Since the new Congress took session this month, there has been a great deal of back and forth between the legislature and the chief executive regarding the issues of the Iran nuclear talks and Iran sanctions. Congresspersons from both parties have made it clear that a bill outlining new sanctions would be a major priority and was expected to come to the floor of the Senate by early February. Some have suggested that a veto-proof majority might be in the offing.
The Obama administration has nonetheless responded by committing to a veto of the bill, and the president has called upon Congress to “hold its fire,” even going so far as to warn that the pro-sanctions legislators would have to “own” the outcome if the bill’s passage led to a breakdown in nuclear talks, or even to a new Middle East war.
It’s difficult to see how those outcomes would result directly from Congress’s efforts. And they might well ask the president what the result would be if Iran continued to stall and obstruct the talks until a third self-imposed deadline lapsed with no serious progress to speak of. Would global peace and security be better safeguarded if these talks proved to be virtually endless?
In a Senate Foreign Relations Committee meeting on Wednesday, fellow Democrat Robert Menendez took remarkably direct aim at the president, accusing him of feeding into the “Iranian narrative of victimization” using commentary that “sounds like talking points that come straight out of Tehran.”
That victimization narrative has been obvious throughout the negotiating process, and Iran’s supreme leader has gotten a great deal of traction out of it, painting every delay and disruption of the talks as a victory for the “Islamic Republic” over the forces of repression. After the second deadline for those talks lapsed in November, the ultimate decision maker in the regime, Ali Khamenei, declared via his personal website, “On the nuclear issue, the United States and European colonialist countries gathered and applied their entire efforts to bring the Islamic Republic to its knees but they could not and they will not.”
The victimization narrative was initiated and is being pursued by the mullahs’ lobby in Washington, but will not fool anyone. The suggestion the world would likely blame the United States if negotiations failed after a new sanctions push defies logic and two decades of mullahs’ deception. To blame sanctions legislation for Iran’s abandonment of talks would be to ignore not only the preceding year of Iranian regime non-cooperation, but also the previous 12 years of efforts to push for a nuclear weapon while stalling and obstructing international probes into that program. It would also be ignoring that European and US conciliatory approach let the regime in Tehran get so close to nuclear bomb.
The Obama administration’s conviction that Iranian President Hassan Rouhani is a moderate does not absolve the mullahs’ regime of more than a decade of nuclear research and defiance of international will. In fact, that conviction does as much as anything else to prove that the administration’s perspective on the nuclear talks is out of step with reality, overly optimistic, and bafflingly pro-regime.
It was Hassan Rouhani, after all, who publicly acknowledged the regime’s ambition to make nuclear progress while limiting international scrutiny. In a speech in 2004 to the Supreme Cultural Revolution Council, the then-lead nuclear negotiator said, “While we were talking with the Europeans in Tehran, we were installing equipment in parts of the facility in Isfahan… In fact, by creating a calm environment, we were able to complete the work in Isfahan. Today, we can convert yellowcake.”
And what is it that President Obama is demanding of his Congress as it considers new sanctions legislation? A calm environment. For the Congress to “hold its fire.” And those requests come at a time when the International Atomic Energy Agency’s problem into the possible military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear program is going at least as badly as the nuclear negotiations themselves.
In November, agency head Yukiya Amano said, “Iran has not provided any explanations that enable the Agency to clarify the outstanding practical measures, nor has it proposed any new practical measures in the next step of the Framework for Cooperation, despite several requests from the Agency.”
Such a lack of cooperation raises serious questions about history repeating itself, about clerical regime continuing its illicit work while going through the motions of limited interaction with negotiators and inspectors. Such a lack of cooperation ought to fundamentally undermine the Iranian narrative of victimization. And no doubt it would do so if that narrative was not being propped up by the Obama administration.
Fear of growing popular discontent together with economic pressure and global isolation has created an unsustainable situation for the Iranian regime. Opening up talks was only aimed to postpone the inevitable eruption of a discontented population seeking an end to the religious dictatorship and establishment of freedom and democracy.
