How and why to kill the deal
If Iran remains a threat, the deal bars the US from taking any steps to counter it aside from all-out war.
SHIITE MUSLIM men from Hashid Shaabi, a militia in
Iraq, hold portraits of Iran’s late leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini
during a parade in Baghdad.
(photo credit:REUTERS)
Washington Post columnist David
Ignatius is a reasonable man. After hearing back to back interviews with
US Secretary of State John Kerry and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
about the Obama administration’s pact with Iran’s ayatollahs, he tried
to balance them out.
Speaking Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation,
Ignatius equivocated that on the one hand, “My takeaway [from Kerry] is
that the details of this deal are pretty solid, that it’s been carefully
negotiated, that it will hold up for 10 years or more.”
On the
other hand, he said, “Netanyahu is right. Iran is a dangerous
destabilizing force in the Middle East. So somehow good policy seems to
me to use the deal to cap the nuclear threat that Iran would pose for 10
years but work on that other problem.”
Ignatius’s remarks serve
to justify supporting the deal. After all, if Obama’s agreement caps
Iran’s nuclear program for 10 years, then it’s a good thing. As for the
other stuff, it can be dealt with separately.
Unfortunately, while eminently reasonable sounding, Ignatius’s
analysis is incorrect. Kerry’s details of the deal are beside the point.
The big picture is the only thing that matters. That picture has two
main points.
First, the deal guarantees that Iran will develop nuclear weapons. Second, it gives $150 billion to the mullahs.
The
details of the deal – the number of centrifuges that keep spinning, the
verification mechanisms, the dispute resolution procedures, etc. – are
all debatable, and largely irrelevant, at least when compared to the two
irrefutable aspects of the big picture.
According to the
administration, today Iran needs a year to use the nuclear materials it
is known to possess to make a nuclear bomb. Other sources claim that
Iran requires several months to accomplish the task.
Since these
materials will remain in Iran’s possession under the deal, if Iran
abandons the agreement, it will need at most a year to build nuclear
weapons.
Then there are the unknown aspects of Iran’s nuclear
program. We must assume that Iran has ongoing covert nuclear operations
in unknown installations through which it has acquired unknown
capabilities.
These capabilities will likely reduce the time Iran requires to make bombs.
Under
the deal, the US and its negotiating partners are required to protect
Iran’s nuclear assets from sabotage and other forms of attack. They are
required as well to teach Iran how to develop and use more advanced
centrifuges. As a consequence, when the agreement expires, Iran will be
able to build nuclear bombs at will.
If Iran remains a threat, the deal bars the US from taking any steps to counter it aside from all-out war.
The
agreement ends the international sanctions regime against Iran. With
the sanctions goes any prospect of an international coalition joining
forces to take military action against Iran, if Iran does walk away from
the deal. So sanctions are gone, deterrence is gone. And that leaves
only war.
In other words, far from diminishing the chance of war,
the deal makes it inevitable that Iran will get the bomb or there will
be a full scale war, or both.
Then there is the jackpot payback.
Who
knows? Maybe the mullahs will use their $150b. to finance new women’s
universities in Tehran and Mashhad, and a seminary for Islamic
liberalism in Qom.
Or maybe the money will be used to fund insurgencies and proxy wars and terror campaigns throughout the region and the world.
The
extraordinary thing about the deal is that the only person who gets a
say in how that money is spent is Iran’s dictator Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei. And Khamenei has been pretty clear about how he intends to use
the cash.
In back to back anti-American rants on Friday and
Saturday, Khamenei repeatedly threatened the US and extolled calls for
its destruction. Speaking in front of a banner at Friday prayers which
declared “We will trample America,” Khamenei praised calls for “Death to
America.”
Saturday he promised to continue to fund and sponsor
terrorism and proxy wars. Just as notably, he refused to commit to
upholding the nuclear deal with the US and the other five powers.
As
far as the Obama administration is concerned, now that the UN Security
Council has anchored the agreement in a binding resolution and so given
the force of international law to a deal that guarantees Iran will
receives the bomb and $150b., the deal is done. It cannot be walked
back.
But this is not necessarily true. Congress may have more
power than it realizes to kill the deal before Iran gets the money and
before its other provisions are implemented.
Over the months
leading up to the conclusion of negotiations last Tuesday, Obama refused
to acknowledge that he was negotiating a treaty. Rather he said it was
nothing more than an executive agreement.
Consequently, he
argued, the US Senate’s sole authority to ratify treaties by two-thirds
majority would be inapplicable to the deal with Iran.
Obama also
said he would further sideline Congress by anchoring the deal in a
binding UN Security Council resolution. This resolution would force
Obama’s successor to uphold the deal after he leaves office.
Obama
mitigated his position slightly when Senator Bob Corker, chairman of
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, drafted the Corker-Cardin bill
with veto-proof majorities in both houses. The bill, which Obama
reluctantly signed into law, requires Obama to submit the deal to an up
or down vote in both houses. If more than two thirds of Senators and
Congressmen oppose it, then the US will not abrogate its unilateral
sanctions against Iran.
In other words, Obama agreed that if
Congress turned the Constitution on its head by replacing the two-thirds
Senate majority required to approve a treaty with a two-thirds
bicameral majority necessary to disapprove his executive agreement –
then he wouldn’t go to the Security Council until after Congress voted.
When
Obama betrayed his pledge and went to the Security Council on Monday,
he gave Congress an opening to reconsider its position, ditch the
restrictive Corker-Cardin law and reassert the Senate’s treaty approving
authority.
As former US federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy
argued in National Review last week, by among other things canceling the
weapons and missile embargoes on Iran, the six-power deal with Iran
went well beyond the scope of the Corker-Cardin law, which dealt only
with nuclear sanctions relief. As a consequence, Congress can claim that
there is no reason to invoke it.
Rather than invoke
Corker-Cardin, Congress can pass a joint resolution determining that the
deal with Iran is a treaty and announce that pursuant to the US
Constitution, the Senate will schedule a vote on it within 30 days.
Alternatively, Congress can condition the Iran deal’s legal stature on
the passage of enabling legislation – that requires simple majorities in
both houses.
Dan Darling, foreign policy adviser to Republican
Senator and presidential hopeful Rand Paul wrote Monday that senators
can use Senate procedure to force the Foreign Relations Committee to act
in this manner. Darling argued that House Speaker John Boehner can
either refuse to consider the deal since it is a treaty, or insist on
passing enabling legislation under normal legislative procedures.
Monday
Netanyahu explained that by keeping US sanctions in force, Congress can
limit Iran’s capacity to move beyond the current sanctions regime even
after it is canceled. Every state and firm considering business
opportunities with Tehran will have to weigh them against the
opportunity cost of being barred from doing business with the US.
Iran
for its part may walk away from the deal entirely if Congress acts in
this manner. If it does, then the US will not be obligated by any of the
deal’s requirements. The continued viability of the Security Council
resolution will be something for the lawyers to argue over.
The
devil in Obama’s deal with Iran is not in the mind-numbing details, but
in the big picture. The deal guarantees Iran will get the bomb. It gives
the Iranian regime $150b.
To secure these concessions, Obama has trampled congressional authority.
If
the American people think this doesn’t advance their national interest,
they should encourage their congressional representatives to ditch
Corker-Cardin and use their full authority, as a co-equal branch of the
government, to scupper it.
If there ever was a contemporary organization birthed in the nether regions of hell itself, Planned Parenthood is it.
