Low expectations for success, as Iran nuclear talks resume

Above all, Iran wants a “guarantee” that its experience with Donald Trump will not be repeated.
The Iranian flag is flown outside the building housing the reactor of the Bushehr nuclear power plant. (Photo: Atta Kenare/AFP)
The Iranian flag is flown outside the building housing the reactor of the Bushehr nuclear power plant. (Photo: Atta Kenare/AFP)

WASHINGTON DC (Kurdistan24) – For the first time since June, negotiations over a renewal of the Iranian nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), resume Monday in Vienna, Austria.

Six rounds of talks were held between April and June under the previous government of Hassan Rouhani, which originally concluded the agreement in 2015, during the Barack Obama administration.

However, expectations for success in the seventh round are low. Ebrahim al-Raisi, who became Iran’s new president in August, following elections in June, is known generally as a hardliner, and his government has taken a hard line ahead of the renewal of negotiations.

Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator and Deputy Foreign Minister, Ali Bagheri Kani, writing in Sunday’s Financial Times, asserted that Iran sought “a full, guaranteed, and verifiable removal of the sanctions that have been imposed on the Iranian people.”

Above all, Iran wants a “guarantee” that its experience with Donald Trump will not be repeated. In 2018, Trump unilaterally left the JCPOA and re-imposed the sanctions that had existed prior to the conclusion of the nuclear accord, as well as new sanctions related to non-nuclear issues.

But the Biden administration can provide no such guarantee. If the JCPOA were a treaty, it could. But treaties require US Senate approval by a two-thirds majority, and that majority simply does not exist.

As the US withdrew from the JCPOA and re-imposed sanctions, Iran increased its nuclear-related activities beyond the limits set by the accord. It also limited the access of inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to key nuclear-related sites.

Thus, the US and other western countries have a markedly less clear understanding of the state of Iran’s nuclear program. Yet it is widely believed that Iran is significantly closer to having a nuclear bomb than it was, when Trump left the JCPOA.

Amos Yadlin, who headed Israeli military intelligence from 2006 to 2010 and served as military attache in Washington from 2004 to 2006, speaking on Israeli television on Friday, warned that Iran was just “two months away” from a nuclear bomb.

Yadlin criticized former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for encouraging Trump to leave the JCPOA. It was predictable, he said, that Iran would respond by abrogating its own commitments under the agreement.

But “when the Iranians moved down this path,” Yadlin said, “neither Trump nor Israel prepared a plan for how to stop them.”

Israel’s Long Focus on Iran

Since the early 1990s, Israel has been singularly focused on the danger posed by Iran’s nuclear program, marking a sharp shift from 1991, when President George H. W. Bush ended the first Gulf War, leaving Saddam Hussein in power.

Like most US allies in the Middle East, then Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir, of the center-right Likud party, was stunned at Bush’s decision. In fact, he regarded it as such a huge mistake that he set in motion a plan to assassinate Saddam.

However, in 1992, Shamir lost the elections to the Labor Party’s Yitzhak Rabin, in part because the Bush administration let it be known that it favored a Rabin victory. The Soviet Union had collapsed, and senior US officials believed that had produced a unique opportunity to advance the “peace process” between Israel and the Arab states.

The Israeli plan to assassinate Saddam proceeded initially under Rabin. But a deadly accident in 1992, in which five Israeli commandos were accidentally killed as they prepared to assassinate Saddam, caused the new Israeli government to drop the operation.

Rabin then shifted Israeli attention to Iran. That focus lasted for the next decade. Indeed, already in December 2001, some three months after the 9/11 attacks, the George W. Bush administration believed it had won in Afghanistan. It then began to plan for the next war: against Iraq.

Israeli officials, however, strongly pressed the US to target Iran instead. But the decision had already been made. There were strong suspicions that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks, as well as the anthrax letters that followed soon thereafter.

Indeed, in the fall of 2003, Dick Armey, who had served as the Republican Representative from Texas’ 26th Congressional District until January 2003, told that to this reporter.

As Armey explained, Vice President Dick Cheney was the liaison between the White House and Congress on issues related to the 9/11 attacks, because Cheney had earlier served in the US Congress.

Cheney had been Wyoming’s representative for a decade, from 1979 until 1989, after which he became Secretary of Defense under President George H. W. Bush.

In 2002, as the Bush 43 administration began to muster the votes for a resolution that would authorize the use of military force against Iraq, Armey—then majority leader in the House of Representatives—told Cheney that he did not support the resolution.

Armey did not want to send young Americans into war without good reason. Cheney responded by telling Armey that Iraq had been involved in the 9/11 attacks, and that changed everything for Armey.

However, the Bush administration did an extremely poor job in explaining that to the American public—or even explaining why the Iraq war was necessary. Already in May 2003, it believed that it had won in Iraq and that the “news cycle” would take care of the controversy that was slowly building around that conflict.

Karl Rove, Bush’s top political advisor, later acknowledged that had been a serious mistake.