Iran must first come clean on its past nuclear activities by providing answers to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the United Nations nuclear watchdog. But if the past is any guide, there is little hope Iran will reveal its nuclear secrets. After all, it stalled IAEA attempts to get answers for more than a decade. Sanctions should have been lifted as a result of, not in exchange for, a promise of some future Iranian compliance with its transparency obligations. Given what’s at stake, the IAEA is now under pressure not to scuttle the deal. Yet the agreement does little to enhance the chances of the agency succeedings. It does not force Iran to turn over decades-worth of documentation about its clandestine procurement; it does not give unfettered access to those scientists who hold the key to the nuclear kingdom; and it does not allow the IAEA to conduct those anytime, anywhere inspections which Western leaders had repeatedly and publicly declared to be essential to a good deal.

The Obama Administration, the British government and the other powers invested in this deal insist that the deal involves such unprecedented monitoring, access and restrictions on Iran’s nuclear programme that no path to a nuclear weapon remains open. This may be true for the monitoring of Iran’s declared facilities for the period during which they will be under stringent controls. But after little over a decade Iran’s nuclear facilities will be monitored only as much as they were prior to the deal, when Iran cheated the non-proliferation treaty under the noses of the international community. Besides, the agreement’s monitoring mechanisms offer no way of dealing with undeclared facilities. Much of Iran’s covert weaponisation activities took place in facilities that, thanks to the deal’s monitoring mechanisms, the international community will have a hard time inspecting. Even if Western intelligence discovers that elements of a clandestine military programme are still ongoing, a convoluted and contentious process will ensue in which the Ayatollahs have at least a temporary veto power and sensitive intelligence sources might have to be revealed.

Supporters of the deal dismiss alarm at some of the concessions they made because, they claim, the economic leverage of sanctions against the Iranian economy is retained thanks to a “snap-back” mechanism: were the Iranians to cheat, sanctions could be swiftly reinstated.

There are three reasons why this is little more than a soundbite. First, sanctions do not snap back. It took several years to build political support and diplomatic consensus for international sanctions to yield the desired effect. Iran will now have ample time to rebuild its shattered economy and devise antidotes to potential future sanctions. If Iran were to cheat on the deal, they would be able to build a bomb within a year, according to the deal’s supporters themselves. It would take longer for Iran to feel sanctions pain again. Second, a snap-back would trigger an Iranian walk-out. If sanctions are reimposed, Tehran will no longer consider itself bound by the deal. But it is not as if such a turn of events would restore the balance of forces before the deal was signed. Iran’s economy would be vastly improved and provisions allowing Tehran to continue nuclear research and development with Western cooperation would put Iranian scientists in a much better position than today. In eight years’ time, they can even apply for PhDs in the United States. Third, the snap-back mechanism is not straightforward — it requires going through a debate among the six powers, Iran and the European Union about whether there is a violation and whether it warrants reimposing sanctions. Expect pressure from the business community and the diplomats invested in the success of the deal to downplay any but the most egregious violations.

This leaves us the hope, candidly expressed by US and European dignitaries, that the deal can strengthen Iran’s moderates. In reality, the deal removes the arms embargo against Iran in five years and missile programme restrictions in eight. It rehabilitates all Iranian sanctions evaders. It delists all those Iranian entities that engaged in money-laundering over the years to circumvent sanctions. It promises eventually to remove all Revolutionary Guard entities and leaders from EU sanctions. It immediately lifts all restrictions on the Supreme Leader’s business empire. And it cancels all restrictions on business in those areas where the Revolutionary Guards and other hardliners excel. How is this going to benefit the moderates?

It is hard to argue that this is a good deal, unless, of course, one takes Tehran’s side — in which case, this is the best outcome Iran could have hoped for.

The post This Deal Is No Deal appeared first on Standpoint.

No doubt this timely injection into the history of the region will inflame the liberal orthodoxy for whom the sine qua non of Middle Eastern politics has been destructive Western intervention. Karsh offers an important corrective, reminding the reader that local political actors are more than mere pawns; rather, they are skilled and ultimately decisive agents in their own destinies.

Rather than starting with the implementation of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the cornerstone of post-colonial accounts of the creation of the modern Middle East, Karsh begins earlier with the disastrous choices made by the Ottoman Empire preceding and during the First World War. In so doing, he accords the Ottomans equal status to the other losing participants of the war who suffered similar imperial dismemberment as the price for martial overreach. This matters because Karsh’s understanding of the grand sweep of history in the region suggests that the postwar foundational mistake was not the breaking apart of Arab nationalism (which he suggests was vastly overstated in a bid for power by the Hashemites) but rather the over-unification of the region.

The book is less an exhaustive history than a series of case studies.  Karsh paints a far richer and more nuanced picture of the creation of the modern Middle East than the shorthand to which we have become accustomed. What emerges is less an imperial imposition than the playing out of a number of different political contests — the machinations of the Hashemites to create Iraq and Transjordan, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Jewish quest for a homeland, the Italian and Greek competition for Anatolia, and resurgent Turkish nationalism.

Karsh continues by illustrating how even at the height of the Cold War, with two superpowers presiding over a supposedly rigid and bipolar world, Middle Eastern states were able to subvert and at times even manipulate the two rival powers. One instance of that manipulation was Anwar Sadat’s expulsion of Soviet personnel from Egypt in the early 1970s and subsequent courting of the West to reverse the limits placed upon the flow of arms to his country. Far stronger examples are the failure of the Soviet Union to prevent Egypt and Syria from attacking Israel in 1973, the Iranian revolution in 1979, which contributed to the demise of the Carter presidency, and the Soviet misadventure in Afghanistan, which many see as the beginning of the end for the USSR.

In one sense there should be nothing surprising about a book like this. Many of the insights that Karsh presents have appeared elsewhere in his own earlier writings and in the work of other scholars such as Fred Halliday, to whom the book is dedicated.

Nonetheless, there is little doubt that as with his previous works Karsh will be further excoriated by his academic critics on the Left. Indeed, the politicisation of the subject matter partly explains why Karsh overstates his case. With the exception of the Iranian revolution, it is dubious to suggest that the tail actually wagged the dog. It is hard to argue that regional states had a determinative effect on great power politics, as the title would suggest.

Equally, Karsh does not place enough emphasis on the effect of external interventions on the region. For instance, Obama’s overhasty retreat and failure to provide the much-needed diplomatic surge was critical to the failure of the nascent Iraqi state and the rise of ISIS.

To an extent Karsh commits the same error as his “New Historian” antagonists such as Benny Morris and Ilan Pappé. They are ultimately engaged in an interpretive war over a similar, limited collection of sources. Going against the trend in diplomatic history, none of them pay enough attention to Arab and Iranian sources and this has left Karsh to make deductions from Western material. As a result, the book is unlikely to settle many historical disputes. It is best seen as a polemical riposte to Obama’s Cairo speech, which was intended to reset America’s relations with the Middle East. Obama suggested that “Muslim majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations.” Karsh attempts to counter Obama’s limited view of Middle Eastern history, not only by bringing out regional power politics but also the history of Islamist imperial ambitions.

Karsh explains much of the logic behind Obama’s recent nuclear deal with Iran, which can only really be understood as part of Obama’s wider regional ambition for US disengagement. The President’s approach gives Iran a free hand to make unprecedented strategic gains, supposedly bringing order to the region by creating what is actually a dangerous balance of power between Iran and Saudi Arabia. In light of Obama’s folly, it is very hard to doubt the broad sweep of Karsh’s
thesis.

The post Subverting The Superpowers appeared first on Standpoint.

Error number one: the collapse of the regional order into sectarian mayhem is not something that can be  contained or ignored. The flood of refugees drowning in the Mediterranean or overwhelming absorption centres on Greek and Italian islands is not going to stop until order is restored in the lands they are escaping from, and the Islamic State, or ISIS, will not lose its appeal to restive young European Muslims until it is defeated.

Error number two: borders are neither sacred nor eternal. Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen have ceased to exist since 2011. These countries have disintegrated under the weight of ethnic and religious divisions, sectarianism and civil war. To a varying degree, all four central governments have melted away — existing only on paper or as warlords of a small portion of what were once their now lost domains. Western policy should acknowledge this reality rather than insist that the territorial integrity of these states can somehow be reconstituted. It should identify those forces across these territories that are likeliest to side with Western interests — and support them.

Error number three: rather than propping up friends and likeminded allies, the West is relying on its enemies to do its bidding, under the grand illusion that the interests of countries like Iran and Turkey somehow align with Western ones. By doing so, it is empowering forces that are inimical to Western goals.

How does one fix these errors?

Europe can invest as much taxpayer money as it wants on chasing smugglers’ boats across the Mediterranean. But rather than blocking the refugees at the water’s edge in North Africa, it should realise that bringing an end to civil war in the region is a more salutary and cost-effective approach to the crisis. These refugees are escaping from war and will continue to come until the war is over.

This requires working out what can be fixed and what will stay broken. Iraq and Syria no longer exist and we should stop pretending they do. In their wake, four entities are emerging: ISIS, Iranian proxies, a hodgepodge of moderate pro-Western and Islamic forces, and the Kurds.

The West should invest more energy crushing ISIS. Since August 7, 2014, when Operation Inherent Resolve (codenamed by the British as Operation Shader) began, the number of air sorties launched and targets hit has been disappointing. The operation was spurred by the conquest of Mosul, in June 2014, by ISIS fighters. A year later, ISIS controls not only Mosul, but Ramadi and Fallujah too. Despite official insistence that ISIS is losing ground, it is not inconceivable that its fighters could take Baghdad before long. Yet they are not irresistible.

In the north-east, where it is fighting the Kurdish Peshmerga, ISIS is in retreat, despite the Kurds having insufficient military equipment. What the Kurds do not have in hardware, they make up in ingenuity and resolve. They are defending their homes and land and are determined not to lose. Western equipment is slow in coming because of fears that a sweeping Kurdish victory would create the conditions for the establishment of a Kurdish state. Turkey might be destabilised as a result. Western governments, all Nato partners of Ankara, thus prefer to prop up an increasingly authoritarian Turkish president, despite his support for Islamists in Syria, rather than give political and military backing to the stridently pro-Western Kurds, who, among other merits, are open-minded, tolerant of minorities, and respectful of women.

Western leaders increasingly believe that Iran can fix the problem for them. After eight years of fighting in Iraq, Americans are understandably weary of military adventures in Mesopotamia. Europeans were never enthusiastic to begin with. It is tempting to see Iran, given its commitment to Baghdad’s Shia-led government, fighting ISIS with more vigour and resolve than the Iraqis themselves. What Western policymakers do not see is that Iran is not fighting ISIS over some theological dispute. After all, in Syria, Iran’s proxy Bashar al-Assad has prudently avoided clashing with ISIS while ISIS has mostly battled Assad’s other Sunni foes, rather than the regime, since it came to the fore. Iran only fights those who interfere with its ambitions — and ISIS’s Iraqi operations threaten Tehran’s clients. Otherwise, Iran is perfectly content to find a modus vivendi with ISIS.

The West should thus see Iranian proxies as no less implacable a foe than ISIS. They serve Iran’s goal of dominating the region, not its nonexistent generosity toward those threatened by Sunni radicals. After all, Iran has funded and armed the Taliban in Afghanistan against the West, and Hamas in Gaza against Israel. What drives Iran is a desire not to deepen the Sunni-Shia divide.

It is tempting to pretend that the mayhem unleashed by the Arab Spring will somehow not affect us. It will. It already does. Unless suitable resources are committed and there is more direct involvement in solving these conflicts to the advantage of more moderate forces, the region’s chaos will spill over into areas that are vital to our own interests. When that happens, the cost of reversing the consequences of this tragedy will be much more significant.

The post The Grand Illusion appeared first on Standpoint.

The day after President Barack Obama withdrew his threat to veto legislation that gives Congress a say over a looming Iran nuclear deal, the Daily Beast ran the headline “Obama Blinks on Iran Nuke Vote.” The Iran deal may turn out to be the signature foreign policy legacy of his presidency. Why then, given the importance the president attaches to the deal, did he give up his fight with Congress?

The answer is that the president cannot hold his ground against more determined adversaries. His presidency is a litany of red lines and principled policies announced and then scrapped when the going got tough. Nowhere is this more evident than in foreign policy, especially Iran.

Since the president opened a secret back channel with Iran in Oman in 2013, he has been reluctant to apply pressure to its government, lest  they should walk away from the negotiations.

Recall the “Assad must step aside” public demand Obama made in August 2011. By the look of it, Assad will still be in office on January 20, 2017, to watch the inauguration of Obama’s presidential successor from afar. Recall also that the president made Assad’s use of chemical weapons a red line that would invite military strikes. Assad used chemical weapons and continues to use chlorine bombs to terrorise and murder civilians.

Obama did not exact the price he promised Assad would pay. Bombing Assad would have upset Tehran. Obama blinked. Critics of the nuclear deal which is shaping up as negotiations race towards the June 30 deadline will note that the president has done the same on virtually every red line the United States and its allies announced over the years with regard to Tehran’s nuclear programme.

Since the beginning of the nuclear standoff with Iran, the official position of the international community was expressed in six UN Chapter VII Security Council resolutions demanding the complete suspension of any nuclear enrichment activity as a precondition for testing the real nature of Iran’s nuclear programme. The US was particularly invested in this aspect; Iran’s demand for a right to enrich ran contrary to a long-held US interpretation of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), according to which NPT members were only entitled to peaceful nuclear energy, not necessarily enrichment — a key component to bomb-making but not essential to nuclear energy production. Most countries with nuclear power plants, including Iran, generate electricity from nuclear fuel supplied by a handful of producers.

Iran has resisted demands to suspend enrichment and dismantle its enrichment facilities. The emerging nuclear deal will now concede Iran a right to enrich uranium. Such recognition — which Iran implicitly extracted already in the interim deal of November 2013 — mortally weakens the previously held US position. Any member of the NPT wishing to develop its own indigenous enrichment programme need only mention the Iran nuclear deal to fend off any future objections. The president who bet his presidency on standing firm against nuclear proliferation has just undermined a decades-old US policy against proliferation. Another blink.

Much like the right to enrich, preserving an industrial-sized nuclear programme has always been Iran’s red line. By contrast, the Obama administration has repeatedly committed itself to the dismantlement of Iran’s key facilities of Fordow, an underground uranium enrichment installation, and Arak, a heavy water reactor suitable for plutonium production.

Obama exposed the Fordow facility in September 2009. In his own words, “the size and configuration of this facility is inconsistent with a peaceful programme”. When critics questioned his ability to stand his ground, after important initial concessions were made in the November 2013 interim deal, the president snapped back. At a policy conference in Washington DC, in December 2013, Obama said: “Now, in terms of specifics, we know that they don’t need to have an underground, fortified facility like Fordow in order to have a peaceful nuclear programme. They certainly don’t need a heavy-water reactor at Arak in order to have a peaceful nuclear programme. They don’t need some of the advanced centrifuges that they currently possess in order to have a limited, peaceful nuclear programme.”

Iran would have none of that, however, and Obama blinked again. The announced deal merely seeks a temporary reconfiguration and downsizing of the two facilities. Once the deal restrictions expire in a decade, Iran will be able to revamp the two facilities as it pleases.

Verification was also critical for the Obama administration, especially in line with the president’s signature policy of nuclear disarmament and arms control. Given Iran’s history of nuclear lies and subterfuge, a lengthy and intrusive enforcement and verification mechanism was in order. But Iran has stonewalled again and Obama, so keen for an agreement, appears to have blinked. The announced deal merely stipulates that Iran will provisionally implement a verification regime its government already ratified 11 years ago. It will be up to Iran to maintain that commitment. And given that Iran had provisionally done the same under the 2004 Paris agreements, only to abruptly suspend such stricter monitoring arrangements when it chose to begin uranium enrichment, none of this is very promising.

That is especially true when one looks at the so-called Possible Military Dimensions of Iran’s programme. The US insist they have overwhelming evidence that Iran was seeking nuclear weapons until recently. A deal that restores the confidence of the international community in the peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear activities needs first to address all Iran’s past suspicious activities. Yet Iran is no longer expected to show accountability until well past the agreement. Knowing what Iran did in the past is critical in order to verify its future compliance with the NPT. The Obama administration has instead agreed that a vague commitment to answer questions in the future will suffice. One more blink.

None of this is surprising. In the first major foreign policy speech of his presidency, Obama addressed the topic of nuclear disarmament before  a vast crowd of Czech citizens in Prague on April 5, 2009. Referring to Iran’s combined threat of nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles, Obama said: “Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile activity poses a real threat, not just to the United States, but to Iran’s neighbors and our allies. The Czech Republic and Poland have been courageous in agreeing to host a defence against these missiles. As long as the threat from Iran persists, we will go forward with a missile defence system that is cost-effective and proven. If the Iranian threat is eliminated, we will have a stronger basis for security, and the driving force for missile defence construction in Europe will be removed.”

Six months later, Obama scrapped the missile defence commitment to the Czech Republic and Poland. And when, five years later, Iran refused to discuss its missile programme, he agreed to let it fall by the wayside of the negotiations. If you like your missiles, you can keep your missiles. Obama blinked, blinked, and blinked again. Why is anyone surprised that he continues to do so?

The post The President Blinked — The Ayatollah Didn’t appeared first on Standpoint.

The Obama administration probably hoped that a dramatic change of course in America’s Middle East foreign policy, coupled with a milestone nuclear agreement that leaves Iran’s nuclear infrastructure intact, could occur without a robust public debate. The administration kept crucial elements of the negotiations to itself for as long as it could. It failed to inform Israel and Gulf Arab allies about a back-channel with Iran it conducted in Oman until September 2013, when it was too late to reverse the basic contours of the interim nuclear deal, otherwise known as the Joint Plan of Action (JPOA).

It kept the full text of the implementation agreement of the JPOA out of the public eye and limited the ability of Congress to review and read the document in unprecedented ways. It failed to explain why important elements of what a “good deal” would look like were allowed to fall by the wayside—Iran’s ballistic missile programme and the possible military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear programme, to name the most glaring omissions—preferring instead to denounce critics as “warmongers”.

The White House also muddied the waters on the impact that a prolonged period of sanctions relief and sanctions suspension would do to Iran’s economy—and similarly dismissed those who came up with different figures from its own, even as evidence piled up about its gross underestimation of Iran’s economic windfall from the JPOA.

In short, despite grumblings and legislative threats from Congress and an increasingly apprehensive set of regional allies fearful of Iran’s rising power, President Obama believed that he could present a nuclear deal as a fait accompli, even as the agreement taking shape appears to undermine the US’s previously proclaimed strategic goals of preventing Iran from ever achieving nuclear weapons capability.

Whether Netanyahu’s speech was poorly timed, impolite or impolitic, it threw a wrench into what until then had appeared to be an unchallenged diplomatic process conducted behind the scenes. The prime minister asked probing questions on the direction of negotiations and the substance of Western concessions, the nature of the deal and its future implications. That is why Obama reacted so furiously—the much-touted breach of protocol obscured the fact that the President was being challenged on the substance of his policies and did not have a good answer to offer. He should have. Netanyahu’s words were not shrill, partisan accusations. The White House could have used the speech as a pretext to retreat from unwise concessions it already made. It could have stated forcefully its position in public. Instead, the administration chose to turn differences over a matter of vital strategic significance into a debate about etiquette.

The tactic failed, largely because by making the matter such a big deal the White House turned Netanyahu’s speech into an event of global interest and significance and his questions, to date left unanswered, resonated with reasonable people and traditional supporters of the President.

Having failed to fend off a debate over substantive policy issues, the White House found another pretext to change subject when, a few days after Netanyahu addressed Congress, Senator Tom Cotton, a freshman Senator from Arkansas, spearheaded an open letter to Iran’s leaders, which was co-signed by 46 other Republican Senators. The letter warned Iran’s leaders of negative repercussions of a deal negotiated while keeping Congress out of the loop.

Once again, the White House could have addressed substantive policy issues raised by increasingly frustrated legislators. Instead, it chose to denounce the move, rehashing the script it used against Netanyahu. Complaining about lèse-majesté may have its merits. But so did the letter.

It is politically foolish to antagonise Congress and not just because its concerns about the deal are well-justified. If the President holds any hope of implementing any deal, it will need to work with Congress to phase out and ultimately undo the elaborate sanctions architecture legislated over the years.

As with Netanyahu, though, Obama thinks time is on his side. After all, Netanyahu’s electoral gamble was not going well for the Israeli prime minister, with his party trailing behind its opponents in the polls as he came to Washington. What better way to skirt Netanyahu’s cri de coeur than to accuse him of brazen and cynical electioneering?

The President should have known better though. A left-of-centre Israeli government would no doubt have sought to mend fences. It would have been be more conciliatory on the Palestinian-Israeli track. But on Iran, it is hard to imagine anything different in strategic terms. As it turned out, Netanyahu won a fourth term of office. The gulf between Israel and the Obama administration over Iran will continue.

The same holds true for Obama’s domestic arena. Discounting Republicans today may make any diplomatic breakthrough short-lived. After all, the President himself threw into the dustbin of history the agreement that former President George W. Bush had reached with Israel’s late prime minister Ariel Sharon, over the territorial contours of a future Palestinian state.

Obama did not agree with the terms of that document and, because the deal had no Congressional authorisation, Obama did not feel bound by it. It was his predecessor’s policy, and he was entitled to discard it. His successors may feel the same about an Iran deal that contradicts not just the policy of all previous US administrations, but also Congressional legislation the President may have the power to suspend but not to reverse.

Obama may still get his way on the Iran deal. But his choice to ignore allies and neglect Congress will only work if the deal he signs off is as good as his critics demand it to be. Otherwise, the President’s “my way or the highway” approach to Iran’s nuclear programme will backfire.

The post Fait Pas Accompli appeared first on Standpoint.

A holiday travelling through Iran by train was recently advertised in the FT. “These days,” wrote Sophie Ibbotson, “travelling through Iran is just a little easier.” She describes travelling in style on the newly- launched Golden Eagle Express, amid silk furnishings and a piano bar, touring Iran’s holiest sights, the ruins of Persepolis and Isfahan—travelling chadors and champagne on ice included. Sounds unmissable—old Persia aboard my favourite mode of travel. If you think so then call Jewels of Persia; from just £9,895, apparently.

Probably, though, I won’t be booking. It seems a little early for me to give my trust and my travellers cheques to Iran, merely on the promise that the newish leader smiles more than the last lot and speaks a drop of King’s English. There is a whiff of Aesop’s fables in the sudden détente between the US and the Ayatollahs since the latter slowed down their uranium enrichment timetable by a whisker in exchange for the long-term lifting of sanctions. “Jump onto my back,” said the fox, “and I’ll take you across to the other side.”

In my case the problem won’t arise because I have Israel stamped on my passport so those smiley men at Tehran airport would be unable to admit me. Similar bans would arise for me in most other countries in the Middle East. But we won’t call that apartheid or racism, will we?

So soon we forget. Everyone is rushing off to visit Burma now that Aung San Suu Kyi has been released from 15 years of house arrest. For 50 years one of the most repressive military dictatorships in the world has starved, deprived of education and terrorised into submission the people of Burma. During the years of her house arrest, and confinement in the deadly Insein prison, Daw Aung San asked the world not to visit Burma.

Then, quite arbitrarily, the generals freed her, took meetings with her, and allowed her a passport to travel and the means to resume her political career. A fanfare heralded the release of a number of political prisoners and the promise of a democratic election. The world gazed in wonder and logged onto Trip Advisor.

I was fortunate enough to meet her for a second in Westminster where she spoke with customary restraint and discretion about her hopes. I also watched her speak to the expatriate Burmese at Westminster Hall the following day. She was a different girl in a different hat full of verve and personality and making her audience roar with laughter. She suggested that we should dip a toe in the Irawaddy and finally visit her homeland.

The country is exquisite, the travellers report. The people are charming and hospitable. The temples are even better than Thailand’s, the Irawaddy is romantic and the hotels are fine. There are flowers on the pillows and fruit cut into orchids. There are no restrictions, they tell you, although few make it up to Naypyidaw, the futuristic city in the jungle built by slave labour to house the new parliament.

Mmmm, I say. By releasing the iron butterfly the military may have cut off her fragile wings. By removing the princess from her global tower, they may have just rendered her fight to be elected impotent. The dictatorship refuses to amend the constitution which states that nobody who married a foreigner can run for office. Suu Kyi is the widow of a Cambridge academic. Her sons are both married to non-Burmese.

The lady comes from a military background and has accepted her restrictions with equanimity and some optimism, but her NLD party is awash with rumblings. A quarter of the parliament is made up of a military block and a new education law removes academic freedom and student unions. A hundred students have been arrested and more injured. The British government, one of the main supporters of the dictatorship, has barely responded. Meanwhile, the people are waiting for Daw Suu, a practising Buddhist, to comment on the shameful slaughter of the Rohinya Muslims in the West by violent Buddhists. Buddhists who don’t step on ants are burning villages to the ground.

So maybe we should reconsider our hols. Russia is out. Another dictator with paranoia and murderous eyes peering out of a dodgy facelift. South Africa is God’s own country, but do you really want to visit a place where a female MP gets her jaw broken during a brawl in a Pretoria parliament and the elected leader spends the nation’s rands on solid- gold bath taps and fleets of Rolls-Royces?

China has artefacts and history to die for—also, 500 executions a year; Ai Weiwei, beaten and imprisoned for his art, under house arrest; a ban on Google; appalling pollution; and the colonisation of Tibet. The American midwest is a place of wonder, but is still working out the best way to chemically kill people on Death Row. France is simmering like a jugged hare with racism of one kind or another and ripe for Le Pen. Italy has its work cut out rescuing survivors from war-torn Libya and the rest of Africa from the sea around Lampedusa and trying to keep Berlusconi and his personal fiscal and carnal pornography from returning to office. Greece is extraordinarily beautiful, historic and needs your euros, or possibly one day your drachmas, more than most. My partner favours Papua New Guinea but with a 28-hour flight to recommend it I’m rather fancying the Swanage.

One country has a rising economy, antiquity to die for, history, sunshine, beaches, more culture than a barrel of yoghurt and some of the best food, best nightlife and most startling innovations in the world. You may be prejudiced against it on hearsay, hysteria and BBC bias, you may hate their aggressive defence and their settlements, and you may spend your days picketing Waitrose for selling its oranges, but why not make up your own mind and go and join sun-seekers, independent thinkers and 40 per cent of the world’s foreign correspondents in the democratic country of Israel. They admit all colours, welcome all creeds—and even let in Guardian readers.

The post Unethical Tourism appeared first on Standpoint.

There is little reason to believe them. All evidence points in the opposite direction. The international community can reach a deal over Iran’s nuclear programme only at the price of meeting Tehran’s red lines. And the problem is that Iran will only agree to restrictions on its nuclear activities as long as they do not ultimately bar its path to a bomb. In the 12 months of negotiations conducted under the interim agreement, Iran won one major policy victory and gained four major concessions in the nuclear domain.

First, Iran has successfully made Western Middle East policy a hostage to the nuclear deal. Iran continues to pursue its hegemonic ambitions in the region. Tehran has stayed the course in Syria and kept up its support for Assad: training, advising and financing Assad’s forces and guiding their brutality over the past 45 months. Their ferocity, coupled with Western lack of support for a viable moderate opposition, is what prompted the rise of Islamic State in Syria. Iran’s brazen support for the Shia sectarian drive in Iraq did the rest.

Going after Assad and defending legitimate Sunni interests in Iraq is one promising way to complement a successful military campaign against IS. Yet Iran has persuaded Washington that seeking confrontation with Iran over Damascus could jeopardise a nuclear deal. The Obama White House has bought into Iran’s narrative that there is a convergence of interests between Washington and Tehran over stopping the advance of IS in Syria and Iraq. These two assumptions have consigned Western efforts against IS to a disastrous stalemate and handed Iran the strategic upper hand in the region. By strengthening Iran’s position, Washington has also broadcast weakness to its allies and adversaries alike. This weakness spills over into the nuclear negotiations as Iran is persuaded that Western refusal to go after Iran’s proxies means that our lack of resolve can be leveraged in the nuclear domain as well.

Second, the international community has already conceded that Iran will never have to suspend enrichment activities as stipulated under six UN Security Council Resolutions passed under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. Moreover, in a final agreement, Iran will have a right to enrich uranium formally recognised. Few remember that Iran was building its enrichment facilities in secret and that, had they not been exposed twice, in 2002 and 2009, Iran might have had a nuclear bomb by now. In 2005 Iran was declared in non-compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), to which it is a signatory; in 2006 the International Atomic Energy Agency referred Iran’s non-compliance to the Security Council. It was because of its enrichment activities that the Security Council considers Iran’s programme a global threat. It is because of Iran’s refusal to fulfil its NPT obligations that its economy is under sanctions.

Even for NPT-compliant member states, enrichment is not a sacrosanct right. The traditional position of the US government, at least, is that the NPT does not grant a right to enrich. Most NPT members obtain their nuclear fuel from a handful of suppliers.

To reward a country that was declared in non-compliance with the NPT with an industrial-sized nuclear-enrichment programme effectively creates a new benchmark. Henceforth, every nation on earth will expect at the very least to be treated like Iran, even if it chooses to initially pursue a nuclear programme in violation of the NPT. The enrichment capacity that will eventually be granted to Tehran will be the baseline for demands by other regional powers such as Egypt, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, to have their own enrichment programmes.

Third, Iran has broken the growing tide of sanctions that was crippling its economy and deprived Western governments of a critical component of their strategy. Iran’s reward, though reversible if talks were to collapse, is double. Not only has it won a victory on enrichment even before a deal is done, but it has denied the West the critical sanction leverage that it previously wielded. By entering an interim agreement that deprives the West of the power to enact new sanctions, Iran can slowly erode their power without making meaningful concessions. Iran and the Obama Administration seem to agree on one point — that the only alternative to the current negotiating framework is war. With such a choice, Western governments will negotiate until Judgment Day rather than reimpose sanctions and risk war. Iran’s negotiating stance will therefore improve over time.

Fourth, Iran has removed its ballistic missile programme and its past military activities linked to the nuclear programme from the negotiations. It has already managed to sweep its missile programme under the carpet — although that is equally forbidden under UN Chapter VII resolutions. The six world powers have also agreed that lack of progress by the IAEA in its efforts to get Iranian answers on the possible military dimensions of its nuclear programme will not hamper a deal. Yet there is no chance a final agreement can put together a satisfactory implementation and verification mechanism unless Iran’s past clandestine activities are fully disclosed, investigated and accounted for. Any agreement that sidesteps such issues will inevitably only be able to verify Iranian good behaviour in known nuclear facilities — but not be able to detect any potential misbehaviour in clandestine installations. Given Iran’s history of deception, it is a recipe for disaster.

And fifth, Iran has eroded Western positions on key components of any future agreement, ensuring that, should these gains be consolidated into a final deal, Iran’s pathway to a nuclear bomb will be at most delayed, but not impeded. It looks as if a deal will eventually tie Tehran’s hands, ever so gently, for ten years at most. For a US President in his second term, even such a deal looks like a historic legacy. For a zealous regime driven by imperial ambitions and a religious sense of history, ten years is a blink of an eye and a promise that, within a decade, Iran will resume its dash to the bomb unimpeded.

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With Rouhani’s blessing, they have all placed loyalists at the helm of government-owned holding companies — all competent managers, no doubt, but hardly the fresh breed touted in the Western media.
Zanganeh has appointed Roknoddin Javadi as managing director of NIOC. He is an old-timer in the NIOC management structure and very close to the minister.
Ahmad Morad Alizadeh, chairman of  Mahan Air (also subject to sanctions), has  retaken his old post as MD at the government-owned National Iranian Copper Industries Company (NICICO), while remaining in charge of a Hamburg-based procurement operation. Mir Ali Ashraf Pouri Hosseini, the new chairman of the Iranian Privatisation Organisation, served in the same post in the waning days of Khatami’s presidency.
Mehdi Karbasian, the new deputy minister for industries and mines and newly-appointed chairman of IMIDRO, the Iranian Mines and Mining Industries Development Renovation Organisation, shares a similar story. Karbasian’s CV not only exudes experience and competence, it exemplifies the entire Rouhani administration as a group of veteran revolutionary insiders. 
Karbasian has sat on the board of dozens of Iranian government-owned companies, including many entities subject to sanctions, such as IRISL—Iran’s shipping lines — and IFIC — Iran’s Foreign Investment Company. He spent his youthful revolutionary years between the battlefield and government management at the Foundation of the Oppressed, a multimillion-dollar economic empire. In the 1990s, under Rafsanjani and Khatami, he occupied many positions of influence in the oil industry, banking, and government.
Alongside new appointments, there are holdovers to confirm that Iran’s oligarchs are in full control of the ship of state. While Alizadeh’s predecessor, Nematollah Postindouz, left behind a trail of corruption charges, the chairman of the Foundation of the Oppressed, Mohammad Forounzadeh, has not been replaced. That may have less to do with moderate credentials, and more with the fact that he is agreeable to all Iranian power centres — he was chief of staff of the Revolutionary Guards in the 1980s and later succeeded Torkan as Rafsanjani’s minister of defence from 1993 to 1997.
Rouhani is not a harbinger of change — if anything he represents the resilience of Iran’s revolutionary elites and their resolve to preserve their grip on power.

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Before the agreement, Iran’s economy was on the brink of collapse. Just after the agreement was signed, President Hassan Rouhani told Iranian television that the country was in the depths of an inflationary recession. He confessed that the only way the government could pay state salaries was by borrowing huge sums of money. He revealed that in some places essential goods were scarce. He admitted that in the previous eight years Iran had squandered its riches on costly policies that made no economic sense, and indicated that sanctions had brought the country to its knees. So why offer Iran relief now, except in exchange for full, immediate and verifiable implementation of its UN obligations, given that the economy was in such a poor state that one further push would break it?

After all, the whole purpose of sanctions was to give the regime a stark choice — keep your nuclear weapons programme at the risk of economic collapse, or survive in exchange for dismantling it. Rouhani’s analysis shows that Iran was dangerously close to that moment of truth — and sanctions relief in exchange for reversible concessions gives it the kind of breathing space it has been denied until now. Considering how hard it was to get there, this is the worst possible unforced error that diplomacy could score.

For almost a decade, the United States and the European Union built a sophisticated, multilayered sanctions architecture to persuade Iran to comply with its international obligations. Those obligations are defined by six Chapter VII Security Council resolutions that patient diplomacy successfully pushed through — and that the interim deal has now undermined.

Initially designed as targeted restrictions against Iran’s nuclear procurement efforts, sanctions gradually targeted more and more sectors of its economy. Their impact exceeded their advocates’ predictions. Within months, Iran’s official crude oil sales fell by 40 per cent. Financial and banking sanctions depleted the foreign currency reserves and triggered a dramatic depreciation of the rial. The car industry, Iran’s second most important economic sector, saw a 40 per cent production drop in 2013. And a European ban on liquid natural gas technology exports grounded Iran’s ambitions to develop its largely untapped gas sector. Sanctions have hurt so much that Iran’s national gas company reportedly declared bankruptcy a week before the interim deal was signed.

Given this success, it was folly to throw away the most efficient policy instrument available to the US and the EU in exchange for reversible concessions that will leave Iran’s nuclear breakout capacity intact, with a vague promise that it may comply with its international obligations in future. After all, given that Iran has cheated its way to its present status as a nuclear threshold state, there is no place to “trust but verify”; rather, this is a case of “don’t trust and verify”.

Yet the interim deal does precisely that.Western concessions will enable Iran to replenish its foreign currency reserves. They will relieve three sectors — petrochemicals, cars and aviation — that are largely controlled by the Revolutionary Guards and the Supreme Leader’s business empire. They will provide the regime with a cash bonanza and help its rulers stabilise the economy — in the first 24 hours after the agreement, the rial appreciated by 5 per cent against the US dollar, and European and Asian carmakers that had quit Iran because of sanctions are lining up again for deals.

Thus the regime constituents least likely to support accommodation with the West and most invested in Iran’s nuclear weapons quest will benefit from these measures long before the nuclear threat is neutralised. Given the dual-use nature of car industry and petrochemical technology, Iran will not only benefit financially but regain access to critical components of the nuclear programme it is currently finding hard to procure.

Even worse, the agreement will reopen banking channels for the regime to exploit. While the language of the agreement appears foolproof — allowing only non-sanctioned entities to benefit from such channels-it is easy to imagine how Iran will take advantage of such relaxation for its own proliferating activities, considering how it cheated the financial system in the past. This is the worst possible disincentive for Iran at a time when its military nuclear programme is dangerously close to completion. 

Thanks to the sanctions regime, Western diplomacy was winning the race against a nuclear Iran. There is now a reasonable chance that Iran will be the victor instead.

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It took only 100 days in office for Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, to fool the United States and its Western allies into believing that his charm offensive was a genuine change of direction. As a result, in Geneva three rounds of negotiations (the last of which will happen before this column goes to press) are shaping an interim nuclear agreement that will leave Iran with its ability to build a nuclear bomb intact while giving Tehran the much-coveted sanctions relief the regime needs to keep its economy afloat.

How did such a capitulation happen? After demanding for seven years that Iran halts all its enrichment-related activities, including research and development, the international community is prepared to settle for a deal that will not stop Iran’s enrichment activities and may ultimately recognise Tehran’s demand that enrichment be considered “an inalienable right”.

Iran’s demand has been a key element of its public diplomacy for over a decade. And while many members of the international community have been nervous about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, few outside the small circle of Western democracies are entirely comfortable with foregoing in principle the ability to enrich. After all, many members of the developing world covet nuclear technology for themselves — and why would they endorse a view held only by the US and a few others that the rights under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) do not include a right to enrich? 

Although the interim agreement does not address this matter, the US and other powers appear resigned to conceding, in the final stage of a future agreement with Iran, that Tehran has such a right. But is Iran’s demand warranted?

The NPT grants its signatories the right to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes in exchange for meeting certain obligations, which can be summarised as ensuring the civilian nature of a nuclear programme, adhering to transparency measures and allowing verification by the international community.

Governments and international scholars diverge on the purposely ambiguous text of the NPT’s Article 4. The US maintains that the treaty only guarantees a right to peaceful nuclear energy, not enrichment per se. Others believe that, provided the peaceful nature of the programme is verifiable, enrichment is possible. 

However, there is no ambiguity when it comes to Iran’s rights. Any right derived from NPT membership is conditional on compliance with the overall goals of the treaty. The civilian nature of a programme is central to the letter and the spirit of the treaty. Whatever the merits of different interpretations of the treaty, it is clear that no right is “inalienable” because rights granted by the NPT are conditional on compliance with the treaty itself.

Which brings us to Iran. With explicit reference to the NPT’s article 4, on September 24, 2005 the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) Board of Governors declared: “Iran’s many failures and breaches of its obligations to comply with its NPT Safeguards Agreement…constitute noncompliance”. 

It added: “The history of concealment of Iran’s nuclear activities referred to in the Director General’s report, the nature of these activities, issues brought to light in the course of the Agency’s  verification of declarations made by Iran since September 2002 and the resulting absence of confidence that Iran’s nuclear programme is exclusively for peaceful purposes have given rise to questions that are within the competence of the Security Council.”

Consequently, six Chapter VII UN Security Council resolutions have been passed since July 2006 (1696, 1737, 1747, 1803, 1835 and 1929), which order Iran to suspend all enrichment-related activities. There is no ambiguity. Resolution 1696 demands that “Iran shall suspend all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities, including research and development, to be verified by the IAEA.” This step was unanimously and repeatedly endorsed by the international community. That an interim deal with Iran would trample all over it speaks volumes about the resolve of the US to hold its ground vis-à-vis a smiling Iranian regime.

As if this were not enough, there are other reasons, beyond suspension demands by the UN, for the right to enrich to be permanently denied to Iran. It has failed to ratify and implement the Additional Protocol to the Safeguards’ Agreement — additional verification and transparency procedures that would enable the international community to exert a higher level of scrutiny over the country’s nuclear activities. Given Iran’s past violations, only enhanced verification can re-establish trust over time. Iranian demurral strengthens legitimate suspicions about its noncompliance.

Finally, Iran refuses to apply the modified Code 3.1 of the Subsidiary Arrangements to IAEA Safeguards’ Agreements. This norm, which the IAEA considers applicable to Iran, requires all NPT signatories to notify the IAEA of any new nuclear facility before building work begins. Iran has repeatedly violated this rule. All its enrichment activities are thus in violation of the NPT, regardless of whether it has a right, in theory, to enrich uranium.

Iran’s continuing non-compliance and history of obfuscation about the nature and extent of its nuclear activities provide no legal ground for the recognition of a right to enrich as part of any future agreement. It is a pity that President Obama thinks he can trust Iran to keep its enrichment capabilities in the final scheme of things.

Supporters of a deal with Iran tirelessly insist that a military strike would only temporarily offset Iran’s march to nuclear weapons. But a deal that grants Iran the right to enrich achieves the same — its impact will only be to delay a nuclear-armed Iran, not forever prevent its occurrence.

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