Last week the US re-imposed sanctions on Iran. This was a direct result of the bold decision by US President Donald J. Trump to cease signing off the flawed Joint Comprehensive Plan of action (JCPOA). Negotiated under the Obama administration, the JCPOA sought to put a halt to Iran’s drive for nuclear weapons in return for sanctions relief and the opening of the Iranian economy to the international community.
I am no fan of Donald Trump. I don't like his politics and I don’t like his style or approach. I also didn’t particularly enjoy watching The Apprenticeeither. So far, his presidency ranks as one of the worst; however, there are some important exceptions where his policies have been more or less right. The first was his decision scale back financial support for UNRWA (more about that in another post) and the second is his policy towards the Iran nuclear deal. Trump was right to conclude that the JCPOA was a bad deal. It was significantly flawed for several reasons including the sunset clause which would allow Iran to restart its nuclear programme in less than ten years, the lack of unfettered and on the spot access for inspectors to enter top secret Iranian military facilities without prior approval, and the no mention of Iran’s ballistic missile programme. We also saw from the Israeli seizure of Iran’s nuclear archive that even though Tehran was more or less keeping to its obligations, it had failed to disclose its intricate and extensive research into developing a nuclear warhead. This in itself could be a breach of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, making the JCPOA worthless. Just as importantly, the JCPOA made no reference to Iran’s foreign policy. This gave the Islamic Republic the financial lifeline it needed in order to spread its influence in the region, including its support for Bashar al-Asad, the butcher of Damascus who had no qualms about using chemical weapons against his own people on multiple occasions and whose torture chambers are a disgrace to humanity in the 21stcentury. Meanwhile, recent reports of anti-regime protests and disturbances in Iran that trickle into the international news over the past few months do not do justice to the momentum growing against the Islamic Republic. Across Iran, from Mashad to Tabriz, many Iranians are voicing their anger at the regime which has crippled the prosperity of a whole generation of Iranians. Even at a crowded football stadium in Tehran fans chanted anti-regime slogans. The ongoing protests represents what can only be described as a revolutionary period. If there was ever a time when the regime was at its most vulnerable, it is now and is why the sanctions can be either effective in bringing down this heinous regime or at least temper Iran’s nefarious ambitions in the Middle East. And what is the European Union’s reaction to all this? Brussels has been actively working against US sanctions and is, in effect, supporting one of the most nefarious regimes on Earth. The EU, which was never a party to the JCPOA (negotiated by the 5 permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany), Brussels has decided to join ranks of Russia, Turkey and China, hardly the beacons of the world liberal order, to obstruct the effectiveness of the sanctions. Not only has Federica Mogherini, the EU’s foreign policy chief, publically and loudly encouraged firms to defy the sanctions, but the EU has even launched the blocking statute, an attempt to shield European companies from US sanctions and limit the damage to their interests and dealings in the US. Also, the EU wants European companies who have contracts with Iranian firms to apply to the EU before halting operations. In other words, the EU is actively working with some of the world’s worst human rights abusers in order to protect a theocratic autocracy which violates almost every article of the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights from US sanctions, hampering and the dreams of ordinary Iranians who are risking their lives to protest the regime. All this so mega European firms such as Siemens, Total, Peugeot and Airbus can make profit. Shame on Brussels, shame on Berlin, shame on Paris, and, yes, shame on London. Despite being in the process of leaving the EU, the UK has sided with the EU on this matter. This is despite the fact that unlike France or Germany, the UK’s trade with Iran only stands at a mere US$1.15 billion. Also, despite supporting the JCPOA and practically pleading the Iranian regime to release Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, Iran has still not complied. This, if anything, is a reason why the UK should be supporting its great transatlantic ally. However, London has elected to side with the EU which has chosen the JCPOA as its causes belli against the US administration. If ever there was a morally dubious foreign policy decision of the EU and UK, this is it.
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The debate surrounding the decision of US Present Donald J. Trump’s to nix the Iran nuclear deal, otherwise known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), has been a real eye opener. It seems that some politicians and commentators have lost their moral compasses.
After Trump’s decision, Federica Mogherini, the foreign minister of the EU, stated that “We are determined to keep this deal in place”. Meanwhile, it was reported that Bruno Le Maire, France’s finance minister, commented that the Iran deal highlights the need to defend European economic sovereignty, even putting forward the idea of creating a statute to offset US sanctions on European firms doing business in Iran. Meanwhile, The Guardian’s Simon Tisdall, contends that Britain should join other European nations to impose diplomatic and economic sanctions on the US – make Trump pay for sabotaging the Iran deal, he argues. Wow, that must have been some great deal to advocate that Europe side not with the US, but an autocratic regime which hates the very ideals that Europe stands for (remember when Italy was obliged to cover naked statues so not to offend the visiting so-called moderate Iranian President Hassan Rouhani), an Islamic theocracy that has terrifying resemblances to the dystopian society envisaged in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. First things first, the deal itself was poor. Bret Stephens of the New York Times put it best when he wrote that if the JCPOA was so great then why did leaders from France, Germany and the UK, as well as some of its other supporters, feel the need to accept that it needed fixing? Fix it, not nix it, they begged of Trump. Surely, if it was such a good deal, it wouldn’t need any fixing? In reality, there was much that needed to be mended, so much so that the repair work would have left the deal unrecognizable. Where to start, the sunset clause allowing the Islamic Republic to be a nuclear weapon threshold state within 13 years? And then there’s the fact that the deal ignores Tehran’s ballistic missile programme, the exclusion of which was a grave error because if Iran were to acquire a nuclear weapon, it would have to be compatible with its ballistic projectiles. And what about the inspections themselves? Far from unfettered access on demand, if the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) want access to secret military areas, they can’t just barge it. They would need approval from a committee of which Iran is a member! Moreover, the Israeli seizure of Iranian nuclear documents confirmed the suspicions of the US and the IAEA that Iran had indeed been working on a nuclear weapons programme, which although frozen, was still not disclosed to the IAEA and therefore contrary to the spirit of the JCPOA and perhaps even the letter of the Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT). It was under President Obama that the JCPOA was signed. Obama twice failed the people of Iran, proud inheritors of an ancient civilization whose erudition and study of their poets such as Saadi and Hafez makes me wish that people in the West would do the same for Shakespeare, Melville, and Cervantes. The first Obama let down was in 2009. As Iranians took to the streets to demand that their votes count in what become known as the Green Movement, Obama’s silence was deafening. Later, Obama did well to spearhead international sanctions which crippled the Iranian economy. Make no mistake, in 2013 the sanctions brought the Mullahs to their knees. However, Obama and the P5 +1 abandoned the prospect of regime change in order to make this terrible nuclear deal. Not only did this hand a lifeline to the Supreme Leader and the Revolutionary Guards (the real powers in Iran), but it allowed the regime to continue its support with boots on the ground for Bashar al-Assad, the butcher of Damascus, who deliberately tortures, murders and massacres his own people, sometimes with the additional sadistic twist of chemical nerve agents. Europe needs to be more honest about its Iran policy. The reality is there are billions of euros at stake with companies such as Airbus, Total, British-Dutch Shell, Peugeot, Renault, and Siemens standing to lose out with the nixing of the Iran deal. It just all goes to show that the lofty foreign policy ideals of the EU are nothing more than a bunch of words. To hell with the Iranian people, many critics of the deal are effectively saying, as long as European companies make a profit. Shame. Last Monday, I had to make a difficult television viewing decision, either catch up on Homeland season 7 or watch Israeli prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu make a live appearance to make revelations about Iran’s nuclear programme? I chose the latter.
Bibi, as Netanyahu is known in Israel, is ever the showman. While delivering a Ted Talk style presentation, he announced to viewers that Israeli intelligence operatives managed to seize tens of thousands of top-secret Iranian documents from a previously unknown nuclear archive located in an unassuming neighbourhood in Tehran (wow!). A sprinkle of these documents was shown in Bibi’s presentation which the Israeli prime minister claimed was evidence that Iran’s top officials, from supreme leader to president and foreign minister, had lied to the international community when they insisted that Iran was not seeking a nuclear bomb. This trove of information, argued Netanyahu, casts doubt on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) which was concluded between Iran, the US, Russia, China and Europe in 2015 under the leadership of Barack Obama, the most fickle president in the history of US foreign policy until the election of Donald Trump, to reduce and monitor Iran’s nuclear programme in exchange for the easing of sanctions. In other words, save the Islamic Republic in return for a nuclear deal. President Trump along with a slew of conservative politicians, academics and commentators have termed the agreement a bad deal, a “terrible” deal or the “worst deal ever”. It now looks that they have a point. Some commentators, eager to save the JCPOA, and by extension Obama’s legacy, insist that there is nothing particularly new in these seized documents. They say that it is all hyperbole, rehashed information and that the deal is still a good one. They add that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was already aware of Iran’s attempt to weaponise its nuclear programme, and the documents are dated before the signing of the 2015 JCPOA. Moreover, the IAEA, as well as Europe and the United States all confirmed that Iran has been in full compliance of the deal and, so far, none of the captured documents seems to have contradicted these assessments. Move along, there’s nothing to see here. Not so fast. Why such faith in an autocratic regime which has incessantly lied to its people from Ayatollah Khomeini’s hijacking the 1979 revolution with his hidden plan to install a constitution based on his political interpretation of the Shia concept of the velayat-e faqih with himself as supreme leader, to the stealing of the 2009 elections and the perpetual corruption which led many across the country to protest the regime a few months ago? Why is it so hard to believe that the same clerical regime that murders, steals, plunders, executes, tortures and imprisons its own people also lied to the international community and broke agreements, pledges and declarations? And yes indeed, there is actually something to this cache of documents. Consider the following: It is true that the IAEA, the CIA and other agencies had their suspicions that Iran was actively seeking to weaponise its nuclear programme and was conducting research into the design and construction of a warhead capable of delivering a nuclear payload, but ceased this project in 2003. But throughout this period and continuously until this very day, Iran’s political leaders denied that there was ever such a programme. However, the IAEA and CIA’s suspicions are now facts. Not only do we now know that Iranian officials had been lying, but they were also negotiating in bad faith, including their declaration before the 2015 agreement that Iran would reveal the full extent of its past nuclear work. The documents show that they have done no such thing. Furthermore, the existence of this nuclear archive seems to have been unknown to the international community. Iran did not declare its existence to the IAEA either before the 2015 nuclear deal or after. Nor did Iran hand over its research into making a nuclear bomb. Instead it hid it. This in itself is a breach of the spirit of the JCPOA and may even be a violation of Articles II and/or III of the Non Proliferation Treaty. If Iran is indeed in breach of the NPT, then the JCPOA as it currently stands is not worth the paper it’s printed on. Finally, Bibi’s revelations create the very real suspicion that having negotiated the JCPOA in bad faith, Iran was essentially putting its nuclear weapon programme aside only to come back to it a later. Of course, defenders of the deal have countered that the P5+1 negotiated it with the assumption that Iran was lying, and in the words of President Obama it was based on “unprecedented verification”. But when negotiating the deal, the international powers did not have such concrete proof that their Iranian interlocutors were brazenly lying. How can anyone now defend the laxity in regulating Iran’s ballistic missile programme or the JCPOA’s ridiculously naïve sunset clause which would allow Iran to enrich again after 15 years? No way Jose! Although tougher than its critics like to admit, the flaws in the JCPOA are real. Obama did an excellent job in forming and executing a stringent sanctions regime which really crippled the Iranian economy and brought the regime to its knees. But the Obama administration underestimated just how successful it was. In 2012 and 2013 there were rumblings of protests in Iran’s major cities, alleviated with the 2013 election of President Rohani, a regime loyalist disguised as a reformer. While negotiating the deal, Iran was in a situation where it could not afford to be in Syria and Yemen, develop a nuclear programme and placate its restless population angered by corruption, inflation and unemployment. The very future of the regime was at stake. Obama and Kerry could have done better and should have done better French and German heads of state have tried to convince Trump to fix not nix the deal and make additional supplementary agreements instead. These new documents give him leverage to do just that. He should take it. |
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