The Virtuous Nuclear Agreement with Iran

"The terms of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action [JCPOA] did not create the desired paradigm of 'verify then trust' but of 'trust and verify only to the extent the Iranians allow it'."
"...The nuclear deal does not guarantee physical inspections of military sites even if the International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA] believes Iran is conducting weaponization activities. Before the announcement of the nuclear agreement, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei stated, 'inspection of our military sites is out of the question'. And after the JCPOA was announced, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif pronounced that Iran had accomplished its objective of denying IAEA access to military facilities."
"In September 2015, IAEA director general Yukiya Amano visited the Parchin military base. Rather than conduct on-site inspections with the physical presence of inspectors at the location, which is the IAEA's standard practice, Iranian inspectors took environmental samples while IAEA inspectors remotely monitored."
"Even so, the environmental samples from Parchin revealed the existence of man-made uranium particles. William Tobey, former deputy administrator for defence nuclear nonproliferation at the National Nuclear Security Administration, explained that these particles are 'prima facie evidence' of undeclared nuclear material in Iran and that a 'larger quantity of uranium left them behind'. Yet the IAEA did not insist on a followup inspection."
"The JCPOA also creates a minimum of a 24-day delay between a formal IAEA request to access a suspicious site and t he date Iran must allow access, which is more than enough time, according to nuclear experts, to destroy or hide evidence."
Sheryl Saperia, director of policy, Canada, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

"[Washington's abandonment of a] major achievement in nuclear non-proliferation and diplomacy [is lamentable. The accord has] contributed to regional and international peace and security."
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres

 
The United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia and China are displeased that U.S. President Donald Trump made good his campaign promise to take American support away from the nuclear agreement reached with Iran under the pretext that the agreement would result in a less intransigent, bellicose and threatening Islamic Republic which might reconsider its support for terrorism and interference in Middle East sectarian conflicts. Since the implementation of the agreement when hundreds of millions was restored to Iran frozen in international accounts, the promise given to Iranians that their economic strictures would be eased, has never materialized.

Trump made good on his promise, the theocratic regime failed to do so on theirs. The money instead gave them the freedom to continue funding and arming terrorist groups in Yemen (Houthis), Lebanon (Hezbollah) and Gaza (Hamas). Funding to provide upgraded military weaponry to the Syrian regime of President Bashar al Assad to enable him to get on with the vital task of slaughtering Syrian Sunni rebels against his Shiite rule. Funding to enable Iranian-linked Iraqi politicians to greater influence in Iraq to bolster Iran's Shiite crescent, threatening the majority Sunni population in the Middle East.

Ayatollah Khamenei's supportive Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has been enriched alongside Khamenei, taking over vital state operations as well as corporate production nationwide. The protests by Iranian workers over poor wages and inflated prices for staples, medicines, food and energy, have been ongoing for months, alongside a women's campaign to be free from the state-ordered dress code that transforms them from humans into unseen ciphers. But according to the P5+1 negotiators for the Iran nuclear agreement, the decision by the U.S. to leave the deal represents a global catastrophe.

Members of Iran's parliament burn a U.S. flag in Tehran on Wednesday. (AFP / Getty Images)

The co-signers, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russian, China and the E.U. are determined to continue to uphold the agreement, minus the U.S. American sanctions re-institution will take months and eventually will result in the U.K., France and Germany having to make a choice between U.S. banking and finance rules and continued profitable trade with the Iranian Republic. Insisting that the agreement has resulted in "regional and international peace and security", these nations extol the virtues of the agreement and value the opportunity it gives them to enhance trade opportunities.

The regional and international peace and security that presumably pairs with implementation of the agreement cannot be detected on the ground, and must therefore exist entirely in the feverish imaginations of the administrations of the co-signees. Trade with Iran has risen from 2015's high of $9.2 billion to a soaring $25 billion in 2017. That kind of trade profitability sacrificed for the paltry return of upholding human rights and the safety of the world community from a conquest-determined Iran appears too high a price to pay.

As far as Canada is concerned, Iranian parliamentarians' burning of a paper American flag, chanting their usual pathological "Death to America!" is understandable from an affronted regime for whom the deal represents to the west "the best tool to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapons capability", according to Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland. To which her boss, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau adds he regrets President Trump's decision to withdraw America from the controversial agreement.

"We will respect the capacity of individual countries to make their decisions about foreign policy. But for Canada's purpose, we make our decisions around foreign policy here in Ottawa, not in Washington, not elsewhere." Explicable, given that Justin Trudeau has promised to re-establish diplomatic relations with the Iranian Republic, which his predecessor, Stephen Harper, chose to relinquish, in view of Iran's human rights record, and its  unquenchable thirst for power and threat to destroy the State of Israel.

Trudeau's administration is working studiously to 'normalize' relations with Iran in view of lucrative trade opportunities. Leading him to rebuke both the Trump administration and Israel over their opposition to the Iran nuclear deal. An interesting perspective indeed, with Israeli defence officials ordering bomb shelters be operational on the Golan Heights after suspicious movements of Hezbollah units near the Israeli border after President Trump's announcement. Since then a barrage of rockets was fired from the Syrian into the Israeli side. Leading the IDF to reciprocate exponentially to destroy established Iranian military sites in Syria.

Humble Humiliation

"After it became clear that the U.S. combat vessels’ illegal entry into the Islamic Republic of Iran’s waters was the result of an unintentional action and a mistake and after they extended an apology, the decision was made to release them."

"The Americans have undertaken not to repeat such mistakes. The captured marines were released in international waters under the supervision of the IRGC Navy."
"Mr. Kerry had contact with him [Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif] and called for the release of the sailors. Mr. Zarif took a strong stance and said that the sailors were in our waters and should apologize."

"[The sailors were released after] investigations showed that they had gone astray during their voyage in the Persian Gulf. [The] illegal entry into Iranian water was not the result of a purposeful act."
Admiral Ali Fadavi, commander, naval forces of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards

Photo from Iranian government. (Sepahnews via AP)

"It was a mistake that was our fault and we apologize for our mistake. It was a misunderstanding. We did not mean to go into Iranian territorial water. The Iranian behavior was fantastic while we were here. We thank you very much for your hospitality and your assistance."

"The Iranian patrol boat came out when we were having engine issues and had weapons drawn, so we tried to talk to them until more boats came out and took us in."

Unidentified American sailor

 

Still from Iranian video

The ten American sailors who were taken into Iranian custody were aboard two riverine patrol boats — 38-foot, high-speed boats commonly used to patrol rivers and littoral waters. An American official explained that they became aware of the unscheduled interference of the Iranian navy when the two vessels, which are often used to patrol shallow waters near Bahrain, had failed to make a scheduled refueling rendezvous with a larger ship. The ten Americans were taken prisoner, charged with spying, the one female sailor among them given a head covering in accord with Iranian sensibilities.

A boat of the type seized by Iran in the Persian Gulf on Tuesday.  Credit Zane Ecklund/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The completion stage of the U.S.-led deal on the Islamic Republic of Iran's nuclear program is set to take effect imminently. The Iranians consider themselves a world power, one which has experienced a simmering resentment at what they see as global interference in their personal affairs. As a sovereign Islamist state they feel they have the right and the personal obligation to explore all weapons options in their bid to intimidate the Arab Middle East and become the acknowledged Mideast power.

The hatred of the administration for the U.S. and all things Western and democratic points to plans to dominate not only the immediate geography, but to pose a threat through the Iranian ballistic missiles program allied with their nuclear program to produce a nuclear warhead for delivery on the newer longer-range, more powerful missiles. The UN Security Council permanent members, America, France, Britain, China, Russia, plus Germany in their negotiations with Tehran's nuclear representatives succumbed to the Republic's agreement to moderate their nuclear plans.

Iran, needless to say, has never honoured any such treaty it has ever engaged upon with the West, and nor has it this time around. Its 'moderate' President Rouhani has pledged that Iran will forge ahead with all its weapons programs, leaving its neighbours feeling more edgily vulnerable than ever against the potential threat that the Republic poses with its ambitions to see Shiite Islam, led by Iran, mount the power structure in Sunni-majority Islam.

The agreement brokered by the United States as a signal triumph, giving the world several years of breathing room before Iran acquires the nuclear devices it longs to have in its arsenal, has simply emboldened the Iranians. Because their negotiators managed to pare down significantly all of the nuclear neutering demands of the P5+1, Iran takes it as a sign of weakness which they can exploit, and they've lost no time in exploiting that state of weakness on the part of those demanding it stand down from its ambitions.

While they're at it, they choose to flex their muscles by visiting Iranian-branded humiliation on the most powerful nation on Earth whose president has chosen to take a humble path through negotiation and diplomacy rather than meet belligerence with firm denials. President Obama has dedicated himself, and through his executive stature the United States itself, to a path of least resistance, choosing surrender of all that the U.S. had formerly engaged in as a warden of world peace, leaving its reputation limp as a wet rag its opponents are delighted to stamp on.

The result is that the Republican Guard, which has sole responsibility for Iran's nuclear program under the guiding direction of Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, simmering with rage over having to submit to the neutralized P5+1 intervention, feels confident enough to poke the U.S. in the eye in a symbolic but very real skit of humiliating audacity; not quite the kind of audacity that Barack Obama promised Americans he would use to transform their country when he ran for election. A grovelling U.S. administration has hugely delighted Tehran.

Several weeks earlier, the Iranian Navy harassed an American carrier and a French frigate in the Strait of Hormuz. Rockets were launched, passing 1,500 yards beyond the aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman. In the Gulf of Aden last year, another Iranian Navy frigate pointed a heavy machine gun as it approached an American military helicopter which had just landed, then turned around, as an Iranian film crew videotaped the episode.

Iran has threatened in 2012 to close down the international waterway it claimed as its own, the Strait of Hormuz, where a large portion of international shipping is conducted. The Revolutionary Guards Navy in 2007 took fifteen British military service members into custody, holding them for almost two weeks, contending it was protecting its sea borders. The British Navy took a year to release its report stating that its vessels had been in a disputed borders area between Iran and Iraq. 

(Photo from Iranian government via European Pressphoto Agency)

Negotiating With Iran

"Any comprehensive agreement regarding Iran's nuclear program must require resolution of the outstanding questions regarding its suspected military dimensions."
Mark Bailey, Canada's permanent representative to the IAEA

"The core message is the same: a deal is the only way to prevent an Iranian bomb and keep the U.S. out of another war."
Truman National Security Project

"Iran may have violated [the interim deal] by starting to feed [natural uranium gas] into one of its advanced centrifuges, namely the IR-5 centrifuge. Under the interim deal, this centrifuge should not have been fed with [gas] as reported in this safeguards report."
"Because enrichment in these centrifuges is intermittent and not continuous, questions arise whether any of the advanced centrifuges work well."
Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security

"It should be stated categorically that limiting Iran’s centrifuge program to between 2,000 and 4,000 IR-1 centrifuges is consistent with Iran’s actual needs for enriched uranium for many years. Even 2,000 IR-1 centrifuges would provide Iran with sufficient enriched uranium for its existing and foreseen research reactor needs." 
"It is important to have in this verification scheme an agreement that the IAEA can also verify all the centrifuges… when I say all, I mean all the things that have been manufactured there — whether it's in a warehouse, whether it's in storage, whether it's installed somewhere else."
Dr. Olli Heinonen, former Deputy Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) 

IAEA inspectors at Iran's nuclear power plant in Natanz, on January, 20, 2014 (photo credit: IRNA/AFP Kazem Ghane) 

 

The Islamic Republic of Iran's Grand Ayatollah Khomeini promised to provide the IAEA with explosive-tests data and the regime's notations on activities related to its research on atomic bombs. The data was to have been released to the IAEA by August 25, and that has not occurred. Since it was a commitment allied with the current and yet-ongoing negotiations between Tehran and the P5+1 any conclusion would be voided with its omission by November 24.

The Republic of Iran is honed toward its diplomatic rehabilitation and international normalization which can only be achieved with a nuclear deal whereby the sanctions will be ended enabling the country to get on with its nuclear 'research' and development and the installation of the additional nuclear plants it plans for its near future, in collaboration with Russia. Without the sanctions coming to an end, restoring normalcy as Iran sees it, and with it the country's financial stability, enmity and a stalemate continue.

Because of the Obama administration's intent eagerness to come to a palatable agreement useful to both the U.S. and Iran, focus has only glanced on Tehran's mobilization of Hezbollah in defence of Syria's Bashar al-Assad's conflict with Syria's Sunni majority leaving Assad free to continue directing his military to commit its bloody atrocities on his civilian population, along with the Shia death squads visiting death and destruction among Iraqi Sunni tribes, a regional maelstrom that birthed Islamic State.

Should success be realized in the negotiations with Iran, it would represent a triumphant foreign relations prop for a president whose international relations have been widely criticized and with good reason. That would represent his foreign policy success legacy, the shining jewel in his presidential library shining on the horizon of the near future. The problem is Messrs. Obama and Kerry are dealing with minds far cleverer and more devious than their own.

From a culture long accustomed to obfuscation, deferrals and denials whose sincerity and diplomacy succeeds time and again in persuading adversaries of the Republic's reliability and trustworthiness in whom faith can be placed and the results assured. Canada, for its part a stern critic of Iran's human rights record expressed skepticism in the U.S. plan for negotiating with a regime for which prevarication and falsehoods represent an advantage over truth and reality.

Canada's deputy permanent representative to the IAEA, Shawn Caza, filed a report with the agency's 35-member governing board  excoriating Iran's "abject failure" in cooperation with the IAEA, along with its "flagrant disregard" of the directives given it by the IAEA. Iran' consistent pattern of deception and noncompliance, its "shell game of posturing and platitudes" denounced as hugely unreliable.

 

On Tuesday in New York, Iranian Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi informed reporters that the Iranian regime's repression hadn't decreased with the election to the presidency of Hassan Rouhani, he of the smiling face and cheerful moderation. In her experienced opinion the oppression and human rights abuses have accelerated, with 624 prisoners put to death in 2013 some for crimes described as "corruption of the earth" and "enmity against God".

Tehran's envoy to the United Nations airily dismisses all accusations against the Iranian Republic as "Iranophobia and Islamophobia". And the promise by President Rouhani on his inauguration of "equality for all citizens without discrimination based on race, gender or religion" has been as true to reality as the Republic's insistence that it has no intention of acquiring nuclear warheads.

 Iran's (presumed) New Regime, (presumptive)New Regimen

What a transformation. The Islamic Republic of Iran, so recently considered a threat to world peace and security, under a theocratic government awaiting the return of a historical personage called the 'hidden imam' whose reappearance will set the stage for a spiritual Armageddon elevating the faithful to the side of God, while those outside the faith will be consigned to everlasting Purgatory, a state government that sees fit to advance violent terrorism and threaten the existence of other states, has suddenly become a darling of the enlightened left.

Where the international community was once obsessed with the potential of a repugnant, human-rights-abusing religion-based ideology gaining the ultimate weapon of mass destruction and making good on its threats, made all the more believable by the state's investment in Islamist jihad and its furtive moves to attain a proscribed agent of universal death, the tide has turned for the cunning minds that find good enough reason to hold the reasoning of the West in contempt.

Any adversaries, however powerful, who are so easily led to believe what they wish to believe rather than the reality before them are obviously not worthy of respect and trust, and are fully deserving, as far as the Iranian Ayatollahs are concerned, of being led down the garden path of betrayal resulting from their naivete. That old adage of once fooled leading to a fuller understanding of the pitfalls of trust enabling one to avoid further such events, seems not to apply to those who are continually led by the nose only to discover their trust has been without merit.

The Republic of Iran has made a pastime of deluding its critics, lulling them by promises never meant to be honoured while it is prepared to swear that it harbours no evil intentions in its pursuit of the nuclear option for energy and medical isotopes, all the while surreptitiously and repeatedly pursuing its agenda apace to bring its scientific advances closer and ever closer to the conclusion it devotes itself to: the possession of the most awesomely destructive atomic weapon on Earth.

The sanctions that have been historically levied against Iran by the European Union, the United States, Canada and the United Nations have left the country financially partially disabled, but never sufficiently so that it has been rendered incapable of continuing its inexorable strides toward nuclear weapons production. All the while, Iran declaring its intentions are misunderstood and it has been penalized unfairly.

Now, with the world awaiting the fulfillment of the promise supposedly inherent in the country's election of a far cleverer, less bombastic, but equally devious and obviously dangerous prime minister in Hassan Rouhani, its emissaries to the United Nations and the IAEA speak soothingly of a new era dawning. Its foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif speaks at Geneva negotiations on Iran's nuclear program for "an end to an unnecessary crisis and a start for new horizons".

The new horizons of which he speaks so glowingly are those where the international community agrees to relax tensions with the Republic by withdrawing sanctions. In exchange for which Iran is more than prepared to offer concessions. Those concessions do not -- will not -- embrace surrendering its nuclear ambitions. Nor will they -- or do they -- include a cessation of uranium enrichment and the setting aside of its stockpiling of 20% enriched uranium readily upgraded to weapons-grade product.

The pompous declaration of a senior U.S. State Department official that the discussions had been workmanlike and worthwhile, do not engage one's confidence in the outcome. "For the first time, we had very detailed technical discussions, which carried on this afternoon", said the official declining identification under diplomatic protocol. A spokesman for Catherine Ashton, the EU's foreign policy official heading the discussions claimed as well the Iranian proposal to be viewed as "very useful". To whom, however?

Iran's deputy foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, claims his country has the right to enrich uranium and will continue to do just that despite the demands of the Security Council that it must suspend enrichment until doubts relating to its program have been resolved. The level of that enrichment was not specified, since vagueness best suits the regime. In exchange for the Republic's non-statements of intent, Tehran expects sanctions to be lifted.

This is, after all, the new, enlightened Iran, a country that has elected a "moderate" as prime minister, although this moderate has always been within the trust of the inner sanctum of the regime, and is well known for having misled the International Atomic Energy Agency and the international critics of Iran's nuclear program when he was formerly the country's chief nuclear negotiator, to evade suspicion and to enable Iran's nuclear program to progress without the knowledge of its international and expert critics.

Iran's nuclear efforts, according to a senior American official, had advanced so greatly that Iran should now be required to take immediate steps to halt and even better, reverse its program. And then negotiations should get under way to approach a comprehensive agreement with everything on the negotiating table and assurances in place that no further subterfuges will take place to once again make a donkey of those observers whose expertise permits them to assess Iran's program and whose conclusions were those of alarm at the potential it so clearly aims for.

Much depends on it, for the safekeeping of the entire world. A despotic, deranged theocracy holds that world to the ransom of belief in its good intentions.