Iran’s win-win deal not without compromise on weapons front
WHOEVER would have thought back in 1979, that in 2015, Iran’s president would hail a deal with the West as a victory, and Iranians would celebrate by dancing in Tehran’s main squares late into the night
The Iran nuclear deal this week has been the strategic lever which has opened a new chapter in USIran relations, and ushered in a new dynamic in the region.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said it all as he tweeted on Monday, #IranDeal is the victory of diplomacy and mutual respect over the outdated paradigm of exclusion and coercion.
He is absolutely right, the world has witnessed the victory of diplomatic solutions over war – a war that could have dragged the region into an abyss.
“The fact that for 18 days the negotiators worked day and night, shows their level of commitment to find a solution to the impasse over Iran’s nuclear program. There is no doubt this is a win-win outcome for both sides,” Iran’s Ambassador to South Africa, Mohammad Faraji, told Independent Media on Wednesday.
The past 18 days’ test was merely the final lap, but hard negotiations have been under way for the past 23 months, and the final result can only be described as the ultimate compromise. Both sides got the maximum they could have and both achieved their red lines.
For the West, the red line was to ensure that Iran could not produce a nuclear bomb, and they achieved this as the deal makes provision only for a nuclear programme for peaceful purposes.
Iran will have to slash its centrifuges by two thirds, and reduce its stockpiles of enriched uranium by 98 percent. There will be a maximum level of transparency, and intrusive inspections.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s red line had been that there would be no inspections of Iran’s sensitive military sites, that Iran must be allowed to pursue a nuclear programme for peaceful purposes, and that sanctions should be lifted. These issues have also been achieved, even if sanctions will be lifted in phases.
The issue of inspections of Iran’s military sites almost scuppered a deal as French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius had said France would not support a deal unless inspectors had access to all sites – including military ones. Iran had dug its heels in, insisting that its military sites were not part of its nuclear programme.
Given the numerous US threats to wage war against Iran, one can sympathise with Iran not wanting to allow Western probing of its mil- itary capabilities. US President Barak Obama had repeatedly said, “All options are on the table”, and Vice-President Joe Biden had said, “We may launch a war with Iran if we have to.”
The language in the deal on inspections has remained intentionally vague due to this tension. Obama likes to say that inspectors will have access anytime, anywhere, but the supreme leader of Iran, who has the final say in matters of state, would never have given his blessing to a deal that allowed such intrusion.
The pundits may say that inspection of military sites is the fly in the ointment, but in the end, there is likely to be compromise on this issue within clearly defined parameters.
A more significant problem is the hawkish position of the US Congress which is stoked by the fiery rhetoric of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who lambastes the deal as a historic mistake. The Zionist lobby in the US is likely to pull out all the stops to ensure Congress does its best to delegitimise the deal.
The US Congress does not have the power to block it, given the Presidential veto, and there is little that Israel can do now that its intense pressure on the French to toe the Israeli line in negotiations has failed.
According to Mohammad Marandi of the University of Tehran, “the reason Israel is so upset is that this deal lessens ten- sions in the region, and the Israeli regime thrives on maintaining an unstable region. Israel is an apartheid state, and the only way it can draw attention away from itself is to create crises in neighbouring countries to deflect attention from its own policies”.
Israel will continue its fearmongering, warning that new revenue from sanctions relief will be spent by Iran on funding its proxies in the region Hezbollah and the Assad government in Syria.
As Marandi has pointed out, Israel should thank Assad and Hezbollah for fighting IS so vociferously, as Israel would be a lot less safe if IS had taken over all of Syria and Iraq.
While the US continues to sell tens of billions of dollars of arms to Saudi Arabia and Israel, Iran will be subject to an embargo on conventional weapons for another five years, and on ballistic missiles for eight years. Such is the essence of compromise.
A more significant problem is the hawkish position of US stoked by Israel’s Netanyahu