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Don’t Ask Me to Explain The Iran Nuclear Agreement
If anyone is hoping for foreign policy wisdom from me about this, you’re looking to the wrong person. Nothing about this makes sense. Adam Garfinkle’s piece in the American Interest strikes me as closest to rational. He rejects the idea that the negotiations are “a cover for shepherding that bomb into being as an ante toward bringing about an Iranian-U.S. condominium to ‘stabilize’ the Middle East,” this on the grounds that the explanation is essentially a conspiracy theory:
It behooves those who hold such views to explain why an American President would think that multinational nuclear proliferation in the Middle East suits mid- to long-term U.S. national security interests. It obviously doesn’t, and so they cannot explain their position rationally.
But he notes that it would seem the President was willing to accept any deal, however unfavorable:
… the hopeful interpretations attached to this decision … make absolutely no sense. The manifest unwillingness of the President to walk away from these increasingly pointless and even ridiculous negotiations on March 31 directly contradicts the intended message that he is, in fact, willing to walk away. Moreover, if U.S. negotiators make concession after concession after concession, as they have, then it leads others to wonder where the line is that changes a good deal into a bad one from which we walk away. Conclusion: There probably isn’t any such line.
Note that the Iranians are now claiming the Administration is lying about the terms of the deal. No idea what to think of that: I’m not inclined to start trusting Tehran more than I do Washington. If I were, then I wouldn’t worry about negotiating with Tehran, right? But the series of Tweets emanating last night from the Iranian negotiating team hardly filled me with confidence that any kind of deal in which I could repose even face-value confidence had been struck.
What I simply don’t understand is the point of this deal—in the President’s mind. As Garfinkle points out, Iran is already a nuclear threshold state, and we’re already on the verge of massive WMD proliferation in the region. Thus his conclusion follows naturally:
Sooner or later, under either this Administration or its successor, we will be right back where we started before all the talking began: We will have to choose between living with an nuclear-armed Iran, letting some other power try to take care of it, or using a variety of moderate- to high-risk means to first paralyze and ultimately prevent it. When all is said and done, what happened today in Switzerland will be seen as not having made so much as a dent in this wall of bad options.
So why are we doing this? What piece of the puzzle is missing? Could there be any secret provision that makes this deal seem rational? Could there be any good reason to kick this decision further down the line? From what I know of it, the deal doesn’t even seem worth the money spent on all those expensive orchid arrangements.
I surely appreciate that there are no good options—only the least bad—but why the urgency to sign off on this particular bad option? Does it look less bad than the others in any obvious way to you? Is there any information that could be added to the picture of the negotiations we now have that would make you say, “Okay, this now seems clearly to be the least bad of our bad options?”
Published in Foreign Policy, General
It certainly very often seems that way to me. But I ask myself whether it is that way, or whether they present it that way–and get away with looking that way–because it’s what people want and accept.
Every so often we get a glimpse at something that isn’t clownish at all. The Wikileaks were not written by clowns. Whether that information actually made it to Obama’s desk, I couldn’t say, but I believe we do have many highly competent people in our foreign policy bureaucracy and our military. No idea what really happens in our intel community–I assume there’s lots of rot because it’s a federal bureaucracy that’s shielded from any oversight, which can’t be good–but I also assume it must attract a lot of very talented people, given that there are power and secrets to be found there. I suspect that combination will always attract ambitious and talented people.
So I have to think there’s a substrate of high-level competence underneath the clown-show appearance. But we sure do seem to get a lot of clown-show outcomes and clown-show excuses for it.
I know I’m supposed to be explaining what’s going on, but I can’t. All I’ve got to work with is the information in the public domain–and it doesn’t add up to anything that quite makes sense to me.
I think we have to assume that from the fact that military action hasn’t been taken, right? But that’s just restating the question. I wonder if they’re operating on the basis of really sound calculations about the likely outcome of military action. I take it as a given that military action would result in, not least, many US civilian casualties. I assume Iran has sleeper networks in the US. I assume quite a number of our embassies would blow up. I assume civilian aircraft would start tumbling out of the sky. I assume that an attack on Iran would mean real consequences, and I also take seriously people who say that it would not necessarily set the program back for long. I assume it might be possible to persuade me that any responsible Commander-in-Chief in full possession of the information ours has would say, “We need more time and preparation–as well as better intelligence–before undertaking that, and this deal will buy us that time.” Does that seem plausible to you?
“I’m not inclined to start trusting Teheran more than I do Washington.”
Funny you should bring this up, Claire. I was thinking about it yesterday. Considering what I know of the past six years of this administration’s actions, and my knowledge of Middle East history over the past 1,000 years, along with my knowledge of Islam, and adding the consistency of Iran’s spoken policies, and how they align with the rest…
And the fact that Obama’s speech yesterday contained some completely contradictory statements….
Yes, in this case, I’m inclined to believe Iran over Obama.
I’m just not sure it’s so easy to flip a switch and empower the reformers–or how reformist they are. It’s also possible that we don’t have that much influence over Iranian internal politics. There are lots of things that could happen as a result of changing a few variables (which is in effect what we’re doing), but there are a lot of other variables that are probably far more important, no?
Yes, it’s plausible.
By the way, I don’t mean to suggest that he’s a complete fool to think that military action against Iran leads to larger and worse consequences in the short term. It likely will lead to larger and worse consequences in the short term.
Where I think he’s probably a fool is where he thinks (if indeed it is his thinking) that we can avoid all of those terrible consequences and live with an only slightly worse balance than we have now, that a nuclear Iran is not catastrophic to our interests.
I hope he is acting appropriately in response to intelligence that we simply don’t have. For instance, how does China, India, Pakistan, and Russia play in this? Then again, sometimes “wait and see (and prepare)” really is the best response to uncertainty. What’s that Coolidge quote about most of the problems rolling into the ditch before they ever get to you?
Claire, you characterize Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals as “a left-leaning version of “How to succeed in marketing?” ”
On the one hand, you seem to agree that there is an influential/powerful faction on the left that currently holds sway, and which is executing the program laid out by Alinsky, if I am reading you right.
On the other hand, you hold that Alinsky is garden-variety self-help. I don;t follow you there.
You disagree with my characterization that: “You [Claire] assert that the tactics accomplish zero that the ideology doesn’t already accomplish?”
I thought you were discounting the importance of Alinsky and his book by asserting that: “Nothing in it would work if people didn’t like the ideas they were marketing.”
Were you referring to the ideas of Alinskyism itself, or the content it delivers (which is how I took your meaning), the progressive agenda? I considered an implication of the utter non-relevance (right?) of Alinsky’s book and the popular acceptance (not through tactics, mind you) of the progressive ideals to be the futility of reasoning with such a mass of leftists. If people actually like the ideas the left (you mean the left, right?) are marketing, then isn’t this a center-left country at best, and the “moderates” on Ricochet are actually the conservatives, and the “conservatives” are the — oh, wait.
Or maybe you’re just trying to have it both ways. You want Alinsky to be acknowledged as an important (perhaps pre-eminent) influence on the gang currently in power, but you also want to safely discount its effects. This is only possible if the book is anodyne, banal — no better or worse than some well-meaning but dippy volume on really, like finding yourself, man.
Alinsky’s more famous book is dedicated to Lucifer. He not only advocates but instructs how to tear apart our civil society, our rule of law. These are no-kidding communists, not bogeymen, not cartoon Boris and Natasha, but the real deal. Saul Alinsky was never actually a member of the Communist Party — membership is for shlubs. He was an arch-communist, and knew better than to get stuck in the trenches. Barack Obama is one of his acolytes, and Clinton is another. The reason they don’t get along is they are too similar, and he’s better at it.
Alinsky and his well-written, truly entertaining, and thoroughly monstrous book do not reek of sulfur, and do not burn the hands of the innocent on contact. Same with His Excellency Colonel Obama. But the banality of evil is what makes it effective.
My guess is that the Obama team is too smart by a half. That is, having taken the perspective that “once the shooting starts, all bets are off,” they have sworn off military action, and congratulate themselves for their wisdom in not engaging in anything they can’t control. Frequently, Obama scorns the Bush team for a “shoot first, then aim…” approach, and he thinks he’s being clever for waiting to aim first.
But the ability to map out every possible outcome is a fool’s luxury. It’s like saying that you should only play poker when you already know what cards the other guy is holding. Well, yeah, it might be great to wait until you have that information, but it likely won’t ever come, and meanwhile you’ll have done nothing.
A much better approach is that leadership calls for prudence, not omniscience.
I see Colin Powell behind a lot of this. His approach was not to fight until you could have an easy win. That’s a luxury only an egotist can afford in a threatening world.
Does the evidence support this assessment? Statistically, he must get something right when it matters if this is just a continuing string of bad luck. You just stated that Obama loves America and works to support and defend the country, unless I am reading you wrong again. Yet you seem to allow that perhaps he didn’t feel that way in the beginning. So you feel that he changed while in office from somebody who really didn’t like America to somebody who really does? Perhaps from a sense of gratitude for or appreciation of the masses who elected him twice?
You know what I hear?
“He’s changed. He loves me. He used to treat me bad, but my love is all he needs. Stop criticizing him. You don’t understand us.”
This is not about you. I hear this from an awful lot of people. I just tend not to hear it from conservatives about Obama.
Well, an unfortunately unused tactic is “If I say I’m going knock you over if you still have WMDs, and you’ve used WMDs before, and then you try to fool me into thinking you have WMDs, don’t be surprised when six of my guys drag you out of the sewer.”
Well it worked a miracle conversion on Qaddafi, and they’ve hardly bother us since — oh wait. Darn YouTube video.
I’m saying that I can’t quite understand how someone in his position wouldn’t feel that way, and that it’s hard for me to form an intuitive mental map of his personality. The rest is your interpretation of what I’m saying, I think. Certainly not what I intended to say.
Again, I’m saying that I can’t figure out what he feels, or felt.
Possibly. I figure that long in the White House has to change your mind if your assumption is that American power is for the worst. You must begin to identify with it, after a while. But never having been President, it’s very hard for me to say.
Nope, you didn’t hear that from me.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen an outgoing president, late in his second term, try desperately for a Middle East peace agreement of some sort. That still seems to me the most likely explanation. Nothing makes an agreement with Iran more urgent now than it was a year ago, except the fact that the clock is running out on Obama’s administration. He’s so desperate to add to his legacy that I think it has blinded him to any other considerations.
Will this agreement ultimately tarnish, rather than buff, his legacy? Probably, but that doesn’t mean he’s perceptive enough to see it. He’s an incompetent president surrounded by an incompetent staff, so mistakes (even big ones) are to be expected.
Been years since I actually read it, so perhaps I should re-read, but my impression–having heard so much about Alinsky and his sinister influence–was that it didn’t suggest much by way of technique that I found surprising or help me make sense of those he was said to influence.
Maybe worth a second reading, I’m open to it. I just don’t remember feeling that it was a remarkable book, or one that gave me a great deal of insight. I’ll read it again over the weekend and report.
Well then you constructed a really firm case for it but artfully left the conclusion to be drawn by the unwary. Silly me. I thought you were pretty clear on it:
You’re right, of course. You didn’t actually state, quote, “Obama loves America and works to support and defend it,” end quote. The fault is plainly mine.
Calvin Coolidge once said, “Patriotism is easy to understand in America. It means looking out for yourself by looking out for your country.” Barack Obama looks out for himself, but never his country. Draw your conclusion from that.
Dangit, man. What do you mean!?
Obama hates America, its traditions, and a majority of its people.
Well I hope you have a license to say that or it’s a trip to the Principal’s office. Give the man credit for doing something positive — His Excellency is replacing the people as fast as he can.
They kept Hillary’s email address secret for 6 years. This is actually easier.
I will believe that when I see actual evidence and defense budgets of military preparation for such an eventuality. Roosevelt and his administration weren’t stupid. You can argue the methods, but they did try getting the military and the American people ready for WWII, in some fashion, prior to Pearl Harbor. The problem was a lack of imagination, not foreseeing what might happen at Pearl Harbor and the Philippines. I don’t think I can credit the current administration and president with any of the strength and fortitude of the Roosevelt administration. Not by a long shot.
(emphasis mine) There is no evidence of this.
You seem to forget that at least in the defense community we are committed to civilian control of policy – to the degree that we take our oaths of office seriously. President Obama is the Commander in Chief and is entitled to promulgate his policy.
It doesn’t mean that his policy is good. In my opinion, he has done more harm to the goals of non-proliferation than anyone. Between abrogating the Budapest Memorandum, removing European missile defense, and toppling Libya, he is encouraging the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
He was elected, he is entitled to do this. Doesn’t make it right.
No conspiracy theory needed to recognize it either.
Every military officer and federal employee swears an oath, fully three-quarters of which is to support the Constitution.
If that oath mentions a duty to defend the Constitution from domestic enemies, then aren’t there a *lot* of people who have some studying to do? Everybody subject USC 5 $3331 should have some idea what would constitute a domestic enemy of the Constitution, what thresholds for action are, and what actions would be appropriate.
I hold that no clue and no plan is a dereliction of that duty. It is a conversation worth having. It takes not a kook, but a Fed, to seriously ask, “What would a domestic enemy of the Constitution look like? Would he announce his intent clearly? Would he act alone? What would be a reasonable threshold of activity or results for making a determination? How could we discern mere criminality or politics versus actual hostile intent to the Constitution?”
Some of us have put some work into it.
One possible way in which the agreement might cause things to work out for the best is that it convinces the Sunni nations to ally themselves with Israel and the coalition takes out, or at least damages, Iran’s nuclear facilities. If this happens:
Claire,
The negotiation is predicated on the idea that Iran is not a Jihadist State. This is the first and most glaring absurdity. The same week that Kerry is sitting down with supposedly final negotiations for a long term deal that, whatever Kerry says, Iran sees as binding, Khamenei, the supreme leader, is shouting Death to America to his entire population. Iran is a Jihadist State. It started that way, it has always exported Jihad and ignored the best interests of its own people, and it continues to foment Jihad wherever it can. Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and the list goes on and on.
You can not possibly do a deal with a Jihadist State. Iran is a large country and to take it down militarily or threaten to, one would need either the U.S. or a large unified coalition or both. Israel can not do it alone. Obama has always been able to nullify even the threat of force by holding U.S. military support hostage. This is rapidly changing as the Yemen situation, and the threat of Iran taking over Iraq and Syria has produced an Arab coalition that specifically knows its enemy. That enemy is Iran.
The mistake that we in the West are making is to simply write the new coalition off as a Sunni-Shia War. All we need do is recognize that Iran is a Jihadist State and turn this into a war between Jihadists and non-Jihadists. That war is winnable and it is worth winning.
As far as the negotiations, I submit my own post. It is only allegorical. Sometimes that is the best one can do.
Regards,
Jim
Maybe Obama’s motivation is more simple. You ask:
I don’t see a good reason for America to kick the decision into the future, but I see a very good reason for Obama to do so. So that Iran does not get nuclear weapons on his watch.
If it happens in the next administration, it’s someone else’s fault.
You silly plebeian’s. You are assuming this deal has anything to do with his current job. The real story is Obama is simultaneous trying to get another noble peace prize and be elected as the next UN Secretary General.
This is all just a diplomacy version of Whose line is it any Way, there is no point.
Claire, I’m going to add my vote to those of Ball Diamond Ball, Mike LaRoche, and Instugator (and perhaps James Gawron?).
Note that Garfinkle’s piece never once cites Michael Doran’s piece in Tablet magazine — although I imagine Garfinkle is trying to nod toward it — and consequently he doesn’t accomplish anything remotely like a takedown, specific argument by specific argument, of what Doran has posited. As a consequence of which, in my book, Garfinkle is not telling us anything worthwhile and certainly not anything actionable. Merely characterizing some unspecified opponents’ contentions as “conspiracy theory” material is not ipso facto some kind of debating trump card.
One thing that you seem either breathtakingly naive about (where the force of ideological “true-believerism” and partisan party loyalty is concerned) or (and this is puzzling) simply forgetful about is the fact that Obama stacked his inner circle with people who possess at minimum one if not a whole raft of the following attributes:
1) Democratic Party diehard hack and message-discipline enforcer
Case in point is my undergrad classmate (and Freshman year dorm-mate) Lisa Monaco; another would be Tom Donilon and now Susan Rice
2) Bizarre “authenticist” Arabist types
Case in point is John Brennan, who before his elevation to DCIA held Lisa Monaco’s post in the WH and from the start has apparently always had the POTUS’s ear much more readily than, say, NSA Jones and similarly “serious” and “level-headed” types; another case in point is Robert Malley (who was just photographed smiling with Kerry in some kind of lighthearted moment in Lausanne)
3) Obama-as-World-Savior true-believer types
Case in point not just ValJar but also CoS McDonough
4) Jaw-Jaw-Better-than-War-War adherents who actually do think America isn’t all that bad (after all, Martha’s Vineyard is divine) but politically Obama is the strongest advocate for their preferred approach so they willfully lie to themselves about what they know to be his ultimate goals, plus the perks of office are hard to give up
Samantha Power, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Victoria Nuland, and I could go on and on — yes, they’re not exactly “inner-circle” types but they provide an excellent “useful-idiot” patina of ostensible intellectual seriousness
5) Enfants terribles (vicious youthful climbers)
Ben Rhodes, Tommy Vietor, my ex-neighbor Peter Orszag (colossally self-regarding even in his teens here on my street in Lexington, MA — I mention him because Rhodes was caught on tape telling visiting supporters that an Iran entente would be “healthcare in foreign policy” in terms of soi-disant legacy achievements)
There are no doubt other attributes worthy of inclusion, but I’m in a pre-Pesach rush so these are the ones springing to mind.
I wonder if you see too many of the Attribute-4 types in Obama’s orbit and conclude, consciously or not, that surely they must have been having some kind of salutary effect on him these past 6 years.
Obama mixes and matches all types as it suits his conceptions and tactical requirements — but his ideology and his intentions are fixed.
I would add separately that Obama really does believe his own BS.
This is not a trivial point, sad though it might be to say.
He is willing to bet that either Iran will successfully intimidate the Sunni states into not actually proliferating on the nuclear front; the fallback if he is incorrect is that — again in his mind — even if such proliferation happens the Sunni states will not have the resolve to actually resort to the nukes they obtain.
Something happened in the very first days of Obama’s presidency, that, especially in retrospect, has really set the tenor of his entire administration. Virtually everything in the arena of international diplomacy fits the model that people at the time could only guess at: his sending the Churchill bust back to England. He didn’t just put it in storage, which would have been sufficient if he simply couldn’t stand looking at it – he purged the White House of Churchill, and by clear implication, this country’s relationship with our staunchest ally.
EXACTLY correct.
From the Churchill bust to the Iranian deal and everything in between – President Obama has fulfilled his promise to radically transform America.
The rest, (e.g. giving the Queen an iPod filled with his speeches, We are the ones we are waiting for, etc) has worked to feed his ego.
What I don’t understand is why Claire still doesn’t believe his promises.
Nothing succeeds and empowers like success, and we shouldn’t underestimate the importance of bread and butter issues which is a big aspect of what this deal is about. Beinart in the Atlantic puts it this way:
Which brings us to what is realistically achievable wrt changing Iran – ie the intersection of possibility and desire – not just in terms of end result but also at what speed and at what cost.
This deal may not be a silver bullet, but imho it’s a huge step in the right direction. It’s realistic about what Iran will accept (eg they are unwilling to be, scientifically speaking, hewers of wood and drawers of water) and also about what the West is willing to pay to get it.
Obviously it’s opposed by the Hezbulharb in Iran, because any improvement in the situation weakens them. It’s also opposed, sad to say, by the Hezbulharb in the US, for similar if not identical reasons.