Republicans round on US president over his “cosmic bet” on Iran, calling the deal “appeasement” and accusing Obama of being “a very, very naive man who does not know how the world works.” By Peter Foster
First there came the fanfare and backslapping of a signing ceremony in Vienna, then an early morning presidential statement from President Barack Obama in the White House lauding the “historic” agreement to resolve a decade-long crisis over Iran’s nuclear programme.
But in the offices of a senior Republican senator up on Capitol Hill the sounds were not of jubilation but audible, stunned disbelief, as the 159-page accord with its five lengthy technical annexes finally downloaded into anxious inboxes.
“It’s just appalling, I really don’t know what to say,” spluttered the national security director of one Republican senator as he scrolled through Annex II, the 31-page list of Iranian individuals and companies that will be released from international sanctions.
Even independent experts, like Suzanne Maloney, an Iran specialist at the Brookings Institution expressed surprise at the speed and scope of the relief being offered to Iran – lifted not in a phased manner, as the Obama administration had previously promised, but in one fell swoop.
“If these individuals and companies start to cheat, how are we even going to begin to deal with that? Do we even have a plan?” asked the disbelieving senate aide, running down the long list of Iranian generals and officials, many listed as a terrorist by the US.
When it comes to judging the Iran deal it has often been said that the “devil is in the detail”, but to understand the backlash that Barack Obama is now facing, it is necessary to know that for many of the deal’s opponents in the US, the devil is not in the detail – he’s in Tehran.
So when Republican presidential candidates queued up to scorn the agreement – Jeb Bush called it flat out “appeasement” – they were not dissecting the minutiae but arguing that handing $150 billion in sanctions relief to a nation still on the State Department’s terror list was little short of madness.
“Laughing all the way to the bank” was the headline in the tabloid New York Daily News above a picture of Iran’s whiskered foreign minister, Javad Zarif, grinning like a Cheshire cat at the ceremony in Vienna. “Joke’s on us” was the front-page verdict in the New York Post.
Rick Perry, the former Texas governor who is running for president in 2016, expressed the typical Republican view of Mr Obama’s decision to reward a country that still holds four Americans in its jails, killed thousands of American soldiers in Iraq and regularly holds rallies chanting ‘death to America’.
“I saw a very, very naive man who does not know how the world works,” he said, “who cannot put the dots together, and stood in front of the American people and said I really don’t care if Congress likes this or not, I’m going to do it.”
Mr Obama acknowledges that such criticisms are not limited to Republicans, but are shared by many in his party who have deep misgivings of their own.
It was to allay those fears that Mr Obama took the risk of giving a no-holds-barred press conference at the White House, at one point almost dancing like a boxer entering the ring, inviting the press corps to hit him with their best shots.
“Have we exhausted Iran questions here?” he asked, looking over to his press secretary, Josh Earnest, who was having near palpitations in the corner. “I really am enjoying this Iran debate … [Are there any] topics that may not have been touched upon? Criticisms that you’ve heard that I did not answer…?”
It was a bravura performance, displaying absolute and lawyerly mastery of the detail, discoursing minutely on the modalities of the 24-day inspection regime, uranium stockpiles and the ability to “snap-back” sanctions – but largely talking past the fundamental differences that separate both sides.
The black-is-white nature of the debate was most clearly expressed by the fact that both opponents and supporters argued with equal fervour that deal could both trigger an arms race – or prevent one.
On the cable TV shows, Ron Dermer, the Israeli ambassador warned that the agreement had left his country in deep peril, while in the very next segment, Sir Peter Westmacott, the British ambassador, came on to say the precise opposite.
“We think this is going to make the situation much worse. We think this is going to endanger Israel,” Mr Dermer told MSNBC’s Morning Joe. “We think it makes the world a safer place,” said Sir Peter, “we think without this deal we would be in much greater danger of Iran securing a nuclear military capability.”
Mr Obama defends himself from the accusation of recklessness by arguing simply that Iran is further from a bomb under the deal than it would be without it.
“We are not measuring this deal by whether it is changing the regime inside of Iran,” he told Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, “We’re not measuring this deal by whether … we are eliminating all their nefarious activities..[but whether] Iran could not get a nuclear weapon.”
But hostile sections of the Washington foreign policy establishment argue that such a narrow interpretation is simply naive, given Iran’s track-record and the “cash windfall” the regime in Tehran will now receive.
Others simply believe that Mr Obama cut the deal because he has always secretly yearned for a rapprochement with Iran that would curb Sunni excesses and rebalance the Middle East.
They noted that at Wednesday’s press conference Mr Obama – for the first time – said that Iran must be “part of the conversation” in the resolution of the Syrian civil war, a view likely to confirm Israeli, Saudi and Gulf suspicions about his ultimate motives.
In the final analysis, Mr Obama’s willingness to deal with Iran – even if diplomatic relations are not likely to be restored any time soon – is the faultline that divides supporters and opponents of a deal the White House must now ram through a sceptical US Congress.
In the run-up to the agreement, polls found America’s war-weary public to be marginally in favour, with the most recent Fox News poll putting the split at 47-43 per cent, but that support will now be tested by an intense lobbying campaign on both sides.
As Nate Silver, the polling and statistics guru noted this week, divisions over the deal mirror almost exactly America’s views on Mr Obama himself – broadly Republicans hate it, Democrats like it and everyone else is somewhere in between.
The tribal lines get blurred, however, by Democratic politicians with close ties to Israel, with its enduring influence in the US political system.
Robert Cohen, the president of AIPAC, the most powerful pro-Israel lobby group in the US, said the organisation would oppose the deal in the House and Senate with the “entirety of our institutional resources”.
The campaign promises to be bare-knuckle and brutal, with opponents absolutely determined to squeeze vulnerable Democrat senators and congressmen as hard as politically possible.
“AIPAC is all in”, one operative who is close to the campaign told The Sunday Telegraph. “Pro-Israel, hawkish Democrats will be squeezed between their values, their constituents and the demands of the White House.
“That’s where this fight’s gonna take place. Members will be clear that the price of them supporting this deal will be their donor-networks, their voters – and ultimately their own political futures.”
These are not idle threats, although it remains to be seen whether – as happened over the 2013 Syria vote on bombing the Assad regime for using chemical weapons – opponents can whip up enough protest to really rattle the White House.
Should Congress vote to disapprove, Mr Obama has promised to use his presidential veto to push it through, leaving opponents needing to find 13 Democrat senators willing to rebel against the White House to override the veto and actually scupper the deal. In the end, the widespread consensus is that enough Democrats will choose to defend their president’s single greatest foreign policy achievement, and leave the final verdict in the hands of history.
For Dr Maloney, the former State Department adviser and Iran-specialist at Brookings, the only certain thing about a deal that has so starkly divided both US politics and America from its traditional Middle Eastern allies, is that its consequences will be momentous – one way or the other.
“Iran has an incredible moment now,” she says, adding that there is no certainty that Tehran will not squander the immense geopolitical opportunity offered now offered them.
The Islamic Republic has had chances to emerge in the recent past, she notes, including winning the war against Iraq in the 1980s and the oil boom of the 2000s, but both times found itself unable to seize the opportunity, hamstrung by a mixture of “ideology and incompetence”.
“I don’t think that there is any guarantee that they won’t do it again,” she says, “but this is a true and historic opening and one that can lead to Iran’s full integration into the international community. That would be a tremendous benefit to Iranians and, over time, a real benefit to the region and the rest of the world.”
In an onimous sign, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, on Saturday launched a scathing attack on the United States and its Middle East policies, saying Washington sought Iran’s “surrender”.
Delivering a fiery speech at a Tehran mosque, punctuated by chants of “Death to America”, Khamenei said he wanted politicians to examine the agreement to ensure national interests were preserved, as Iran would not allow the disruption of its revolutionary principles or defensive abilities.
“We will never stop supporting our friends in the region and the people of Palestine, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Bahrain and Lebanon,” he said. “Even after this deal our policy towards the arrogant US will not change.”
As one US commentator put it, Mr Obama has placed a “cosmic bet” on Iran by agreeing to this deal – the world now waits to see how the chips may fall.
