Exceptional

by Dick Cheney

  Two months later, Iran held a presidential election. On Saturday, June 14, massive protests erupted in the streets of Tehran when the Interior Ministry announced that President Ahmadinejad had been reelected with 62.6 percent of the vote. Supporters of former prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi charged that the election had been rigged and took to the streets. The mullahs, faced with the most significant challenge to their legitimacy in the thirty-year history of their rule, responded with violence to crush the protests. President Obama’s initial response was silence, followed by tepid criticism of the mullahs’ actions. Any support he expressed for the protesters could put his efforts to court the regime in jeopardy.

  In September 2009, French president Nicolas Sarkozy, British prime minister Gordon Brown, and President Obama announced the discovery of a secret Iranian uranium enrichment facility on an Iranian military base outside Qom. The Iranians claimed the facility was for peaceful purposes, and Ahmadinejad declared, “I don’t think Mr. Obama is a nuclear expert.”

  In a pattern that would be repeated many times over the course of the next six years, Iranian cheating was met with the offer of a deal. The Obama administration proposed a swap: if the Iranians agreed to ship 80 percent of their enriched uranium to Russia, they would receive the fuel they needed for the Tehran Research Reactor. The Iranians went along for a while, buying time while they continued to enrich, but then the supreme leader publicly criticized the offer, ending the round of negotiations.

  Back in Washington, Stuart Levey provided a briefing for the National Security Council on restarting the effort to isolate Iran financially. UN ambassador Susan Rice objected. She argued that the United States should seek a new UN Security Council resolution before restarting Treasury’s program. President Obama agreed with Rice, and Levey’s program remained on hold.

  Congress began work on a new round of legislatively imposed sanctions. Although President Obama claims credit for implementing an historically tough and extensive set of sanctions on Iran, a review of the record demonstrates that his administration, and Secretary Clinton’s State Department, in particular, opposed and attempted to water down every congressional effort to impose tighter sanctions on Iran.

  Secretary Clinton’s deputy James Steinberg sent a letter to Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman John Kerry in December 2009 explaining that the State Department had “serious substantive concerns” about the “unintended foreign policy consequences” that could be caused by the sanctions legislation under consideration. Steinberg wrote that the administration was worried about the bill’s “inflexibility,” in particular. Secretary Clinton’s team did not succeed in killing the legislation, but they were able to weaken the sanctions provisions and delay the final bill, the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act (CISADA), providing yet more time for Iranian uranium enrichment activities. President Obama ultimately signed CISADA into law in July 2010.

  As it became clear CISADA was not having a sufficient impact on the Iranian nuclear program, a bipartisan group of ninety-two senators wrote to President Obama urging that he “impose crippling sanctions on Iran’s financial system by cutting off the [Central Bank of Iran].” In November, a bipartisan group of senators introduced amendments to the 2012 defense authorization bill to target Iran’s oil industry and central bank. Secretary Clinton and President Obama opposed the sanctions. Despite aggressive efforts by the Obama NSC, Treasury Department, and State Department, detailed in a piece in the Weekly Standard by Joel Winton, titled “Rewriting History: The Real Hillary Record on Iran Sanctions,” the amendment passed unanimously, 100–0.

  To his credit, President Obama had given the green light to Treasury to relaunch its efforts in the summer of 2010 after a new UN Security Council resolution was passed imposing additional sanctions on Iran. The combined effect of the new multilateral sanctions, additional U.S. sanctions, and Treasury’s financial isolation campaign started to have a profound impact on Iran’s economy. Getting the sanctions lifted became a top Iranian priority.

  It should be noted, however, that there is no evidence that even these sanctions, tougher than any implemented before, had an impact on the Iranian nuclear program. The reason for their apparent ineffectiveness may well be that the Obama administration began looking for ways to relieve the pressure on Iran almost as soon as the new sanctions regime was in place. Six months after UNSC resolution 1929 was passed, Secretary Clinton started working with the Sultan of Oman to open a secret back channel for direct negotiations between the United States and Iran. A senior official in one of the governments in the Middle East described what happened next this way: “Just when the sanctions started working and Iran was feeling real economic pressure, Obama threw them a lifeline.”

  The Associated Press has reported that the secret meetings launched by Secretary Clinton began in mid-2011. According to Clinton the first US-Iran meeting took place in Oman in July 2012. In either case, it was in these meetings, according to senior Obama administration officials, that the outline of the nuclear framework agreement signed between Iran and the United States in November 2013 began to emerge. Two items in particular were of the utmost importance to Iran: They wanted the Americans to agree to drop the long-standing demand of the international community that Iran halt its uranium enrichment programs; and they wanted immediate sanctions relief. Iran also managed to secure a commitment that the United States would provide nearly $12 billion in cash payments, from frozen Iranian assets, over the course of the negotiations. The Iranians are reputed to be excellent negotiators, but getting the United States to cave on two fundamental points prior to the beginning of the actual negotiating, while also securing a commitment that the Iranians would be paid to stay at the negotiating table, must have surpassed Tehran’s highest hopes. It also set a pattern for concession after concession that followed during the framework negotiations—none made by the Iranians.

  The most damaging of the original American concessions, by far, was the Obama team’s willingness to allow Iran to continue to enrich. This position immediately gutted all six UN Security Council resolutions passed over the previous decade demanding a halt to Iran’s enrichment activities. It also seriously threatened the entire nuclear nonproliferation structure, codified in the NPT, which has been in place since 1968. The NPT guarantees every nation the right to peaceful nuclear programs. The Iranians extend this, asserting that they have a right to “peaceful nuclear programs, including the right to enrich.” These five words open the possibility of many other nations demanding this nonexistent right and moving forward with their own enrichment programs.

  We now know that a number of President Obama’s key policy decisions, including his decision in 2013 not to enforce the red line he had drawn concerning Syria’s chemical weapons use, were made while these secret talks were ongoing. As we discussed in chapter 4, failing to act against the Syrian regime, after it blatantly violated the red line Obama had drawn, damaged America’s credibility and handed a propaganda victory to ISIS. President Obama’s decision not to strike Bashar al-Assad was likely an effort to avoid offending the Iranians, Assad’s patrons.

  In an October 2014 letter to Ayatollah Khamenei, the president emphasized that America’s military operation against ISIS in Iraq and Syria would not target Assad or his forces. Since then, the lack of any coherent American strategy to defeat ISIS has opened the way for Iran to step in, increasing its regional role, presence, and responsibility at the expense of America’s allies and interests in the region, not to mention the people of Iraq and Syria.

  ON JULY 14, 2015, President Obama announced a new nuclear agreement had been reached with Iran. An early indication of how unfavorable the deal was for the United States—and how favorable to Iran—was the president’s speech about it from the red-carpeted Cross Hall of the White House. Had the deal been a fair one, he would have spoken frankly about it. Instead, within the first two minutes of the Cross Hall speech, the president told three falsehoods abo
ut the agreement.

  The first falsehood was his claim that the deal “will prevent [Iran] from obtaining a nuclear weapon.” The truth is the opposite: This agreement will guarantee an Iranian nuclear arsenal. It allows the Iranians to maintain every element of their nuclear infrastructure and removes restrictions from their nuclear program within a decade. Even if one assumes for the sake of argument that the Iranians comply with the deal for the next ten years, at that point, they will have the ability, as the president has himself admitted, to achieve almost immediate nuclear breakout. The ten-year “sunset” provision is most accurately understood as the sun rising on an Iran armed with nuclear weapons. The president’s assertion that the Iranians have “pledged to the international community that they will not develop a nuclear weapon” is of little comfort, given that the Iranians have cheated on every nuclear agreement into which they have ever entered.

  The president’s second falsehood was that the deal “stopped the spread of nuclear weapons in this region.” In fact, the agreement guarantees and even accelerates it by legitimizing for the first time ever an Iranian uranium enrichment program, something previously held by the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency to be illegal. Combine this with the removal of other key restraints, such as those on Iran’s ballistic missile program (about which more below), on its ability to ship conventional weapons to terrorists, and on the IRGC, which oversees Iran’s support for terror and is fomenting chaos and violence as Iran attempts to dominate the region, and there is more than enough reason for Iran’s neighbors to decide they must pursue their own nuclear weapons programs. Having watched President Obama retreat from the Middle East, and realizing that he capitulated on nearly every key issue in the negotiations with Iran, is it any wonder our allies have concluded they can’t count on us to defend them? Is it surprising they would question our ability to use our nuclear umbrella to protect them as they watch President Obama cut the size of our nuclear arsenal? The Obama deal will not stop nuclear proliferation. It will unleash it.

  The president’s third falsehood was that “the international community will be able to verify that the Islamic Republic of Iran will not develop a nuclear weapon.” The claim is deceitful in two ways, first by misstating again what the agreement will accomplish. It will not keep the Iranians from developing a nuclear weapon. It legitimizes a pathway for them to do so. Secondly, it presents the verification provisions as though they were foolproof, which they are far from being. They are also a world away from what the administration publicly said they would be. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said in April that “we expect to have anywhere-anytime access.” The same month President Obama’s deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes said the deal would include “go anywhere-anytime, twenty-four/seven access as it relates to the nuclear facilities that Iran has.” Despite these reassurances, the Obama Iran deal gives the Iranians months to delay any request from international inspectors for access to suspicious sites, more than enough time for Iran to remove evidence of illicit activity. Instead of ensuring the international community’s ability to verify, the Obama Iran deal seems structured to allow any deception that might go on to be unverifiable.

  A truly verifiable deal would include not only go-anywhere-anytime inspections, but it would also require that Iran disclose all its nuclear activity, past and present, military and civilian. Such knowledge is essential for knowing the starting point from which future nuclear developments begin. Secretary of State John Kerry seemed to understand this when he was asked in April 2015 whether the United States would accept a deal in which the Iranians failed to disclose their past activity. “No,” he replied, “They have to do it. It will be done. If there’s going to be a deal, it will be done.” Two months later, in June 2015, Kerry’s position had evolved. “We’re not fixated on Iran specifically accounting for what they did at one time or another,” he said. “We know what they did. We have no doubt. We have absolute knowledge with respect to the certain military activities that they were engaged in.” No responsible American official would make such a claim, and one wonders what changed between April, and June. Likely it was the Iranians’ making clear that they wouldn’t accept such a provision.

  According to the agreement reached in July, Iran is not required to provide a complete disclosure of its past or current activities. There is nothing in the agreement about the military facility at Parchin, for example, where Iran has engaged in suspicious nuclear-related activity and to which the IAEA has been denied access. There are secret annexes—or side deals—that reportedly govern verification at Parchin and other sensitive sites. The IAEA has refused to share these annexes with Congress. On July 22, 2015, Secretary of State Kerry admitted he hadn’t seen them either. In other words, despite promising that he would never accept a deal based on trust, President Obama has agreed to a deal in which he has no idea what some of the most important verification provisions are.

  On the day after the agreement with Iran was announced, the president held a press conference in which he made assertions similar to those in his July 14 speech—claims that deny facts and logic. Journalist and Middle East analyst Omri Ceren astutely noted, “As always, you’re left asking, ‘Does the president really believe this? And would it be better or worse if he did?’ ”

  In so many ways the Obama Iran agreement is worse than those concerned about it could possibly have imagined before the negotiations concluded. On June 10, 2015, former undersecretary of state for arms control and disarmament Robert Joseph testified about the danger of an agreement that did not address Iran’s ballistic missile program. That failure, combined with other flaws in the agreement, Joseph testified, would mean that “the threat to the U.S. homeland and to our NATO allies of an Iran armed with nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles will increase not decrease under the anticipated agreement.” What the president had in mind, it turns out, was even more dangerous. Rather than stopping Iran’s ballistic missile program, the Obama deal lifts restrictions that prohibit Iran from building these missiles.

  One week before the deal was announced, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey testified that American security depended upon “stopping Iran from having an ICBM program.” Carter said this was important because “the ‘I’ in ICBM stands for ‘intercontinental,’ which means having the capability to fly from Iran to the United States, and we don’t want that. That’s why we oppose [Iran’s] ICBMs.” General Dempsey directly addressed the Obama-Iran agreement being finalized. “Under no circumstances,” he said, “should we relieve pressure on Iran relative to ballistic missile capabilities and arms trafficking.” The president agreed, nonetheless, to lift both restrictions, enabling Iran to build ICBMs after eight years and to traffic in conventional weapons after five.

  In the run-up to the agreement with Iran, the president made promise after promise that he subsequently broke. He said that sanctions wouldn’t be lifted until the Iranians fulfilled their obligations, but during the negotiating process itself he lifted sanctions in a wide array of areas, including some sanctions that were imposed for non-nuclear purposes. In addition, over the course of the negotiations, the United States provided nearly $12 billion in cash from frozen Iranian assets to the regime in Tehran—and according to the agreement announced in July, they will have access to over $150 billion more. Iran will also have a financial windfall as it begins selling its oil on world markets and accessing international financial and commercial markets. This money will undoubtedly be used by Iran to fund its military and terror-sponsoring activities around the globe. President Obama’s claims that Iranian President Rouhani will be constrained by his campaign promises to use the money to improve the lives of everyday Iranians were absurd.

  The president promised international sanctions would “snap back” into place if Iran cheats. Instead, the agreement actually commits the European Union and the UN Security Council to refrain from re-imposing or re-introducing sanctions
lifted under this agreement. It also prohibits the UN Security Council and the European Union from imposing any new nuclear-related sanctions. The United States similarly commits “to refrain from re-introducing or re-imposing” sanctions that are lifted under this agreement. If those commitments aren’t sufficient to prevent any attempt to impose “snapback” sanctions, the agreement says “Iran . . . will treat such re-introduction or re-imposition of sanctions . . . or such an imposition of new nuclear-related sanctions, as grounds to cease performing its commitments” under the agreement. If Iran cheats, and we learn about it despite the absence of a go-anywhere-anytime verification regime, the protracted international debate about whether the cheating happened and how significant it was will take place under the shadow of the Iranian threat—codified in the agreement—to abandon all their commitments. If history is any guide, President Obama will argue that the trade-off isn’t worth it. After all, one can almost hear him saying, we wouldn’t want to risk Iran abandoning the deal.

  President Obama assures us that his “commitment to Israel’s security is, and always will be, unshakeable.” Although no nation is under greater threat from a nuclear-armed Iran than the state of Israel, President Obama has consistently demonstrated more determination to constraining Israeli action than Iranian action. The impact on Israel’s security of Obama’s attempted détente with Iran has already become evident. On January 18, 2015, Israel struck a convoy traveling in the Golan Heights. The convoy was carrying senior Hezbollah and Iranian officers, including a general in the IRGC. “By treating Syria as an Iranian sphere of influence,” former national security council senior director Michael Doran noted, “Obama is allowing the shock troops of Iran to dig in on the border of Israel—not to mention the border of Jordan.”

  President Obama has said consistently that all options remain on the table to prevent Iran from attaining a nuclear weapon, including the military option. That was until May 31, 2015, anyway. In an interview on Israeli TV that day, the president took the military option off the table. His deal was really the only option, he said, because military strikes wouldn’t be effective. “A military solution won’t fix it,” he continued, “even if the U.S. participates.” The Iranians had already noted the change. “There are very few people in today’s world who take these military threats seriously,” Ayatollah Khamenei said in a speech in July 2014.