Israel as a historic mistake: For the U.S., a burden too heavy to bear

Re-upping an article from 2015 for this moment 23 July 2015 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s reaction to the July 14 agreement involving Iran and six world powers plus the European Union, was brusque and bitter. It was a “historic mistake”, he said, rewarding clandestine nuclear activities and imposing no penalty on Iran’s hostile and aggressive behaviour. Israel would not be obligated in any manner by the deal and would have the world know it had the means to defend itself. There were no surprises there. Nor were there any in the subsequent spectacle of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a powerful lobby that wields enormous financial clout, stepping up with vows to kill the deal in U.S. Congress. Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, prohibitive favourite for the Democratic nomination to the White House next year, felt compelled to defend the deal by loyalty to a president she had served. But that was done in an undertone. The louder motif in her first reaction was a declaration of loyalty to the AIPAC cause. Confident about her historic destiny, Clinton announced that as U.S. President, she would deploy every weapon to “compel rigorous Iranian compliance” and demand verifiable evidence of the “roll back” of Iranian nuclear plans. The U.S. would “never permit Iran to evade its obligations or to place any suspicious site off limits to inspectors”. The reaction to any “cheating” would be “immediate and decisive”, triggering a “return of sanctions” and every avenue being kept open, “including, if necessary, (the) military options”. There is an obvious predisposition in the U.S. political arena to believe that Iran is prone to “cheat”. It is a theme that in its constant invocation brings back memories of the accusations levelled against Iraq through the 1990s, well after it had been disarmed by an intrusive inspections process carried out under a punishing regime of sanctions. Iraq’s “cheating” was what led the U.S. to fudge its own intelligence and stampede a sceptical world into the invasion in 2003, leaving a trail of chaos in the region that is still to abate. “Cheating” is a word that curiously has not been applied in the mainstream discourse on U.S. conduct through that frenetic rush to war. Rather than accept that accolade, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) proved rather more comfortable – even eager – embracing incompetence as an alibi. And as he left office in expiation for his sins while loudly proclaiming loyalty to his family as sole motive, George Tenet the CIA director through those years, also earned himself the highest presidential honour, the Medal of Freedom. Since this could not have been a reward for either incompetence or cheating, the only reasonable inference is that it was to buy his silence. Deceit similarly, is an accusation that Israel is curiously exempt from after keeping nuclear whistle-blower Mordecai Vanunu in solitary confinement for decades and inflicting seven decades of ethnic cleansing in Palestine and terrorist violence in its neighbourhood. As Israel and the paranoid elements in the U.S. plunged on with accustomed strategies of twisting facts, the Arms Control Association (ACA), a Washington DC based expert body, came up with a fairly sober assessment. The comprehensive agreement with Iran, ACA stated, “would verifiably block Iran’s pathways to nuclear weapons development”. When implemented, it would be “a net plus for non-proliferation and (would) enhance U.S. and regional security”. At a public forum two days later – coincidentally the seven-decade anniversary of the first nuclear test in the New Mexico desert – the ACA head described the agreement as “among the most complex and consequential of the nuclear age”. On a mission of reassurance to Tel Aviv, British foreign secretary Phil Hammond was berated by his hosts for suggesting that Israel would have opposed any manner of a deal. When a sheepish and apologetic U.S. Defence Secretary Ashton Carter went calling, a grim-faced Netanyahu made not the slightest pretence of hospitality before TV news crews. As reported by the Wall Street Journal, an Israel partisan in the U.S. media landscape: “The tension was evident from the moment Mr. Netanyahu greeted Mr. Carter at his office in Jerusalem. ... At first, Mr. Netanyahu welcomed the Pentagon chief with a hand-shake, but then abruptly scrapped U.S. plans for the two leaders to make brief remarks in public. Instead, Mr. Netanyahu led Mr. Carter past two waiting microphones, up a staircase and into a meeting room. Confused, members of the American delegation trailed behind them”. In self-righteous hauteur, Netanyahu is believed to have rejected an offer of enhanced U.S. military aid, overruling advice from security and intelligence agencies that Israel should take all it could get. In the fractious milieu of Israeli politics, the Iran deal has been Netanyahu’s great opportunity to get the full spectrum behind him. And as he prepares for the bigger mission of twisting the U.S. political system into submission, he has calculated that the military aid carrot would weaken his case. Netanyahu had given ample forewarning that no deal preserving a vestige of Iranian sovereignty would be acceptable, brazenly wading into political partisanship in March and addressing U.S. Congress in a deliberate affront to President Barack Obama’s investment in the talks. As he sketched a scare scenario of mortal danger to Israel’s survival, Netanyahu reached for Biblical analogies and invoked a sinister Persian viceroy’s plot against the Jewish people from two-and-a-half millennia back. He then segued into a weird diatribe more strident in its Islamophobic tone than recent appearances before the U.N. General Assembly. The emergence of the Islamic State militia as a malevolent new presence in the West Asian region, did not make Iran a potential ally of the west, he said. There was a “deadly game of thrones” underway, in which there would be “no place for America or for Israel, no peace for Christians, Jews or Muslims who don't share the Islamist medieval creed, no rights for women, no freedom for anyone”. Rhetorically, these were a clear overture to the most extreme elements in the U.S. and Israel. Then facing a tense electoral battle at home, Netanyahu pinned his hopes on retaining the loyalty of the fanatical right-wing that is now mainstream in Israel. As polls neared, he warned about a sinister leftist conspiracy to depose him, before playing his final card and vowing that a Palestinian state would never become a reality under his watch. It was that pivot to the extreme right that transformed a losing position into victory. After weeks of negotiations, when Netanyahu put together a narrow majority in Israel’s parliament, it was in alliance with the most reactionary elements, mirroring in many ways the Republican Party in the U.S. This is the ideological fraternity that could deliver Israel from its feverish paranoia over the Iranian nuclear deal. First reactions from kindred souls on Capitol Hill did not disappoint. John Boehner, speaker of the U.S. House, faithfully echoed Israeli talking points. But as various complexities dawned, he retreated into sullen silence. It was left to AIPAC to work out a strategy and in a fact-sheet produced to order, it identified five minimum requirements that had not been met by the Iran deal. Among the five was the alleged failure to enforce a regime of “anytime, anywhere” inspections. The template Israel had in mind was undoubtedly the punishing regime that the U.S. and U.K. – with an acquiescent U.N. Security Council failing to offer resistance – imposed on Iraq through the 1990s, often seeking provocative intrusions into the innermost precincts of the state on utterly laughable grounds. It was a policy of regime change pursued through a disarmament agenda, which led by its own inexorable logic, to the invasion of 2003. Republicans in the U.S. remain unrepentant at the record of dissimulation, but Democrats are visibly suffering buyer’s remorse. And the plain fact about the nuclear deal with Iran, stated in cold print is that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) would be permitted “managed access” to all sites if concerns were to arise about undeclared nuclear activities. The term “managed access” has set off a flurry of condemnation in the constituency that puts Israel before all. Its implication though, is modest. Every sovereign state is guaranteed the right to safeguard sites vital to security. Even here, Iran’s rights have been severely abridged. If reasons advanced for denying access were to be deemed inadequate, the eight parties to the nuclear deal – the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, Germany, the European Union and Iran – would decide by majority vote. Even the worst-case scenario sketched by Israel – of a gang-up of Russia, China and Iran preventing inspections – would be far removed from realms of possibility. A specific worry that Israel vented through its captive media platforms involves the covert Parchin military base, southeast of Tehran, “suspected of being the centre of Iran's secret nuclear weapons program”. And here IAEA inspections -- recorded in periodic reports to the board -- reveal a ruthless distortion of facts. As recorded in a report of 8 March 2006, the agency was in November the previous year, given access to the Parchin site. The IAEA “did not observe any unusual activities in the buildings visited” and an analysis of numerous environmental samples gathered “did not indicate the presence of nuclear material at those locations”. An ostensible failure in the deal to insist that Iran “must come clean on its prior nuclear work” is another of the Israel lobby’s grievances. Here again, the factual record of inspections paints a rather different picture. Most such inspections have followed declarations by Iran that it intends to pursue nuclear fuel cycle activities as it is entitled to under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The matter became contentious from about 2003 with reports that Iran had imported uranium compounds through the 1990s without reporting them. Iran’s response was that quantities imported did not exceed the technical definition of “an effective kilogram”, the threshold at which reporting to IAEA became obligatory. Once this discrepancy was cleared, as the IAEA reported in June 2003, Iran fully accounted for the material except for minute traces that were quite plausibly, lost due to technical issues with the storage process. In November 2005, the IAEA recorded that Iran had provided a “substantial amount of information and documentation relevant to its procurement efforts in the late 1980s and early 1990s”. All this when aggregated with information from other sources, “seemed consistent with Iran’s declarations of what had been procured”. Though there was no evidence that Iran had achieved uranium enrichment even remotely within reach of a bomb, the response of the U.N. Security Council, which exercises ultimate oversight, was to severely abridge Iran’s rightfully entitled activities. Heavy water production for instance, is not classified as an activity subject to NPT safeguards but is under strict monitoring in Iran. As part of its obligations under the July 14 deal, Iran will verifiably dismantle the vast bulk of its centrifuges for uranium enrichment and accept an obligation to not develop fissile material beyond a very modest enrichment level of 3.67 percent. Israel’s worry that the deal does not block Iran’s nuclear weapons quest “for decades” is evidently an outrageous falsehood. With elaborate safeguards and conditionalities in place, the deal completely eliminates the plutonium pathway to a nuclear weapon and cuts uranium enrichment capacity substantially for a decade. Iran will retain a residual enrichment capacity only because it has the right under the NPT to peaceful nuclear energy research. To take away this entitlement would be to reduce the NPT – already a highly skewed and distorted instrument – to complete absurdity. If there is a breakout by Iran after a decade – and there is no reason to believe there will be – the ACA assessment is that it would take at least a year to produce material sufficient for one explosive device. The New York Times on July 17 reported that AIPAC had set aside a budget of $ 20 million to defeat the Iran deal. Following the Netanyahu speech in March, Israel-firsters in the U.S. Congress began manoeuvring to impose their will on the negotiations, delusionally disregarding their multilateral character. President Obama retreated from an early threat to veto legislation abridging the executive privilege to conclude a treaty, subject to post facto legislative ratification. Desperate negotiations later a law was passed that allowed U.S. Congress a limited window of time to vote the deal up or down. Congress needs a two-third majority in both houses to beat the veto that President Obama has sworn to employ against a down vote. Precedents in this particular instance exert a formidable force. The last time Congress actually reversed an executive branch decision involving foreign policy was in 1986, when Ronald Reagan’s bigoted pushback against sanctions on racist South Africa was decisively defeated by a congressional black caucus mobilisation. The U.N. Security Council meanwhile went right ahead and unanimously ratified the Iran deal. Even in the remote eventuality of a U.S. congressional rollback, it would have no bearing on multilateral sanctions which would be removed in accordance with an agreed timetable. If increasingly bitter partisanship in domestic politics demands, the U.S. may reimpose some form of sanctions. But the specifically nuclear-related sanctions that the U.S. has over time conjured up are unlikely to add very much to those that originate in concerns over terrorism and human rights. These remain in place and very little the U.S. Congress does is likely to be of material significance. Obama’s turn towards negotiations with Iran after decades of confrontation was an effort to change course in a region that has been plunged into a state of proliferating chaos by the overweening conceits of U.S. power. Till the late-1970s, Iran and Israel were the two regional props around which U.S. power gravitated. Iran’s Islamic revolution in 1979 knocked out one among those props, but Iraq fortuitously stepped into that breach, with the active encouragement of the Gulf Arab states and the U.S., to fight a decade long war against Iran over territory and denominational loyalties. As the two sides fought to a bitter stalemate, the U.S. found a way of playing one side and then the other. But the blood and treasure spent in defence of the Arab Gulf states left Iraq with a sense of entitlement which when rebuffed, erupted in virulent hostilities against erstwhile friends. In August 1990, Iraqi tanks rolled into Kuwait, setting off a sequence of U.S. military responses that have still not run their course. Even after inflicting what the U.S. triumphally claimed was a decisive defeat on Iraq, the impulse for vengeance was not exhausted. With other proxies in the region being weak and inept, the U.S. embarked on a strategy of dual containment targeting both Iraq and Iran. By the late-1990s, this strategy was beginning to wear thin and global sympathy was growing for Iraq, still subject to brutal economic sanctions and whimsical bombing raids by the U.S. and U.K. That was when a slow and hesitant warming towards Iran began, with U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in 2000 rather hesitantly admitting a U.S. role in the 1953 putsch that overthrew Iran’s first democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. All possibility of a durable rapprochement vanished in 2001 with the return of the right-wing to power in the U.S. In his first state of the union address to the U.S. Congress in 2002, U.S. President George Bush enfolded Iran and Iraq – bitter regional adversaries with not the faintest connection to the September 11 terrorist attacks in the U.S. -- into his theological construct of an “axis of evil”. Faith had supplanted fact as the basis of policy. And it was perhaps some signal from a divine being – and a lot of unsubtle nudging from Israel -- that pushed Bush into invading Iraq. In 2006, when India was in the process of negotiating a great escape from the nuclear order it never tired of portraying as an oppressive restraint, the New York Times ran an editorial titled “Iran’s Best Friend”. The reference was to the Bush administration, whose invasion of Iraq had transformed it into “an Iranian-aligned fundamentalist theocracy”. Far from a servitor of western interests, Bush’s invasion had created a “squabbling, divided country in which the Shiite majority in the oil-rich south finds much more in common with its fellow Shiites in Iran than with the Sunni Muslims with whom it needs to form an Iraqi government”. Moving on to the nuclear deal just signed with India, the New York Times warned that it was “exactly the wrong message to send ... just days before Washington and its European allies will be asking the International Atomic Energy Agency to refer Iran's case to the United Nations Security Council for further action”. Iran's hopes of preventing such a reference were slender, but it was almost certain that it would try “convincing the rest of the world that the West is guilty of a double standard on nuclear issues”. As propaganda prop, Bush could just “as well have tied a pretty red bow around his India nuclear deal and mailed it as a gift to Tehran”. Inconsistencies at the level of principle never bothered the U.S., but a rapidly deteriorating situation on the ground soon became impossible to ignore. With the explosive arrival of the Islamic State (IS) militia in 2014, the effort to keep a lid on rapidly escalating antagonisms and a malign new polarisation of regional forces was officially declared over. As the U.S. embarked on yet another dubious battle of dual containment – seeking the destruction of the IS while also vowing to dismantle Syria and Iran, the militia’s only credible regional opponents – it must have found the complexities rather too much to deal with, even with the deepest commitments of faith. In deep remorse, Vice President Joe Biden in October last year said that the whole structure of alliances the U.S. had assembled to serve regional hegemonic compulsions, had directly fuelled the rise of the IS. He was forced to apologise by an orchestrated wave of outrage from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the Emirates and Turkey, but clearly his only sin was in publicly uttering what was by then the official reading in U.S. intelligence circles. In August 2012, well before the emergence of the IS as a threat, a report by the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) in the U.S., spoke of the possible repercussions of the continuing chaos in Syria. Regime change in Syria was a declared policy objective and as in various other contexts – Afghanistan and Iraq to name only two – the U.S. was gladly aligning itself with every manner of political tendency that would make it possible. Al Qaeda, the principal target of the war on terror, the DIA observed, had suffered a “regression” in the “western provinces of Iraq during the years 2009 and 2010”. Following the rise of the insurgency in Syria though, the religious and tribal powers in western Iraq began to side and “sympathise with the sectarian uprising”. The insurgency in Syria was principally driven by the extremist sect called the Salafists, as also the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda. And among its supporters were “the west, Gulf countries and Turkey”. Those who opposed the insurgency and supported the Syrian regime were “Russia, China and Iran”. Further aggravation in Syria, the DIA observed, could lead “a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in Eastern Syria”. This was “exactly what the supporting powers” wanted, “in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran)”. The potential deterioration of the situation though, would have “dire consequences” for Iraq. It would create the “ideal atmosphere” for Al Qaeda to “return to its old pockets in Mosul and Ramadi and (would) provide a renewed momentum under the presumption of unifying the jihad among Sunni Iraq and Syria”. There was no mystery about the emergence of the IS mid-2014 as a force that within days could seize control of a vast swathe of territory within Iraq. It was foreseen almost to its last details. What remains to be revealed is Israel’s role in fomenting the chaos. In 2003, well after the fiasco of the Iraq invasion had turned tragedy, a survey of European Union countries found that a clear majority identified Israel as the greatest threat to world peace. It caused much outrage in Israel and the resurrection of the old bogey of anti-Semitism. But the Zionist state’s angry and querulous reaction to a nuclear deal with Iran that has won almost unanimous world acclaim, underlines just how far it is adrift of world opinion. In 2004, as he contemplated the horrors of Zionist extremism in Israel in the days of Ariel Sharon’s premiership, Tony Kushner, Pulitzer prize winning playwright and acclaimed screenplay writer for the Steven Spielberg film "Munich", described the creation of Israel in terms that foreshadowed Netanyahu’s reaction to the Iran nuclear deal: a historic mistake. Speaking to the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, he rebuffed all accusations of anti-Semitism as cheap and ugly hysteria from those “advocating for something .. impossible to advocate for ... (namely) ... a Jewish state that does not acknowledge its own crimes”. Equally importantly, “a Jewish state is also supposed to be a democracy, in which the demographics are going against its continued existence as a Jewish state”. Others have considered the anomaly of the state of Israel coming into existence as an ethno-religious homeland based on colonisation and ethnic cleansing, at just the time that the world was entering a phase of decolonisation. That original sin of Israel’s birth has scarred it for life and it remains incapable of defining its borders or finding an identity that would meet basic democratic norms. The neighbourhood has no option but to accept its truculent presence, which embodies the perennial prospect of instability. If necessary, all international law has to be rewritten to ensure that its state of exceptional nationhood is forever sustained. The U.S. deal with Iran signals that the burden of carrying this exceptionalism is becoming too heavy to bear.