We already know that President Obama will do and say just about anything in order to pressure Democrats to vote for his Iran nuclear deal. He’s smeared Jewish groups, falsely argued that only Israel is against it, and disingenuously accused Republicans of opposing it for partisan reasons when it was he that destroyed the bipartisan consensus on Iran by pressuring Democrats to back the deal out of party loyalty. The administration has also consistently misled Congress and the public about the nature of the deal and the way it preserves Tehran’s nuclear infrastructure and right to continue advanced research that will give it a bomb virtually the moment the pact expires in a decade. But the most dishonest argument it has deployed to win over skeptics is the one highlight today in Politico. According to Michael Crowley’s feature, “the ultimate argument in favor of the Iran deal” is that “it would make it easier to bomb Iran.” Believe it or not, that’s actually what the administration is telling members of Congress this week. The question is whether there can be any member of Congress stupid enough to buy it?
Give the president credit for chutzpah. Having spent the last several months labeling opponents of his policy on Iran as warmongers, his staffers are now trying to persuade those who worry about the way the deal makes it even more dangerous, that the intelligence the U.S. gets about its facilities will make it easier to bomb them if it should ever violate the pact.
There is a superficial logic to this assertion.
It is true that the inspections that will take place (after 24 days notice to the Iranians) will give the international community a better idea about the layout of the Islamist regime’s nuclear facilities. It will also, as Crowley writes, give them more data about the “supply chain” for their infrastructure, including their uranium mines and mills. Were the U.S. ever to conduct a bombing campaign, that information will be useful.
It’s also true that Iran is quite worried about letting Westerners of any sort, let alone Americans into their military facilities that are part of their nuclear project. As Crowley notes, that’s part of the reason they insisted on the farcical inspections process at Parchin that, as we learned last week, will call for all the on-site work to be done by the Iranians themselves. Administration apologists have tried to twist themselves into pretzels to deny this or to come up with “truther” theories about the Parchin agreement but the fact is, the Iranians’ tough negotiating stand won them the right to keep inspectors out of the place where they were building nuclear bomb triggers and did other work directly related to the bomb project.
But even if we concede all this, that doesn’t amount to a compelling argument to support the deal. Information that could be used to bomb Iran might be useful but if the agreement goes through, President Obama will have made it virtually impossible for such a military campaign to ever take place.
As I wrote back in June when Crowley wrote about the bunker buster bombs that were part of the Pentagon’s plans for bombing Iran, this is an administration that has never had a “Plan B” that would allow for the use of force if the talks failed.
Though at times the president has given lip service to “all options including force” being on the table, such threats lacked credibility. At every point in the negotiations when Iran said no to Western demands, the administration conceded the point to them. Even at the end of the process when a subtle threat of force might have won him a couple of Iranian concessions that might have made the deal look stronger, the president personally made it clear that he didn’t believe that force could work against Iran thus removing any pressure that the hint of a military option might have provided.
The same dynamic will be in operation once the deal is implemented. Having invested so heavily in a deal whose premise is détente with an Iran that Obama thinks “wants to get right with the world,” the U.S. will be reluctant to even notice violations of the pact, let alone accept the notion that Iran is cheating. If it was impossible to imagine that Obama would ever bomb Iran no matter what it did before the deal, it will be even harder to conceive of such a scenario after it was signed.
It is true that the next president may take a more sanguine view of Iran than Obama. But as even some of the Republican presidential contenders have conceded, once implemented this deal won’t be so easy to unravel, let alone provide an opportunity for the West to bomb the Iranian nuclear plants. Let’s remember that the deal is just the tip of the iceberg of the process that will unfold in the coming months and years by which U.S. and European businesses will get involved in the Iranian economy. Once sanctions are lifted, re-imposing them won’t be easy. Snapping them back, as Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry promised would be part of any deal, won’t be a realistic option.
What Obama has done is to set in motion a process by which the West is, in essence, a partner with the Iranians on their nuclear project. The deal grants it virtual immunity and has already put Israel — the only other power that has any ability to use force against Iran — in a position where it would be very difficult, it not impossible for it to consider bombing.
Part of the premise of the deal is a belief that Iran’s “breakout” time to a bomb will be lengthened so as to give the West a year to decide what to do about Iranian cheating. But there are two problems with this. One is that any estimates about breakout time are guesses. The lax inspection process won’t clear up that fog of uncertainty. Just as important, by the time U.S. intelligence figures out what is going on that would just be the start of a debate within the U.S. security apparatus and with our allies about what to do about it. By the time all that is resolved, it would almost certainly would be too late to anything about it. Indeed, once Iran is on the cusp of having a bomb, it would also create a dynamic that would make the West reluctant to challenge a nuclear power, especially one run by religious fanatics as is the case with Iran.
So while U.S. intelligence may get some material it might not have gotten, that won’t make it easier or even remotely more realistic that bombing could ever happen. Like the promise of the Massive Ordinance Penetrator bombs, information that would be useful in a bombing campaign won’t ever be used.
Let’s not kid ourselves. War was never nor is it now the best option to deal with Iran. Had the U.S. stuck to a process of isolating Iran, ratcheting up sanctions and creating an embargo on it sale of Iran, it would brought the regime’s economy down and created enough leverage to make a deal that would have ended the nuclear threat possible. With strong U.S. leadership that would force the West and even Russia and China to follow (since they would suffer greatly if they were cut off from the U.S. economy by sanctions measures), it is still possible to get a better deal. But even if we were to see war as a final option, once this deal is signed, that will be off the table.
If members of the House and Senate want to vote for this deal they should do so if they believe in its dubious merits. But none of them should be so simple as to fall for the argument that it will make war easier. That is a blatantly dishonest argument that should be dismissed by even the most gullible members as pure spin. Once implemented, nothing short of a cataclysm will make force an option against Iran. Indeed, that’s exactly the point of Obama’s shift to an Iran-centric policy that hinges on détente with the Islamist regime. Anyone who isn’t comfortable with the U.S. enabling Iran to become a threshold nuclear power must vote against the deal.
