Former Obama aides say agreement risks failure to secure safeguards and that it will leave the Islamic Republic as a ‘nuclear threshold state’.
Obama’s first term, warned on Wednesday that a deal on curbing Iran’s nuclear program was at risk of failing to provide adequate safeguards.
US Secretary of State John Kerry (L) with Iranian counterpart Mohammad Javad Zarif in Switzerland during the last round of talks (Photo: AP)
In an open letter, the group of former US officials and foreign policy experts cautioned that an Iran nuclear deal would “fall short of meeting the administration’s own standard of a ‘good’ agreement” unless it included a tougher line on United Nations nuclear inspections and conditions for sanctions relief.
The release of the letter, which was signed by Dennis Ross, an adviser on Iran and the Middle East in Obama’s first term, comes as US Secretary of State John Kerry prepares to fly to Vienna on Friday to join the talks.
“Most of us would have preferred a stronger agreement,” the letter released by the Washington Institute said. “The agreement will not prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapons capability. It will not require the dismantling of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. It will, however, reduce that infrastructure for the next 10 to 15 years.”
The letter also urged the Obama administration to affirm as a matter of policy that Iran would not be able to produce or attain fissile material for a weapon. ” Precisely because Iran will be left as a nuclear threshold state (and has clearly preserved the option of becoming a nuclear weapon state),” said the letter, “the United States must go on record now that it is committed to using all means necessary, including military force, to prevent” such a possibility.
Furthermore, the bipartisan group acknowledged concerns that an agreement could encourage Iran to continue bolstering its military capabilities, support for proxies, and regional interventions.
It thus proposed a number of regional initiatives to assist US allies in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, as well as efforts to “interdict Iranian arms bound for extremist groups”.
Ross told Reuters it was vital that negotiations were not driven by a deadline but by “getting it right.”
“The Iranians must understand that we will catch them if they cheat and that the price will be high even for lesser transgressions,” Ross said. “And, they must know that we will not permit them to have a weapons capability.”
Ross said administration officials with whom he had spoken said the principles outlined in the letter were contained in an April 2 interim agreement between Iran and world powers in Lausanne, Switzerland.
A senior US official said the letter “in large part tracks with the US negotiating positions inside the room.”
Negotiations between Iran and six major powers – the United States, Britain, Germany, Russia, China and France – are aimed at reaching an agreement by June 30 under which Tehran would curtail its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.
Negotiations are widely expected to slide past a self-imposed June 30 deadline.
Recent developments have Just days ago, Iran’s parliamentpassed a bill banning access to military sites and scientists. Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei ruled out freezing Iran’s sensitive nuclear work for a long period and said all sanctions imposed on the country should be lifted immediately.
In addition to Ross, the letter was signed by David Petraeus, former CIA director and US commander in Iraq, Robert Einhorn, a former member of the US negotiating team with Iran, retired US General James Cartwright and Gary Samore, an Obama adviser on nuclear policy turned president of the advocacy group United Against Nuclear Iran.
The letter was also signed by Stephen Hadley, a national security adviser to both former President George W. Bush and his brother, Republican presidential contender Jeb Bush.
Any deal would face fierce opposition from Republicans who have argued the Obama administration is readying a deal that would leave Iran with a clear path to making a nuclear weapon.
Kerry, speaking to reporters on Wednesday evening, said it was too early to say if negotiators could clear the last outstanding issues.
“If they are not addressed, there will not be a deal,” he said. “We have been very clear that we are not going to negotiate in public.”
@ Eric R.:
You have not clarified what effect that worrying about anti-Semitism will have on inhibiting 500 million Europeans and 1,500 million Muslims to destroy 14 million Jews in Israel and elsewhere.
All things considered, worrying and even bleating about the Nazis endlessly to the governments of the USA and the United Kingdom accomplished nothing whatsoever in stopping Hitler’s Nazis from murdering some 6 million Jews in their extermination factories in the early 1940s. Except that all the goodthink folks in Western Civilization felt exceptionally satisfied about a relative handful of leaders of Hitler’s government being hanged after the Nurnberg trials in 1946. And, lest I forget, Hollywood made a rash of Holocaust motion pictures, complete with violins playing dolefully on the sound tracks.
Realities being what they are, I think you ought to focus on finding the Jewish nation and the Jewish state a different set of international friends. Unless, like the fools, you imagine the USA is going to jump in and stop all the above.
(Sort of like “Victoria’s messenger comes riding” to save Mackie Messer in die Dreigroschenoper. Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht were exercising German irony in that pre-Hitler production, pointing out that Victoria’s messenger rarely comes riding to save any condemned wretch. I always liked the German language production better than its Anglophonic counterpart. It always helped me to better understand the 1920s.)
So what about it, Eric? Whom do you seriously think is going to stop all this? I personally think the best possible outcome would be China conquering all southwest Asia with assistance and backing of Russia and India. Could that ever be arranged? Probably not. But it might just be tempting for all three of them, with both the economies and the spirit the various Western civilizational blocs plainly and rapidly collapsing.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
ArnoldHarris Said:
There is a very simple reason to worry about anti-Semitism. It kills us. By the millions. And has for 2,000 years. Even Zionism and the forming of a powerful state (and Israel is one of the top 5 military powers in the world) does not stop the hatred, nor does it stop its threat to the Jewish existence on the planet.
If you don’t worry about anti-Semitism, then 500 million Europeans and 1,500 million Muslims will destroy the 7 million Jews of Israel in their New Jersey sized state – or if you prefer, Maryland-sized if you include J & S, (and the 7 million Jews elsewhere). And they won’t give a damn about how many hundreds of millions of their own die in the Samson Option.
@ Eric R.:
Eric, I really, truly, and irrevocably do not give a damn about anti-Semitism except to the extent that its existence can be turned around and used as a tool for uniting and empowering of the Jewish nation. I think I could argue an excellent case that without anti-Semitism, there never, ever would have been any factor that would have seriously sparked the interest of so many millions of Jews to follow the Zionist path of re-assembling the Jewish nation on the soil of Eretz-Yisrael, in what became the modern State of Israel. So let the anti-Semites howl. Because if I am right, and I sincerely think that I am, it will help build a stronger and more united Jewish nation and Jewish state.
I think too many Jews argue against all of the above because they seriously want to be loved and held in high esteem by non-Jews. And I think that what they fail to comprehend is that the harder they attempt to maneuver all that, the more they are distrusted by all the goyim. I don’t want to spend even a minute of whatever life I have left trying to get enemies to approve of me.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
@ ArnoldHarris:
Arnold, my father, born in Poland, is still alive today because his family was able to flee in 1939 to Siberia. And as a fighter in the Palmach in 1948, he actually used some of those Czech weapons. However….
the most accurate answer I can give to your response is that you are correct — as far as you go — but leave out the rest of the story.
This is the same Russia that after 1967, created the leftist anti-Zionist craziness that infects the entire Western Left, and threatens European Jews with extermination.
This is the same Russia, that after 1967, armed the Arabs to the teeth in an attempt to destroy Israel.
This is the same Russia that after 1967 actually flew combat missions for Egypt — and stopped when Israeli pilots started blowing them out of the sky.
This is the same Russia that after 1967 turned the UN into nothing more than a virulent Jew-hating Marxo-Nazi-Islamist organization.
This is the same Russia that after 1967 gave aid and succor to the PLO and the PFLP and encouraged their massacres of innocent Jews.
This is the same Russia that threatened Israel with nuclear annhilation in 1973 if she did not stop crossing the Suez Canal.
This is the same Russia that — even before 1967 — suppressed all attempts to allow the practice of Judaism.
Now, I will grant you that Putin has encouraged Jewish life under his rule. And I will grant you that his expansionist moves in the Ukraine and the Baltics don’t bother me that much.
But the running interference for the mullahs? His backing of anti-Semitic parties in Europe both on the ultra-nationalist “right” (Jobbik) and on the far left (Syriza)?
Yeah, those bother me. They should at least worry you a little, too.
@ Eric R.:
Eric:
If you have been analyzing my comments on Israpundit over the years that I have been commenting here, you must know by now that I am far less concerned about the injustices of anti-Semitism than I am about how to put it to work on behalf of building an extending a power base for the Jewish nation and the Jewish state. I really do not care about injustice, and I think the only useful response to anti-Semitism is national unity and national power. Besides, it is a useful instrument for inducing a greater flow of Jewish aliya to Israel in general and to Shomron and Yehuda in particular.
Despite that, it was interesting to read Walter P Lacquer’s recent article about Russia’s long-standing anti-Semitism. However, my real interest in him was to learn that he is still alive, having achieved 94 years of life. As an old-time of 81 years, I am encouraged about such considerations. The last time I had read one of his works was shortly after he published his history of Zionism in 1972.
About Russia and the Russians. On more than one occasion, the Russian state and nation has played a central role in serving the cause of the Jewish nation, irrespective of any question of anti-Semitism.
It was great Stalin himself who maneuvered the policies that enabled most of Russia’s large Jewish population to escape eastward of the deadly reach of the SS mobile killing units that accompanied the rear areas of the German armies as they advanced into Russia.
It surely would have been a policy approved by Stalin that enabled 500,000 Russian and Polish Jews to be armed and to fight in the vast Soviet armies of the Great Patriotic War.
In my long life, I have met and befriended more than one Jewish warrior of the Red armies who fought their way into the streets of Berlin, and who lived to describe their military adventures. I sure as hell never heard any anti-Russian comments from any of those guys.
And only Stalin would have had the power to make sure that more than 100 of those Jews attained the rank of general officers. How many Jewish generals got to serve in the US armed forces of World War 2? The only one I know of was General Maurice Rose, one of Patton’s armored division commanders in the great 3rd US Army. But Rose, a career officer, felt it necessary to convert to Christianity so as not to make trouble for himself in the higher reaches of the corps of officers.
Then in 1948-1949, while the newly-proclaimed State of Israel was fighting off the armies of their four neighboring and hostile Arab states, it was Stalin and the Communist leaders of Czechoslovakia and Jugoslavija who arranged shipment of weapons of all kinds — including Czech-made German Messerschmidt 109 fighters, exactly when the new Israeli Zahal needed them the most and while the USA and the United Kingdom were enforcing a total embargo against shipment of their own military hardware to the hard-pressed new Jewish state.
All things considered, Putin’s Russia would make a better ally for the Jewish State of Israel than the USA of Kerry, Obama, the US State Department, and enough self-hating liberal Jews who not only are ashamed of their own Jewish heritage but whose actions and policies serve to weaken their American homeland.
In any case, Israel and its science-based industries are now attracting the favorable attention of both China and India, whose combined populations account for about 2.7 billion of the world’s present population of about 7 billion. And neither of those countries — both of which have strong ties to Putin’s Russia — have any history of anti-Semitism.
So think about questioning everything you read. There’s always more there than meets the eye.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Dearest Beloved Israel, Did you notice today’s ruling on Obamacare in which the Supreme Court disregarded the evidence and shredded the Constitution to benefit the corporations that want to redistribute their health care costs to the taxpayer? The United States is now so thoroughly corrupt that even elemental decency has evaporated. The rule of law has no meaning. Words have no meaning. Alliances have no meaning.
Please internalize this message: America can no longer be trusted. We have become a kleptocracy, a nuclearized Third World banana republic. You depend upon America at your peril.
If it is logistically feasible, take out Iran’s nuclear program by any means necessary and incur the resulting international wrath. Your only friends are disenfranchised and powerless citizens who cherish your existence. Do not be passive in the face of extinction out of a misguided belief that you will “alienate America”. America is already lost.
The US has become an unprincipled mess, just like the rest of humanity. Protect yourselves with disregard to world public opinion, or you will certainly perish.
@ ArnoldHarris:
Arnold! Just the guy I was looking for…
As the resident Russophile, can you read this and give me your thoughts? Lacquer is perhaps the best known writer on anti-Semitism of the last 150 years.
http://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2015/06/anti-semitism-and-the-new-russian-idea/
Looking at that photograph of John Kerry trying to scrunch his tall frame down to eye level in order to converse normally with his shrimp-size Iranian counterpart, along with what all of us already know, tells me much more.
First, the Iranian shrimp really knows he is dealing with the grandson of Jewish Fritz Kohn, who changed his name to “Frederick Kerry” before emigrating to the USA in 1902, from some small village in the Bohemian province of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. Fritz Kohn pretending to be Frederick Kerry went on to commit suicide in a Boston hotel in 1921. Something tells me that I might just be able to guess why he took his own life; self-hatred is a particularly Jewish disease.
Second, I think the Iranian shrimp, along with the entire ayatollist leadership of Iran, despises Obama, Fritz Kohn’s Catholic grandson, and everything else about this modern and remolded Roman Empire of the West. If they were ever to get what they imagine is an opportunity to use on American targets any nuclear weapons that they surely will develop, they will do so. As a matter of fact, I don’t even think that such mentalities as theirs are even capable of controlling their urges toward such destruction.
But back to the self-hating and renamed Jews of the West. My own paternal grandfather was born in 1867 in one of the western provinces of the old Russian Empire. His family name surely was not “Harris”. He died in 1942 and by paternal grandmother followed him in 1949. Her family name was “Harkovy” but all I know about his name is on the copy of my father’s birth certificate issued in Davenport, Iowa in August 1892. One day, I will drive down to the cemetery just outside Chicago where both of them are buried, and photograph the inscriptions on the gravestones, after which I might be able to decipher them, because I can at least read Ivrit to some degree.
Because I am a lover of authenticity. Which is why I never could even think of abandoning or betraying the Jewish nation into which I was born more than 81 years ago. It’s one of the important things I picked up from my own father, whose memory I still bless and honor, 36 Yahzeits ago.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI