!!!!
U.S. boxes in Israel, not Iran
Syndicated columnist
.
.
“Iran, U.S. Set To Establish Joint Chamber Of Commerce Within Month,”
reports Agence-France Presse. Government official Abolfazi Hejazi tells
the English-language newspaper Iran Daily that the Islamic Republic
will shortly commence direct flights to America. Passenger jets, not
ICBMs, one assumes – although, as with everything else, the details have
yet to be worked out. Still, the historic U.S.-Iranian rapprochement
seems to be galloping along, and any moment now the cultural exchange
program will be announced, and you’ll have to book early for the Tehran
Ballet’s season at the Kennedy Center (“Death To America” in repertory
with “Death To The Great Satan”).
.
In Geneva, the participants came to the talks with different goals:
The Americans and Europeans wanted an agreement; the Iranians wanted
nukes. Each party got what it came for. Before the deal, the mullahs’
existing facilities were said to be within four to seven weeks of
nuclear “breakout”; under the new constraints, they’ll be eight to nine
weeks from breakout. In return, they get formal international
recognition of their enrichment program, and the gutting of sanctions –
and everything they already have is, as they say over at Obamacare,
grandfathered in.
Many pundits reached for the obvious appeasement analogies, but Bret
Stephens in the Wall Street Journal argued that Geneva is actually worse
than Munich. In 1938, facing a German seizure of the Sudetenland, the
French and British prime ministers were negotiating with Berlin from a
position of profound military weakness: it’s easy to despise Chamberlain
with the benefit of hindsight, less easy to give an honest answer as to
what one would have done differently playing a weak hand across the
table from Hitler 75 years ago. This time round, a superpower and its
allies, accounting for over 50 percent of the planet’s military
spending, were facing a militarily insignificant country with a ruined
economy and no more than two-to-three months’ worth of hard currency –
and they gave it everything it wanted.
.
I would add two further points. First, the Munich Agreement’s
language is brutal and unsparing, all “shalls” and “wills”: Paragraph 1)
“The evacuation will begin on 1st October”; Paragraph 4) “The four
territories marked on the attached map will be occupied by German troops
in the following order.” By contrast, the P5+1 (U.S., U.K., France,
Russia, China plus Germany) “Joint Plan of Action” barely reads like an
international agreement at all. It’s all conditional, a forest of
“woulds”: “There would be additional steps in between the initial
measures and the final step…” In the post-modern phase of Western
resolve, it’s an agreement to reach an agreement – supposedly within six
months. But one gets the strong impression that, when that six-month
deadline comes and goes, the temporary agreement will trundle along
semipermanently to the satisfaction of all parties.
Secondly, there are subtler concessions. Explaining that their
“singular object” was to “ensure that Iran does not acquire a nuclear
weapon,” John Kerry said that “Foreign Minister Zarif emphasized that
they don’t intend to do this, and the Supreme Leader has indicated there
is a fatwa which forbids them to do this.”
.
The “Supreme Leader” is not
Barack Obama but Ayatollah Khamenei. Why is America’s secretary of state
dignifying Khamenei as “the Supreme Leader”? In his own famous remarks
upon his return from Munich, Neville Chamberlain referred only to “Herr
Hitler.” “Der Führer” means, in effect, “the Supreme Leader,” but,
unlike Kerry (and Obama), Chamberlain understood that it would be
unseemly for the representative of a free people to confer
respectability on such a designation. As for the Führer
de nos jours,
Ayatollah Khamenei called Israel a “rabid dog” and dismissed “the
leaders of the Zionist regime, who look like beasts and cannot be called
human.” If the words of “the Supreme Leader” are to be taken at face
value when it comes to these supposed constraints preventing Iran from
going nuclear, why not also when he calls Jews subhuman?
.
I am not much interested in whether “the Supreme Leader” can be
trusted. Prudent persons already know the answer to that. A more
relevant question is whether the U.S. can be trusted. Israel and the
Sunni monarchies who comprise America’s least-worst friends in the Arab
world were kept in the dark about not only the contents of the first
direct U.S./Iranian talks in a third-of-a-century but even an
acknowledgment that they were taking place. The only tip-off into the
parameters of the emerging deal is said to have come from British
briefings to their former Gulf protectorates and the French getting
chatty with Israel. A couple of days ago, Nawaf Obaid, an adviser to
Prince Mohammed, the Saudi Ambassador in London, was unusually candid
about the Americans: “We were lied to, things were hidden from us,” he
said. “The problem is not with the deal struck in Geneva but how it was
done.”
.
“How it was done”: Some years ago, I heard that great scholar of
Islam, Bernard Lewis, caution that America risked being seen as harmless
as an enemy and treacherous as a friend. The Obama administration seems
to have raised the thought to the level of doctrine. What has hitherto
been unclear is whether this was through design or incompetence.
Certainly, John Kerry has been unerringly wrong on every foreign policy
issue for four decades, so sheer bungling stupidity cannot be ruled out.
.
But look at it this way: It’s been clear for some time that the
United States was not going to take out Iran’s nuclear facilities. That
leaves only one other nation even minded to keep the option on the
table: Israel. Hence the strange new romance between the Zionist Entity
and the Saudi and Gulf Cabinet ministers calling every night to urge
them to get cracking: In the post-American world, you find your friends
where you can, even if they’re Jews. But Obama and Kerry have not only
taken a U.S bombing raid off the table, they’ve ensured that any such
raid by Israel will now come at a much steeper price: It’s one thing to
bomb a global pariah, quite another to bomb a semi-rehabilitated member
of the international community in defiance of an agreement signed by the
Big Five world powers. Indeed, a disinterested observer might easily
conclude that the point of the plan seems to be to box in Israel rather
than Iran.
.
If it were to have that effect, the Sunni Arab states would be faced
with a choice of accepting de facto Shia Persian hegemony – or getting
the Saudis to pay the Pakistanis for a Sunni bomb. Nobody in Araby
believes the U.S. can “contain” Iran, even if it wants to. And, since
the Geneva deal, nobody’s very sure the U.S. wants to.
.
Meanwhile, through the many months they kept their allies in the
dark, Washington was very obliging to the mullahs. According to the
Times of Israel, among the Iranian prisoners quietly released by the
U.S. as a friendly predeal gesture is Mojtada Atarodi, arrested in 2011
for attempting to acquire nuclear materials. Iran has felt under no
pressure to reciprocate. America is containing itself, in hopes of a
quiet life.
.
Will it get one? The Guardian reports that, last Saturday night at
the Geneva InterContinental, the final stages of the P5+1 talks were
played out to the music bleeding through from the charity bash in the
adjoining ballroom. At one point, the band played Johnny Cash:
.
“I fell into a burning ring of fire
I went down, down, down and the flames went higher
And it burns, burns, burns
The ring of fire … .”
.
So it does.
.
.
©MARK STEYN
