkansas, that threatened to abolish any agreement reached by the Obama administration on that country's nuclear program. The Cotton letter, signed by 46 other Republicans in the Senate, created a social and mainstream media firestorm, which effectively bumped the Hillary email imbroglio from the top spot in the cultural consciousness. With Kerry appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, there was plentiful soundbite video of Team Obama vs. GOP presidential aspirants.

The permanent circus of partisan conflict has spread from government funding measures and Obamacare to the conduct of foreign policy. Republicans are feeling their oats. Wading into foreign affairs to undercut ongoing White House diplomacy is the GOP's way of saying, "We're not going to lose Congress in the foreseeable future. We might not win the presidency. But we don't have to. We'll run everything from the House and Senate."

One silver lining here is that Obama's ISIS AUMF request appears to be dead in the water. And the good news out of Iraq is that Islamic State has been all but defeated in Tikrit without the assistance of U.S. air power. Anne Barnard reports this morning in "Iraqi Forces Claim Western Areas of Tikrit From ISIS":

BAGHDAD — Iraqi government forces and allied militias took control of the western neighborhoods of Tikrit on Thursday, military officials said, leaving only one area, including a palace complex once used by Saddam Hussein, in the hands of Islamic State militants. 

Military officials said they were confident of declaring victory within a few days in Tikrit, a central objective in rolling back the militants and the government’s largest operation against the Islamic State since it swept into much of the country’s north and west in June. 

Top Iraqi officials, including Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, visited troops near the front lines on Tuesday night and Wednesday. They called for security forces to facilitate the return of displaced civilians from Tikrit and surrounding areas. 

Bringing civilians back without revenge attacks or continuing conflict will be the next test for Iraq’s government if it holds its gains and completes the operation in Tikrit. The government mustered a 30,000-strong force, the bulk of it fighters from Shiite militias, in an effort to retake the city.

Note the last paragraph. This is the talking point for why the U.S. sat out the Tikrit offensive. The presence of Shiite militia backed by Iran risks the sectarian cohesion of the Iraqi state. Never mind that Islamic State fighters have been slaughtering Christians, Yazidis and Shiites and desecrating antiquities, as well as raping, crucifying and immolating. Let's play up rumors of Shiite atrocities.

And this is what reliable, pro-USG scribe Anne Barnard does farther down in her story:

Iraqi officials said they would investigate reports of atrocities, filmed and posted in recent months on social media, and committed by armed men in uniforms with the insignia of a special forces unit and other regular government forces. 

The images have been circulating on social media, and they were compiled and presented to Iraqi and United States officials by ABC News. The images raised the question of whether Iraqi forces may have run afoul of a measure that requires the United States government to cut off aid to foreign militaries that commit human rights abuses.

One video shows what appears to be a 12-year-old boy being shot to death in the street after being accused of working with the Islamic State. Another shows two civilians being shot after insisting they were not involved with the militant group; fighters then riddle their bodies with bullets. Another apparently shows a civilian being beheaded, and other images show a head propped on the front bumper of a military vehicle that appears to be an American-made Humvee.

Iraqi officials have showed footage to the BBC that they said proved that the Islamic State was using chlorine gas in roadside bombs. The images show orange clouds rising from the bombs as Iraqi ordnance disposal teams detonate them. Chlorine, while not as dangerous as substances like sarin, banned by international treaty, can cause coughing and burning eyes and in close quarters can be fatal.

What is going on is the U.S. is getting pressure from its GCC allies to cut off its support of Iraq. The last paragraph about ISIS using chlorine bombs is illuminating. I'm sure Barnard and/or her editors included it to maintain a semblance of balance.

Soon, if the reconstituted military of Iraq continues its battlefield successes against Islamic State, we shall see the jihadi ratline from Turkey in full flower once again. ISIS is a GCC/Western cat's paw. The target has always been the Shiite Crescent.