Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu waves as he step to the podium prior to speaking before a joint meeting of Congress on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, March 3, 2015. Prime Minister Netanyahu is used the address to push Congress to reject a US agreement with Iran.
BEIRUT — Bomb Iran! The Islamic Republic is an inherently evil state on the path to building a nuclear weapon, which will lead to an unending nuclear arms race in the Middle East. Following a nuclear agreement with the United States, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey will all build atomic bombs, resulting in a nuclear war sure to reduce the region to a radioactive wasteland!
At least that’s what John Bolton, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 2005 to 2006, and others would like people to believe. Writing in The New York Times in the run-up to the March 31 deadline for a political agreement between the P5+1 nations (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States, plus Germany) and Iran, Bolton asserted, “Time is terribly short, but a strike [on Iran] can still succeed.”
According to Gary Sick, however, people who follow this line of thinking are the same people that got us into a war with Iraq. Sick is a former U.S. National Security Council staff member, who served under presidents Ford, Carter and Reagan. He was the principal White House aide for Iran during the country’s 1979 revolution and the hostage crisis. Currently, he is a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Middle East Institute.
Speaking with MintPress News on the phone from New York, Sick explained that war hawks like Bolton and Joshua Muravchik only serve to drive American foreign policy to hopeless conclusions. In their minds, he says, the only solution is violence.
Muravchik is a fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. He wrote an article in the Washington Post on March 13 entitled, “War with Iran is probably our best option.”
“The people who believe that, they’re never going to change their minds,” Sick said, adding, “They haven’t had a new thought in years.”
Looking back to Nixon’s rapprochement with China
Gary Sick, pictured above briefing President Carter on the Iran hostage crises in 1981, told MintPress that war hawks like John Bolton and Joshua Muravchik are the same people that got us into a war with Iraq and only serve to drive American foreign policy to hopeless conclusions.
People like Bolton, Muravchik and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu see no hope in anything but regime change, Sick says, explaining that they present the U.S. with two options: Either Washington heeds their calls for regime change in Iran, or it deals with a government it doesn’t particularly like.
“And the fact is, we’ve dealt with governments we don’t like when we did a deal with Mao Zedong,” Sick argued. “We didn’t like that guy.”
“Here’s a guy who had actually slaughtered millions of his own people — millions — who had basically threatened nuclear war against the rest of the world. We did a deal with him, and he didn’t do it anymore.”
Sick says there is a historical perspective with two different approaches for viewing the negotiations with Iran — both of which relate to China.
“One, we should’ve bombed China. We should’ve used nuclear weapons, and there were people within the United States that thought that was a really good idea at that time,” he explained. “Or we should’ve tried to do a deal with them, and basically try to constrain their actions.”
“And that is actually what really happened,” he added.
Sick says the current negotiations with Iran resemble other major arms controls agreements that the U.S. has had in the past, which happened to work out very well. For example, China signed and ratified numerous multilateral arms control agreements and treaties after the U.S.-China rapprochement in the 1970s, including the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
“Both sides have so much invested”
In the event that the P5+1 and Iran don’t come to terms and there is no agreement, Sick told MintPress that the world could anticipate Iran resuming the creation and installation of centrifuges, building up a stockpile of nuclear material, up-blending enriched uranium to 20 percent, and resuming work on their plutonium reactor in Arak, along with starting up their system at Fordow. In short, the Iranians will come closer to being able to build a nuclear weapon in a short amount of time, if they choose to do so.
There is no proof, however, that Iran ever decided to weaponize its nuclear program. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has, in fact, issued a fatwa against nuclear weapons, as did his predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Even Mossad, Israel’s national intelligence agency, concluded in 2012 that Iran is “not performing the activity necessary to produce weapons.” That assessment was revealed in a leak of top-secret documents last month — just weeks after Netanyahu claimed in a speech to the United Nations that Iran was only one year away from getting an atomic weapon.
“Where we were in 2013 was that the Iranians were accumulating enriched uranium very quickly, everybody was worried about that, and there was a threat that the Israelis would launch a unilateral attack or that they would try to drag the Americans into another war,” Sick said.
“We can go back to that, but I certainly hope that we don’t.”
Optimistically, however, he noted that he doesn’t imagine the talks will regress. “Both sides now have so much invested in the entire process, it’s very hard to believe that they’re going to walk away from the whole thing entirely,” he said.
What are the issues right now?
The reactor building of Iran’s Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant is seen, just outside the port city of Bushehr 750 miles (1245 kilometers) south of the capital Tehran, Iran.
The U.S. wants Iran to limit its nuclear program so that it cannot easily be weaponized. President Barack Obama has stated that the U.S. goal in the nuclear negotiations is to make sure “there’s at least a year between us [the U.S.] seeing them try to get a nuclear weapon and them actually being able to obtain one.”
The U.S. proposes to do this through instituting an intensive inspections regime of Iran’s nuclear facilities, and limiting the amounts of plutonium and highly enriched uranium the country can produce.
Meanwhile, Iran wants to maintain its right to generate nuclear energy under the NPT. It’s also seeking an end to sanctions that have been imposed on the country since 1979.
Tehran opposes the intensification of inspections because it is already under what Mohsen Milani, executive director of the Center for Strategic and Diplomatic Studies at the University of South Florida, has described as “the most intrusive inspection regime in the history of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).”
According to Ariane Tabatabai, assistant professor in the Security Studies Program at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, however, Milani is misinformed. Japan is the most thoroughly inspected country in the world, with an on-site inspector stationed at one of its plants 24 hours a day.
She wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:
“Iran claims that based on the number of days inspectors spend in the country, it is subject to the most intrusive inspections, but that reasoning is flawed, as time spent in-country is not a measure of intrusiveness. Much of the time the IAEA inspectors spend there is to monitor activities, and while this is important, it does not increase the international community’s knowledge about the content and scope of the nuclear program. In fact, despite having spent years in the country, the IAEA is still unable to verify the correctness and completeness of the information Tehran has provided.”
Ultimately, in the event of a comprehensive deal, the P5+1 would like Iran to implement the “additional protocol” and reveal more information regarding accusations that the Parchin military complex had been used to develop nuclear weapons in the past. This comes despite the fact that the IAEA has never found any evidence that Iran is building a nuclear weapon or even wants to do so. The additional protocol is an agreement signed by Iran in 2003 that allows the IAEA additional authority to investigate the country’s nuclear program.
Despite all these stringent safeguards being demanded of Iran, the U.S. Department of Defense recently declassified a 1987 report on Israel’s nuclear weapons and facilities that “are equivalent to our Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge National Laboratories… [and run] the full nuclear gamut of activities from engineering, administration and non-destructive testing to electro-optics, pulsed power, process engineering and chemistry and nuclear research and safety.”
However, due to the secretive nature of the program, Israel is not subject to IAEA monitoring, and it is not a signatory of the NPT.
How could a nuclear deal impact the Middle East?
As far as the broadening theater of war in the Middle East piercing Iraq, Syria and now Yemen, Sick told MintPress that the nuclear deal should be thought of in terms of how it could either ease or exacerbate those problems.
The naysayers of a nuclear deal argue that it would allow Iran greater movement in the Middle East, he says, noting that these are the same people arguing that Iran is ultimately attempting to export its 1979 Islamic Revolution to countries all over the region, as it has argued in the past that it would.
However, Sick argues that a deal “doesn’t give them [Iran] any more freedom than they have right now.” He noted, “In fact, they had more freedom of movement before they got into these negotiations.”
Indeed, he believes that a nuclear agreement would impose unprecedented restraints on Iran’s ambitions in the region. If Iran doesn’t implement some restraints in terms of its regional strategy, it could be be seen as showing bad faith and walking away from an agreement. Ultimately, Sick reasoned, “They want the sanctions to be relieved.”
Further, a deal won’t change the Islamic Republic’s relationship with the Assad regime or Hezbollah, which both concern the U.S. and Israel. “But those were there to begin with,” Sick said.
“One of the things that comes with an agreement is that the United States and Iran will begin seriously talking with each other, and this is something new,” he told MintPress.
Since Iran is involved with many of the regional issues, Sick says, there would now be a channel for the U.S. and Iran to communicate directly, “rather than shouting at each other in newspaper headlines.”
“If there is a nuclear agreement, it’s not going to solve all of the problems in the Middle East, certainly not, but it does, in fact, result in the possibility of a more business-like relationship where the two sides can both be heard, and some problems may be alleviated,” he concluded.