O’S IRAN- DEAL DOUBLE- TALK

IN the aftermath of the Iran nuclear agreement reached last week, President Obama has had a lot to say about sanctions.

On the one hand, the president doesn’t think they really work. In his weekly address Saturday, Obama said therewere three options for Iran’s nuclear program: aerial bombardment, his deal and sanctions. Not surprisingly, Obama warned that sanctions “always led to Iran making more progress in its nuclear program.”

Here’s the catch: Two days earlier, at the announcement of the framework agreement, Obama praised the efficacy of renewing sanctions in case Iran cheats. “If Iran violates the deal,” he said, “sanctions can be snapped back into place.”

If Obama doesn’t think the sanctions that have cut off Iran’s banks and blocked the Tehran government from legally selling its oil will halt the regime’s nuclear program, why does he think snapping them back would deter Iran from cheating?

I put that question to Darryl Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association and a supporter of the deal. He said the influx of trade and foreign investment may change the Iranians’ sanctions calculations.

“They will have access to trade, foreign investment, oil sales to other countries, that will have a strong effect on their behavior, too,” Kimball told me. “As the foreign trade and investment increases over time, Iran’s incentives to comply will become stronger than they are today.”

This is possible. But another scenario is that Iran’s leadership was never all that interested in the overall health of the country’s economy, and instead wanted to avoid an economic meltdown that would cut into the personalwealth amassed by the regime elites.

As a 2013 Reuters investigation found, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, personally controls a charitable fund with holdings worth $ 95 billion. Khamenei and his cronies have enough money to ride out the devastating sanctions.

To gauge Iran’s likely behavior, two recent examples could be instructive. A similar framework agreement was reached in 1994 with North Korea. At the time, President Bill Clinton said the deal— which cut off its pathways to plutonium production— was a good deal, just as Obama talks about his Iran agreement today.

By 2000, however, US intelligence judged that North Korea “had produced one, possibly two, nuclearweapons” by the mid’ 90s, “although the North has frozen plutonium production activities at Yongbyon in accordance with the Agreed Framework of 1994.”

In other words, North Korea was able to comply with the terms of the framework agreement but still violate its spirit by building a weapon at an undeclared facility.

The Iran framework, at least according to the White House, does provide for intrusive inspections. But the parties have yet to work out a plan to answer the 11 or so questions the International Atomic Energy Agency has about possible military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear program before 2003.

Answering these will give inspectors a baseline to know what they are looking for if they are to catch Iran cheating again.

The other useful historical example is Iraq. At the end of 1991, Saddam Hussein agreed to intrusive inspections and a full accounting of his previous program.

The UN and IAEA were never able to fully close the file on Iraq, even though it turned out that Saddam only wanted to make it appear he had a nuclear program that in fact had been shuddered.

Charles Duelfer, the US weapons inspector who wrote the final report on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in 2004, wrote in Politico that the inspections program for Iraq was stymied because violations and cooperation had to be determined by the 15 countries on the UN Security Council.

Saddam knew how to divide the international community, paying off foreign officials in some cases.

UN inspectors had access to advanced technology to detect cheating in Iraq, just as they will in Iran. President Clinton even bombed Iraq after Saddam Hussein kicked out inspectors. But Saddam undermined the inspectors nonetheless.

It took years to put in place the crippling sanctions Obama said thisweekend didn’t deter Iran.

Obama says snapping them back will deter Iran from cheating again. If he’s going to sell this deal, he’ll need to explain that contradiction.

‘ Khamenei and his cronies have enough money to ride out the devastating sanctions. ’