The Iran Nuclear Deal Could End Democrat Support for Obama

It took months of difficult bargaining before Iran and six world powers agreed to a first-step nuclear agreement. The two sides will find it even harder as they start to confront the realities standing in the way of a final agreement. Iran denies that it wants, or has worked on, nuclear arms. But on November 24, it agreed to some curbs on uranium enrichment - which at higher levels becomes the core of nuclear arms or reactor fuel - in exchange for some easing of the sanctions that are choking its economy. The purpose of the initial 6-month deal was to provide entry-level concessions from both sides that would make it easier to reach a final accord to minimize any potential Iranian nuclear weapons threat in return for a full lifting of sanctions. But as the sides begin meeting to shape the final pact in Vienna, Gary Samore, who helped the US negotiate with Iran until last year, and now is at Harvard's Belfer Center think tank, has told the US media that the interim deal is "simply a truce," with the hard work still ahead. While the US Congress weighs how to keep Iran under the control of sanctions to encourage it to negotiate a final agreement, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, acuses the US of bad faith and says his country will negotiate but is pessimistic that a deal can be reached. There are several key issues, but the most contentious is the question of how many and what kinds of enrichment centrifuges Iran should be permitted to have. The interim accord says a final deal will include sufficient centrifuges for a program with practical limits and a peaceful nature. The Iranians continue to insist on keeping all of the 20,000 centrifuges now at their enrichment sites. Of those, 10,000 are running. But the US fears that having 20,000 centrifuges on site - even with most of them idle - would give Iran the capacity to produce enough weapons-grade enriched uranium within a few months. The US and its negotiating partners - Russia, China, Germany, France and Britain - want only a few thousand of the machines left in place in Iran, to give them a more than a one-year window to produce one nuclear weapon, if Iran turned on all its centrifuges and started working on weapons-grade uranium. Iran also wants to upgrade its centrifuges so as to enrich uranium four times faster than its current centrifuges, something the six nations oppose. Another major disagreement surrounds the underground enriching facility at Fordo, because it is heavily fortified against aerial attacks. The six powers have said that they want Fordo shut down. But because Teheran is opposed to tearing down any of its atomic infrastructure as a matter of national pride, Samore thinks a possible compromise would be to "repurpose" Fordo while keeping it a nuclear facility, perhaps as a storage area for equipment or material. The six allied nations also worry about Arak, another Iranian nuclear facility, because it is a heavy-water plant that would produce substantial amounts of plutonium, which can also can be used as the nuclear core of a missile. Converting the reactor to a light-water installation or cutting back on its output would ease big-power concerns, even if, according to Samore, they have to pay for the conversion. And the problem with the longest lifespan is the question of how to treat Iran ultimately. Because it is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran will at some point have to be treated as any other non-nuclear weapons NPT member state, if it honors the commitments it makes under a final agreement. The big question is - when? And what happens then? The US and its allies will undoubtedly want to extend the agreement for a very long period, up to 25 years, for maximum assurance that Iran has abandoned any potential nuclear weapons ambitions. Samore says Iran wants the final agreement to end after five years, so that it can start building its nuclear program like any other non-weapon NPT state. That would mean that Iran could run tens of thousands of centrifuges and reactors that produce substantial nuclear fuel, which worries the international community. All this is permitted under the NPT as long as the UN nuclear agency can find no reason to suspect that any activity is non-peaceful. This will eventually renew worries about Iran's nuclear program, because once Iran passes into the NPT system, it will be impossible to single out Iran for restrictions that other NPT member states are not under. That's why the US and its allies want a long period before this occurs - to allow time for peaceful regime change. ~~~~~ And, if you think the American Congress is bluffing, consider that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, the Virginia Republican likely to become Speaker if John Boehner is ousted, yesterday delivered a speech at the Virginia Military Institute condemning President Obama’s foreign policy. In a major national security speech, Cantor warned of a "brutal" Iran becoming a nuclear power, saying that American allies fear that US enemies feel empowered under Obama’s leadership and that the nation’s status as a world power has vastly diminished. "America’s friends worry we have lost our way, that we have lost the will to live up to our values or stand up to aggressors," Cantor said. "They see a divided, inward-looking America that is focused on its weaknesses rather than its strengths, and they know this is an America that invites challenges and emboldens adversaries." In the speech setting out "clear principles" for his own foreign policy initiatives, including American-Russian diplomacy, Cantor singled out US nuclear negotiations with Iran as a dangerous setback to US peace-keeping efforts in the Middle East. "I can imagine few more destabilizing moments in world history than Iran on the threshold of being a nuclear power," he said in the prepared remarks. "Make no mistake : Iran is a brutal theocracy. Its leaders violently repress dissent at home and support conflict and chaos abroad. We should lay the groundwork now for additional sanctions in the event Iran violates the terms of the interim agreement." Cantor has previously said that the six-month nuclear deal with Iran "bodes very ominously for the region and US security." And he warned that it brings Iran "closer to becoming a nuclear power" and threatens US relations with Israel. ~~~~~ Dear readers, the Iran nuclear negotiations are going to be extremely difficult - not only in Vienna but also in Washington, where many Congress members believe Iran's only negotiating goal was to loosen sanctions and that Obama fell into the trap. Many Americans oppose Obama's Iran position. They are already worried by President Obama's willingness to trust Iran and his obvious estrangement from Israel, and they are supported by both the Republican majority in the House and minority in the Senate, and many Democrats in both chambers, who see any deal with Iran that leaves any Iranian nuclear capability in place a threat to world peace and to Israel's existence. It may very well be that Obama's non-American actions on the world stage will meet their Waterloo over Iran. Obama does not represent America's view of appropriate foreign policy and asking them swallow a nuclear Iran may just prove to be Obama's undoing.