The perils and the promise of the Iran deal
Despite Netanyahu's scary superlatives, the deal signed with Islamic Republic, however flawed, has some promise for Israel and the Middle East.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday spared no superlatives from the nuclear agreement announced Tuesday by Iran and the six world powers. A 'bad deal,' a 'historic mistake,' a 'gamble with the collective fate of the world and a blow to Israel’s security' were only a few of the descriptions the prime minister used for the 159-page agreement that will put Iran’s nuclear program in deep freeze for the next 10 years, force parts of it into regression, and leave restrictions on it for a generation.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry was correct when he said that Netanyahu’s criticism of the nuclear agreement was “way over the top.” Over the past six years this has been a consistent Netanyahu phenomenon.
At the start of his term in 2009 he argued that the sanctions against Tehran were not effective and tried to push for an American military attack on Iran’s nuclear installations. Afterward, he turned the sanctions from a means to an end, and demanded that they be intensified even more.
When the interim agreement was signed with Iran in Geneva in November 2013, he attacked it stridently and argued it was a bad deal. In the ensuing months Netanyahu admitted that the interim agreement had many advantages and he even pressed the U.S. administration to extend it again and again.
In this case, too, Netanyahu’s depiction of the agreement as a disaster or a capitulation of the West to Iran in which all red lines were crossed is exaggerated. Netanyahu was right when he said that it was not a good agreement, but he is mistaken and misleading when he tells the Israeli public that there can be such a thing as a good agreement regarding the Iranian nuclear program.
The document approved Tuesday by the representatives of Iran and the world powers has many problematic sections, like the mechanism reimposing sanctions on Iran if it violates the agreement, which is so cumbersome it’s doubtful it could ever be applied; or the long period UN inspectors will need to get approval to visit suspicious installations, a period that would give the Iranians enough notice to destroy evidence of what went on there.
Other problematic sections are the weak limits on research and development of advanced centrifuges by Iran that would allow it to reduce its “breakout time” to a nuclear weapon, and concessions to Iran under which restrictions on the purchase and sale of missiles will be removed in eight years and the embargo on conventional weapons dropped in only five years. It’s scary to think what this section will do the weapons arsenals of Hezbollah and Hamas in a few years.
On the other hand, the agreement will obligate Iran to take steps that are hard to imagine it would take under any other scenario. Iran will have to reduce the number of its centrifuges by two-thirds under UN supervision; give up 98 percent of the 12 tons of enriched uranium it has in its possession, and restrict its uranium enrichment for a period of 10-15 years. There will be more UN inspectors in Iran monitoring all phases of its Iranian nuclear program for the next 25 years than there are in any other country in the world.
The agreement promises a long period over which the threat of a fast Iranian breakthrough to a nuclear weapon will be significantly reduced. From a situation in which Iran could have obtained enough fissile material for a nuclear bomb in two months, over the next decade it will need at least a year. Israel and its allies have gained a lot of time in which to prepare for the day after the agreement, to upgrade intelligence systems so they can keep track of any Iranian attempt to resume nuclear weapons development and to prepare the military option should it be needed.
A decade in the Middle East is an eternity. It’s enough to look at what has happened in our region over the past five years to understand how much is liable to change in Iran as a result of this agreement. The change could be for the worse, but it might also be for the better. An Iran that is closer to the West, that is full of foreign companies, that is closer to the United States and maintains a normal dialogue with it may become an Iran that’s less dangerous for Israel.
