BFFs: Netanyahu instructing the US President on what to do, what to say.
Patrick Henningsen
21st Century Wire
After this week’s UN General Assembly, it’s pretty clear that the Iran nuclear deal may be in jeopardy. Not from a European perspective, but from Washington’s end of things.
As I pointed out at the time, from the beginning of the agreement in 2015, the main resistance in Washington was coming from only two places – the Republican Congress and Senate and the Israeli Lobby. In the words of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “No deal is better than a bad deal.” In reality, any deal was a bad deal for Israel, and what’s bad for Israel is meant to be bad for the United States of America, or so we’re told constantly by FOX News.
Despite Israel’s vehement opposition and Bibi’s grandstanding in front of the US Congress, the P5+1 nations successfully ratified a Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) for Iran’s nuclear program that summer. In US terms, this was generally hailed as a success at the time and a major foreign policy success benchmark for the Obama Administration.
IMAGE: Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, together with John Kerry, Federica Mogherini, Phillip Hammond in Lausanne, Switzerland, 2015.
Yesterday’s announcement by EU foreign minister Federica Mogherini that Brussels will not be renegotiating the Iran Nuclear Deal – will have no doubt angered an unhinged Netanyahu, who has already positioned himself as a mortal adversary to any deal which might benefit the nation of Iran. In terms of a foreign leader and a foreign lobby meddling in the US democratic system, a strong case could be made for Israel on that front; the radical Likud Party’s insistence on steering US policy on the issue should be a cause for worry of anyone who values US independence drafting its own foreign policy and treaties. The Guardian more or less summed it up this week:
“The desire to obliterate Obama’s mark on history may be something else that Trump and Netanyahu share. The Israeli leader had an acrimonious relationship with Obama, who successfully fended off Netanyahu’s bid to derail the Iran deal in the US Congress two years ago.”
During this week’s UN General Assembly speech, Trump dusted off his Iran soundbites from the campaign trail, again calling it “the worst deal ever signed in our nation’s history.” It shouldn’t surprise anyone what’s coming next.
Clearly, Washington is employing a standard good cop, bad cop approach to its evaluation of the JCPOA. On one hand, you have US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson (good cop) confirming that the US had acknowledged and accepts Iran’s technical compliance with the ‘letter of the deal’ – which is based solely on the results of inspections carried out by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) international watchdog. “From the technical standpoint, the IAEA reports continue to indicate and confirm that Iran is in technical compliance with the agreement,” said Tillerson.
Interestingly, Tillerson also noted that the US will continue to monitor Iran’s nuclear activity, and also “take additional steps” – but no one really knows what those ‘steps’ are yet.
Then we have President Donald Trump (bad cop) who, having not actually read the nuclear agreement and being totally reliant on charlatan advisors (people who run conservative websites, FOX News pundits, in-laws etc.) and the Israeli Lobby, is dutifully reading off of a script supplied to him by Netanyahu’s office – claiming that Iran is somehow violating the spirit of the law. In other words, Tehran is harboring a secret agenda and simply cannot be trusted. According to this logic, by not allowing US weapons inspectors unfettered access to visit any and all sensitive military facilities throughout Iran, then somehow Iran is in ‘non compliance’ with the nuclear deal, and therefore the agreement is null and void from a US point of view. This is a standard ploy which seemed to work for the US in 2002 with Iraq, and was used as a pretext for war, invasion and occupation of that country.
It’s doubtful Washington and Tel Aviv will achieve all of those same objectives again with Iran, but an aggressive stance and military stand-off would at least create the conditions for a new round of punitive US-led sanctions against Iran. To initiate this process, the US will first have to withdraw unilaterally from the P5 + 1 agreement, placing US-Iran relations back to its previous status quo. This could happen before Christmas.
Make no mistake about it: economic sanctions are the end game here. The re-imposing of sanctions would potentially refreeze billions of dollars of assets and put the breaks on Iran’s economic recovery, and keep it from becoming an oil and gas competitor internationally. Above all, this would be the desired outcome for the all the spoiler stakeholders in this affair; Israeli-Saudi Arabia alliance, Washington’s Neoconservative foreign policy cartel, the US security state and its bloated military industrial complex.
Look for this drama to proceed as planned.
Now Israel has a problem. What’s good for Washington is not necessarily good for Europe…
RT International reports today…
All parties to Iran’s nuclear agreement remain in full compliance with the deal, EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said after the Wednesday P5+1 powers’ meeting. She emphasized that the deal had potentially averted a military incursion into Iran.
“This is an agreement that prevented a nuclear program and potentially prevented a military intervention,” Mogherini said, following a meeting of ministers representing the six world powers and Iran on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.
Calling the negotiations a “frank” discussion, Mogherini said that it boiled down to all sides agreeing that no country has breached the terms of the deal. “We all agreed on the fact that there is no violation, that the nuclear program-related aspects, which is all the agreement, are being fulfilled,” she said.
In an apparent reference to the recent criticism of the deal by US President Donald Trump, who has labeled the landmark agreement “worst deal ever negotiated” while vowing to scrap it, Mogherini argued that “there is no need to renegotiate parts of the agreement.” Among the issues raised at the meeting was Washington’s commitment to the deal, Mogherini confirmed.
Speaking on whether she considers the deal to be effective, Mogherini said the answer to this question should lie exclusively within the scope of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which is tasked with watching over Iran’s compliance with the scaling down of its uranium enrichment. A potential US withdrawal from the deal was not on the agenda of the meeting, she said, noting that the parties did not discuss any scenarios resulting from Washington walking out on the agreement.
“The scope of the nuclear deal is related to the nuclear program of Iran. There are other issues that are out of the scope of the agreement, and these issues might be tackled in different formats,” she told journalists, when asked about Trump’s frustration with the deal.
Tillerson reaffirmed the US commitment to the deal but said that Trump is now weighing arguments “from both sides” to make a final decision whether the existing agreement meets US interests…
Continue this story at RT
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