{"id":84450,"date":"2021-03-13T17:05:46","date_gmt":"2021-03-13T15:05:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=84450"},"modified":"2021-03-12T08:19:32","modified_gmt":"2021-03-12T06:19:32","slug":"18-05-57","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=84450","title":{"rendered":"The Iran Deal\u2019s Inevitable Sequel"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>The Iran Deal\u2019s Inevitable Sequel<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

LEE SMITH<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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President Barack Obama, standing with Vice President Joe Biden, conducts a press conference in the East Room of the White House about the Iran nuclear deal, on July 14, 2015ANDREW HARNIK – POOL\/GETTY IMAGES<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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Barack Obama\u2019s plan was never about stopping Iran from obtaining a bomb. It was about realigning American interests in the Middle East in order to remake the Democratic Party at home.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Joe Biden\u2019s commitment to reenter the Iran nuclear deal from which Donald Trump withdrew might strike observers as bizarre. After all, Barack Obama\u2019s July 2015 agreement, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was an expensive and comprehensive failure whose underlying premises have been shown over the past six years to be false. By contrast, Trump\u2019s policy of returning to traditional regional alliance structures\u2014boosting allies and deterring enemies\u2014was a success. The United States entered no new Middle East wars and Iran didn\u2019t build a bomb, despite supposedly being \u201cmonths\u201d or \u201cweeks\u201d away from a nuclear breakout during Obama\u2019s second term in the White House.<\/span><\/p>\n

But facts- and results-based analysis misses the main purpose of the JCPOA, which had nothing to do with preventing Iran from building nuclear weapons. Rather, the agreement guaranteed Iran the money and technology it needs to build a bomb while putting Iran\u2019s nuclear program under the protective umbrella of an international agreement guaranteed by the United States. The purpose of the JCPOA, in other words, was to put the nuclear issue in brackets by giving the Iranians a bomb that they were manifestly unable to build on their own\u2014and, in doing so, to remove the obstacle that prevented Obama from realigning American regional interests with those of the revolutionary regime.<\/span><\/p>\n

None of this should be remotely surprising to anyone who has read the plain text of the deal, and who understands it in its regional context rather than in the context of America\u2019s domestic political wars. What I learned over the course of nearly a decade reporting on the deal, its causes and its effects was that all the elaborate technical talk that was endlessly bandied about by \u201cexperts\u201d\u2014centrifuge arrays and stockpiles of enriched uranium, etc.\u2014was simple persiflage, intended to distract attention from the underlying purpose of these arrangements, which was to dump America\u2019s current Middle East allies in favor of Iran.<\/span><\/p>\n

The patent lunacy of tilting against Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Israel and toward Iran\u2014 that is, weakening your allies in order to partner with your enemy\u2014was reflected by the abject misery the strategy caused in the Middle East. Between 2009 and 2017, I covered the entire spectrum of U.S.-Iran relations, from the Iran lobby to how Obama facilitated the genocide in Syria to satisfy Bashar Assad\u2019s Iranian patrons. I detailed how the Iranians had killed Americans in Iraq and Lebanon and plotted to kill them at home, too, even as Obama praised Iran\u2019s terror master Qassem Soleimani. I reported on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s speech in front of Congress warning of the dangers of putting mankind\u2019s most destructive weapon in the hands of a regime that embodies anti-Semitism, and the Obama administration\u2019s deployment of anti-Semitic conceits to scare off Jewish Democrats from opposing the deal. I warned that empowering such a regime would bring more violence to the Middle East and license discord and give rise to a politics of paranoia here at home.<\/span><\/p>\n

And here\u2019s how anyone who was paying attention during the first iteration of the Iran deal debate knew the JCPOA was never about stopping Iran from getting the bomb\u00ad\u00ad: The key clauses of the agreement restraining Iran\u2019s nuclear and nonnuclear activities were in no way permanent. In fact, they were specifically designed to expire over time. Had the deal been built to prevent Iran from a nuclear breakout, there would be no so-called \u201csunset clauses.\u201d In other words, the JCPOA was written to ensure that a well-funded Iran (thanks to the elimination of American and U.N. sanctions), fortified with missing technology (also courtesy of the United States) got the bomb\u2014once Obama was safely out of the White House.<\/span><\/p>\n

Why give Iran the bomb? Because Obama wanted to give America\u2019s old allies the boot. His motive for such rude treatment was that he wanted America to leave the Middle East for good, and to do so he needed a regional power that could manage American interests. Since the Gulf Arab powers are dependent on American protection, they are by definition incapable of handling America\u2019s Middle East portfolio. Israel, though a nuclear power with a serious army, is a Jewish state and so has little ability to project power in a Muslim-majority region. Those are both rational observations, if not evidence of the need for a change in policy.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet seen simply as a device for buttressing American strategic primacy in the Middle East, Obama\u2019s policy was never remotely rational. The consequences of the deal never mattered, because what mattered to its authors was simply the deal itself. Similarly today, there are no Iranian depredations\u2014against Syrians, or Lebanese, or Iraqis, or Israelis, or Iranians, or perhaps even Americans\u2014that will deter the same Obama staffers who fill all the same Iran policy posts in the Biden administration from reentering the JCPOA. They\u2019re not going to be stopped from reversing Trump\u2019s exit and fulfilling Obama\u2019s pledge to protect Iran\u2019s nuclear weapons program until it becomes fully operative\u2014which is the only thing that can etch the new security structure in stone.<\/span><\/p>\n

Why Obama didn\u2019t settle on Turkey as America\u2019s preferred regional hegemon was an early tell. The geopolitical entity now known as \u201cTurkey\u201d has been a dominant regional power center in the Levant for two millennia, under the Ottoman and Byzantine empires. Turkey would have been a logical choice, if the point was simply to make an ally a steward. It is a large Muslim country with a real economy that trades extensively with the West. It\u2019s a democracy, albeit at times a troubled one; it is certainly far more democratic and far less oppressive and dictatorial than Iran. It\u2019s also a NATO member with a NATO army, an important airbase, and several naval bases on vital waterways. And yet anonymous Obama officials kept leaking that Turkey\u2019s army was a mess, an assessment that was later shown to be false when the Turks cut through Assad\u2019s forces in Idlib like butter.<\/span><\/p>\n

Obama officials lied about Turkey\u2019s strength, and continue to demonize the imperfections of the Turkish government, because Obama\u2019s project had nothing to do with advancing America\u2019s geopolitical interests. He had his heart set on realigning the United States with Iran. He spoke of it in virtually every interview he gave about his Middle East policy. He talked<\/a> about Saudi Arabia and Iran having to \u201cshare the neighborhood\u201d; he wanted to create<\/a> a geopolitical equilibrium between Arab Sunni \u201cGulf states and Iran\u201d; \u201cthere are shifts that are taking place in the region that have caught a lot of them off guard,\u201d he said<\/a> of traditional American allies. \u201cI think change is always scary.\u201d He said it in speeches and press statements, too, like when he spoke<\/a> of respecting Iran\u2019s \u201cequities\u201d in Syria. He told interviewers that Iran was a real state, with institutions and interests and therefore Iranian behavior was fundamentally rational.<\/span><\/p>\n

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By making the U.S.-Israel relationship toxic, Obama made the pro-Israel wing of the party leprous.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

So what if the Iranian regime galvanizes the masses with chants of \u201cdeath to America\u201d? It appears Obama reasoned that America could work with that. He said<\/a> that even Iran\u2019s state-sponsored anti-Semitism did not necessarily signal irrationality. Rather, it was an \u201corganizing tool\u201d that didn\u2019t preclude the regime from making rational decisions about its own survival. Obama\u2019s easy dismissal of Tehran\u2019s insistent and loony anti-Semitism was another red light: There was something off about the president\u2019s stated reasoning. Anti-Semitism, as I wrote at the time, is the form that unreason takes in modern politics. Who sees state-manufactured systemic<\/em> and eliminationist hatred of an entire race as a mere detail?<\/span><\/p>\n

Starting in January of 2014, Obama paid Iran $700 million a month to negotiate the nuclear deal. That is, the American president was paying for the war that the terror regime\u2019s client Assad was waging against the Syrian people. But Soleimani feared he still couldn\u2019t stop the armed rebels, even with hundreds of billions of dollars in JCPOA sanctions relief on the way. Obama had miscalculated: Iran couldn\u2019t stabilize the Middle East. He had downgraded traditional American allies and helped fund a genocide in Syria, all for nothing.<\/span><\/p>\n

With Trump entering the White House, more evidence that Obama had misread Iran\u2019s strength became apparent. Trump left the JCPOA, just as he had promised, so where was the war that Obama said was inevitable? What happened instead was that the Iranian opposition turned on the regime and filled the streets to protest against a sclerotic ruling class that had squandered money on foreign wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Gaza, as well as Syria. When Trump reimposed sanctions, Iran did not set the region aflame, as Trump\u2019s critics promised, because American sanctions had in fact crippled its ability to make war. After the Iranians used Iraqi proxies to attack the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Trump killed Soleimani\u2014and still the apocalypse that Obama had forecast failed to materialize.<\/span><\/p>\n

The premises on which the Iran deal was ostensibly based were proven false. But now, the Biden administration promises to return to it, and the Washington, D.C., foreign policy establishment is staging a revival of the original show\u2014the purpose of which is to legitimize the failed JCPOA by pretending there is a genuine debate over how it might best be negotiated and implemented. Does it matter how this charade might affect the lives of millions of Middle Easterners, never mind the security and prosperity of American taxpayers? Of course not.<\/span><\/p>\n

Instead, Americans will be sold the same faded bill of goods all over again. The warmup act will likely feature pillars of the peace process industry like Dennis Ross, Aaron David Miller, and Martin Indyk swearing out bona fides on behalf of the fact that Joe Biden is a \u201clifelong friend of Israel\u201d who wouldn\u2019t dream of jeopardizing the Jewish state by giving Iran the bomb. Next, the Biden administration and its Team Iran<\/a> allies will be called on to defend the JCPOA against another Beltway clique, the Iran hawks, none of whom have the slightest actual leverage or power in the administration\u2014and their good friend Benjamin Netanyahu. In return, the hawks will publish op-eds and whisper loudly about their extra-special-secret access to the administration\u2019s good-guy moderates like National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who all love Israel just like Joe Biden does. The smart move, say the hawks, is to empower the Biden \u201cmoderates\u201d so they can take on the administration\u2019s hardliners, like Iran envoy Robert Malley.<\/span><\/p>\n

The real candidate running under the \u2018Joe Biden\u2019 label is his former boss, which is why none of Biden\u2019s public stands and votes matters<\/span><\/p>\n

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But wait, doesn\u2019t positing divisions in political institutions between moderates and hardliners sound familiar? Yes, it\u2019s how American policymakers have mischaracterized the Iranian regime since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The idea of strengthening the \u201cmoderates\u201d in order to push back on the \u201chardliners\u201d is nonsense, of course; even if moderates really do exist in such institutions, they have no control over major policy decisions. While the Biden administration is hardly as bloody-minded as the Tehran clique, there\u2019s no chance that any of the policymakers involved in Iran policy were hired in order to oppose what President Biden has identified as a foreign policy priority\u2014reentering the JCPOA. When the negotiations reach a crucial stage in the coming months, Iran deal advocates will admit as they did last time that, OK, the deal isn\u2019t perfect, but the only other option is war. And just as they did last time, they\u2019ll say that if you don\u2019t support the deal, you\u2019re a warmonger.<\/span><\/p>\n

In other words, the big Beltway foreign policy show is nothing but a sting. Who\u2019s the mark? You are. The hawks have no more chance of stopping the deal than the Washington Generals do of beating the Harlem Globetrotters. The point of the show is to make sure that cash continues to flow into Team Biden\u2019s coffers.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Biden administration\u2019s determination to reenter the Iran deal is a macabre scam virtually handing off a bomb to a terror state. And that\u2019s why Tablet is not going to pretend that any of it is real by giving the play-by-play details of battles between \u201cmoderates\u201d and \u201chardliners,\u201d or the odds on a \u201chawk\u201d victory, or any other part of this geopolitical con job.<\/span><\/p>\n

And yet before the farce unfolds in full, there\u2019s an important question that still needs to be answered: Why is the Biden administration reinvesting so enthusiastically in a failure that will damage America\u2019s closest allies? After all, there are plenty of ways to raise money, and Jewish Democrats are nothing but eager to remain within the fold. The answer is that what you see as failures the White House and its satellites see as features.<\/span><\/p>\n

America\u2019s Middle East allies are in fact only the most visible targets of the Iran deal: As an intervention in American domestic politics, the JCPOA was designed as an instrument to break pro-Israel Democrats, who represent what Obama saw as the most powerful of the internal constituencies that might oppose his reordering of the Democratic Party. That is, the real realignment isn\u2019t in the Middle East, which America is leaving anyway, but inside Obama\u2019s own party.<\/span><\/p>\n

I confess that I didn\u2019t see the domestic thrust of the Iran deal clearly the first time around: Namely, that the point of the Iran deal as seen through the lens of American domestic politics was to dismantle the 20th-century Democratic Party and remake it in Obama\u2019s own image. That\u2019s why the Obama administration devoted nearly the entirety of its bandwidth during the president\u2019s second term to getting the deal through Congress, rather than focusing on income inequality, minimum wage laws, rebuilding domestic industry in America, curbing the power of tech monopolies, or other potentially worthy and appropriately left-wing causes.<\/span><\/p>\n

The deal was never about Obama\u2019s personal feelings about Israel, whatever they are.<\/span><\/p>\n

Downgrading Israel as an American ally was a way to take down the pro-Israel wing of the Democratic Party, whose power depends on the strength of the U.S.-Israel relationship and which is generally seen as less \u201cprogressive\u201d\u2014and which had generally supported his rival, Hillary Clinton. By making the U.S.-Israel relationship toxic, Obama made the wing of the party leprous. Unmaking \u201cJewish power\u201d within the Democratic Party meant permanently decoupling the United States from Israel by wedding America to the most credible anti-Israel force in the Middle East, the Islamic Republic of Iran. It was through that deliberate political math that Obama\u2019s Democratic Party became the Party of Iran.<\/span><\/p>\n

So please don\u2019t waste your time trying to parse whatever Biden negotiators and Iranian diplomats in Vienna or Berlin are reported to be saying six months or a year from now. As far as the Middle East is concerned, none of what Iran deal supporters say about the JCPOA is real. And as far as Americans are concerned, the real explanations lie closer to home.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Lee Smith<\/strong> is the author of the newly published book The Permanent Coup: How Enemies Foreign and Domestic Targeted the American President.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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The Iran Deal\u2019s Inevitable Sequel LEE SMITH President Barack Obama, standing with Vice President Joe Biden, conducts a press conference in the East Room of the White House about the Iran nuclear deal, on July 14, 2015ANDREW HARNIK – POOL\/GETTY IMAGES Barack Obama\u2019s plan was never about stopping Iran from obtaining a bomb. It was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84450"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=84450"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84450\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":84481,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84450\/revisions\/84481"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=84450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=84450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=84450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}