YOSSI MELMAN/Nuclear deal not perfect, but the skies are not going to fall tomorrow/HERB KEINON/30-year journey to stop Iranian nukes may soon move to Congress

 Analysis: 30-year journey to stop Iranian nukes may soon move to Congress
HERB KEINON/07/14/2015

Iran has been pursuing nuclear weapons for most of the last three decades. The quest began at the end of the Iran-Iraq War in 1988 when the Islamic Republic’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, famously “drank from the poisoned chalice” and accepted UN Security Council Resolution 598, which put an end to that eight-year, blood-drenched war. Never again, Khomeini vowed, would Iran drink such poison, and the country’s race for nuclear arms – something that would have precluded the need for what Khomeini viewed as a capitulation – was on. During the last nearly 30 years, the world – with varying degrees of seriousness and intensity – has tried to block that path.

The strategy during much of that time period has been to kick the can down the road, delay the Iranians, place impediments in their way in the hope that in the interim something would happen: either there would be regime change in Iran, or the Iranian rulers – of their own accord or because of popular unrest – would come to realize that the price of a nuclear bomb was too high and that if they wanted to save the country’s economy they would have to scuttle the bomb. So, during this period, viruses were sent to infect the Iranian computers, some Iranian nuclear scientists and engineers were assassinated or mysteriously disappeared, and straw companies were set up around the world selling faulty material to the mullahs so that when they spun their centrifuges, the centrifuges would blow up. The accord on the verge of being agreed upon in Vienna, the one Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has railed against endlessly, buys the Iranians more time.
Ten years of it.

During this period, the Iranians will be hard-pressed to assemble a nuclear bomb. But then the sun will set on the agreement and all bets will be off. Then, the Iranians, according to Israel’s reading of the deal, will not have to sneak around to assemble a bomb. They will be able to do so in broad daylight. And therein is one of Israel’s key complaints. At a time when the Iranians came to the talks because their economy was being devastated, the world powers had the opportunity not to just kick the can down the road, but rather to kick it over the fence, deep, deep into one of the neighbor’s bushes. Or, to use a boxing metaphor, two years ago the world powers had Iran on the ropes – its economy badly limping, oil prices falling, its legitimacy at a low point. But instead of ratcheting up the sanctions and delivering a knockout blow, the powers let Iran slither off the ropes to come back and fight another round.

And fight they did. As Iranian President Hassan Rouhani was reported to have said over the weekend, “Twenty-two months of negotiation means we have managed to charm the world, and it’s an art.” That was then. Now the reality has changed. So, now what? The agreement has pretty much put to an end to any option of a preemptive Israeli military strike. Few seriously believe Israel would launch a preemptive attack on Iran to push back the program after that country reached an agreement with the world powers, including the US. It is also equally unrealistic to think Netanyahu – who has fought the Iranian nuclear program for years – will now suddenly roll over, play dead and say, “Okay, you win, I guess now we will just have to accept a nuclear Iran.”
Netanyahu – who has charged that this is a “very bad agreement,” and that what happened in Vienna was a foolish “march of concessions” that amounted to a near total capitulation to Tehran – will not now throw up his arms in surrender.

Rather, now his arguments against the accord will move to Congress, the last place where changes in the agreement might possibly still be made. If then ambassador Michael Oren – as he writes in his recent memoir – was given instructions to call congressmen in 2011 and say “Israel felt abandoned” after US President Barack Obama delivered a speech adopting an Israeli-Palestinian deal based on the 1967 lines with land swaps, then one can only imagine what Oren’s successor, Ron Dermer, will tell the congressmen when he calls about this agreement. And that type of campaigning in Congress against a policy that Obama sees as his foreign policy “legacy,” and which US Secretary of State John Kerry views as his possible Nobel Prize winning ticket, is not bound to win Netanyahu any points in the White House, where his credit is already depleted.

The final year of the Obama-Netanyahu era, therefore, most likely will be more fraught than even the seven years that came before. But Netanyahu will go ahead – feeling duty-bound as a son of the Jewish people so soon after the Holocaust and as the prime minister of the world’s only Jewish state – to do whatever he can to try and override the agreement. If not to stop it, at least to change it so that when the history books are written it will be noted that he – alone among the world’s leaders – fought until the very end an accord that ultimately may place the world’s most lethal weapons into the hands of one of the world’s most extreme regimes.

Analysis: Nuclear deal not perfect, but the skies are not going to fall tomorrow 
YOSSI MELMAN/07/14/2015

In 2007, a senior Israeli cabinet minister told senior military officials that if a country wants nuclear weapons nothing will stop it.“I know at least one country that did it,” he remarked in response to their agreed upon strategy to do everything to keep Iran from getting the bomb. Instead, he advised them to focus on delaying the nuclear program and to ask the US to be handsomely compensated. Eight years later, when it seems that only a miracle will prevent a nuclear deal between the six super powers and Iran in the Vienna talks, one can say that due to its successful diplomacy, sabotage and assassination operations attributed to Mossad and its demand to impose sanctions, Israel managed to prevent Iran from reaching the bomb. It seems, though, that what Iran really wanted was to be a nuclear-threshold state and not to assemble warheads. Of course, Israel was not alone in these efforts; it was an impressive international concert that presented a unified front. Another Israeli government could have appropriated the nuclear agreement as its victory – as a result of wise diplomacy combined with daring covert actions, Iran was brought to its knees and forced it to sit down, negotiate and compromise on its nuclear program, something Tehran had refused to do from 2002 to 2013.

The pending deal will lengthen Iran’s capability to have fissile materials and produce a bomb to at least one year for at least the 10-year term of the agreement. It’s estimated that before Iran agreed to talk and clinch the interim agreement it was just two to three months from the bomb. The number of centrifuges of the old and outdated models at the uranium-enrichment sites in Natanz and Fordow will be reduced to a third of the current inventory to 6,000 from 19,000. Iran is forbidden to enrich uranium above 3.6%; its enriched uranium will be dwindled from 10 tons to a mere 300 kg.; and the nuclear reactor in Arak will be redesigned and won’t be able to produce sufficient plutonium as fissile material. As for international inspection, even if it is not insufficiently intrusive, it still will be tighter than it is now.

If Iran honors the deal, the chance of a nuclear race in the Middle East by countries such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey will be slimmer. But Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has decided to take a different path. Instead of working hand in hand with the international effort to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions and claiming victory, it has preferred to be left alone. Israel is opposed to the agreement. To any agreement. Netanyahu tried to create a wedge between the US president and Congress and failed. Israel exaggerated the Iranian threat and portrayed it in monstrous proportions. Netanyahu said Monday night that Iran not only aspires to impose it hegemony in the region, but to control the entire world.

True, it would have been better without a deal in the first place. As far as Israel is concerned, it was preferred that sanctions remain forever. But Israel is not the center of the universe – the big powers have their own interests and sometimes they don’t listen to the Jewish state’s warnings, just as Israel, in many instances, is not attentive to requests from other nations, including its allies; for example, the Palestinian question. The nuclear deal in the making is far from perfect, but the skies are not going to fall tomorrow. Israel remains the strongest and most technologically advanced state in the Middle East. And, according to foreign reports, it has an impressive arsenal of nuclear warheads. It is also true that lifting the sanctions will help revive the Iranian economy. But, according to estimates by US economists, the recovery will be slow.

It is very unlikely that a dramatic shift in Iran’s rush for a regional hegemony will be seen. Its ambition is already high. The deal will not increase Iran’s grip on Hezbollah, which is already full. Its support for terrorist groups and its subversive attempts to undermine and destabilize countries will not necessarily be enhanced. They are already in full gear. These efforts, after all, are a double-edged sword – the more Iran intervenes in other countries’ domestic problems, the likelier it will be bleeding itself. Look at what happens to Iran in the Syrian mud, Yemenite slippery slopes and Iraq.
It is rather surprising to hear our leaders expressing fears about what will happen upon expiration of the agreement 10 years from now when they cannot say what will occur two or three months down the road on our borders with Gaza, Golan, Sinai or Lebanon. All in all, it is possible to estimate that at least two tangible results will emerge from the nuclear deal – the military- security establishment will demand that its budget be expanded and Israel will ask the US to supply it with a security compensation package, exactly as the cabinet minister suggested eight years ago.