After repeated comments on Monday declaring the collapse of a weekend deal with Iran entirely the fault of Iran, the Obama Administration is back-tracking significantly, not only conceding that Iran isn’t to blame, but insisting no one is.
“Fault is immaterial,” insisted State Dept spokeswoman Jen Psaki, who insisted the talks are simply a “complicated” issue that are going to take awhile to sort out.
Russia was also quick to dismiss the claims that Iran was to blame for the lack of a deal, saying there simply wasn’t a consensus. Reports from those familiar with the situation say France actually was the one that rejected the deal, and did so with an eye on a big arms deal with Saudi Arabia.
US officials are now describing the talks not as a failure but as a “near miss,” apparently hinging on disputes over wording, and they insist that a deal remains probable in the near future.
The White House has come out very publicly in its opposition to imposing more sanctions on Iran, insisting it would threaten ongoing diplomacy. Israel is on the opposite side, lobbying the US Congress heavily for the sanctions, on the grounds that diplomacy is getting in the way of their war plans.
With both houses of Congress shaping up to be the battleground for this debate, the House leadership still seems largely in favor of imposing new sanctions, with Rep. Mike Coffman (R – CO) expressing “deep concern” about diplomacy in general and seeing its sabotage as a net positive.
The Senate seems a little more split on the matter, with Banking Committee Chairman Tim Johnson (D – SD) determined to hold off on new sanctions until the Obama Administration says otherwise.
The talks almost netted a deal with Iran over the weekend, but are now paused for 10 days, giving lobbyists a lot of time to press Congress on both sides, and hawks time to try to sabotage the talks before they resume.
Fresh off of signing their own cooperation deal with Iran, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s chief Amano Yukiya confirmed the agency’s willingness to help with the implementation of any deal between Iran and the P5+1.
“If there is some agreement between the P5+1 and Iran and if we are requested to implement some verification measures, we are prepared to implement them,” Amano insisted.
The IAEA has been able to repeatedly confirm the non-diversion of any of Iran’s nuclear material from its civilian program to any undeclared activities, and has gained access to additional facilities above and beyond those required by Iran in their safeguards agreement.
Iran is widely expected to agree to additional protocols to their safeguards agreement as part of a final agreement with the P5+1. In years past Iran had voluntarily implemented some of those additional protocols, but never ratified the deal because of international disputes over their program.
The White House had for quite some time been quietly lobbying Congress to put its new sanctions bills against Iran on hold for the sake of diplomacy, but is now being very public with its opposition to the bills, calling them a “march to war” against Iran, and one that the American public opposes.
White House spokesman Jay Carney said that the public “justifiably and understandably prefer a peaceful solution,” warning that if the sanctions derail the talks it would leave war as the only alternative.
Some Congressional hawks have been presenting more sanctions as a way to scare Iran into making more concessions, but others have opposed a deal at all costs, and are facing strong lobbying from Israel, which has complained that the deal would get in the way of their planned war.
All of this is setting the stage for the Congressional battle to be much more public than it’s been in recent months, and with Israel planning to ratchet up its lobbying in the week left before the next round of talks with Iran, the rhetoric is likely to get more serious in the days to come.
Iran is negotiating with the wrong US officials
To end sanctions regime, Tehran needs to convince Congress
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry (L) holds his hands up as he leaves after a news conference held at the end of the Iranian nuclear talks in Geneva November 10, 2013. Jason Reed/Reuters
Iranian officials have just finished a meeting in Geneva with the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and Germany (the so-called P5+1). On short notice, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry dove into the first formal and open negotiations between the two countries since 1981, offering glimmers of hope for future relations between Washington and Tehran. Because of the severe impact that economic sanctions imposed by the United States and Europe are having on Iran's economy, Iran has signaled to the world that it may be willing to accept restrictions on its nuclear program in exchange for relief.
Despite this reason for optimism, Iran faces a serious obstacle: The country is negotiating sanction relief with the wrong arm of the U.S. government. Although the executive branch negotiates treaties and represents U.S. interests abroad, the overtures made by Kerry and his team of sanction experts seem out of sync with the will of Congress, which not only wants to keep current sanctions in place but also is poised to pass new laws exacting even tougher economic sanctions. The House of Representatives has already passed H.R. 850, and the Senate Banking Committee has harsher sanction legislation ready to be voted on and moved out of committee. These efforts continue despite the White House's pleas to congressional Democrats and Republicans to postpone new measures in order to give negotiations a chance to succeed.
These legislative developments are significant, for some of the most effective economic sanctions against Iran are anchored in U.S. law — not in executive orders. Since Congress makes the laws, only Congress can change them. Certainly President Barack Obama has the legal authority to make deals with foreign governments, but he may do so only within the confines of U.S. law, and his prosecutorial discretion is limited when it comes to economic sanctions.
Direct and indirect sanctions
To understand the dynamics involved in U.S. policy on Iran, it is important to mark the difference between direct and indirect economic sanctions. Direct sanctions bar specific individuals and companies from conducting international trade, using the global banking system or traveling abroad and in some cases result in asset freezes. Most direct sanctions are established and enforced by executive order, and the president has some leeway in easing these sanctions. However, they are not the sanctions that are allegedly crippling Iran's economy.
Indirect sanctions, on the other hand, are based in U.S. law and cannot easily be offered up as bargaining chips in the current negotiations. These sanctions are sometimes called business-choice sanctions or extraterritorial sanctions. They are meant to affect Iran's overall economy rather than punish or stop illicit proliferation activities, which is the focus of direct sanctions. Indirect sanctions work by offering firms a choice between doing business with Iranian entities or exclusion from doing business with U.S. entities, with substantial penalties imposed for doing the former.
The Iran Sanctions Act of 1996 created the first indirect sanctions on Iran. These are the ones responsible for hurting Iran’s overall economy by comprehensively limiting its ability to sell oil and use international banking systems. Thanks to indirect sanctions, Iran currently sells less than 1 million barrels of oil per day (bpd) — down from about 2 million bpd in 2011. Iran's currency was devalued 50 percent just before President Hassan Rouhani's election. Although Iran wants immediate relief from these indirect sanctions, they are unfortunately not the kind the Obama administration can easily waive or revoke.
A Senate move on stricter sanctions could torpedo any preliminary deal the White House might negotiate with Iran.
It is the way indirect sanctions work that makes them so hard to reverse. They are based in law and primarily directed at large, legitimate foreign entities — mostly in the energy, banking, transportation and insurance sectors. As long as these sanctions are part of U.S. law, businesses will be at risk of having them applied, even if Obama makes a deal with Iran and declares that he will henceforth exercise prosecutorial discretion in enforcing these sanctions or in granting waivers. To do this, he would have to justify his actions to a hostile Congress (through frequent reporting mechanisms built into the legislation).
In the current political climate, many large foreign companies are choosing not to do business with Iran even if they believe the transaction is legal. They fear that their legal analysis may be wrong, that the president may change course on prosecutorial discretion and that Congress will further tighten sanctions, putting to waste the business ties they establish. Furthermore, they may stay out of Iran because of risks to their reputations from being associated with a perceived pariah state. As long as these laws are on the books, Kerry cannot simply negotiate away the risk-avoidance choices that are being made by foreign businesses.
The Iran Sanctions Act, as amended and updated, contains a loophole that allows the president to grant limited waivers. Obama has authorized six-month waivers to 20 countries (including major Asian purchasers such as China and Japan) allowing them to procure crude oil from Iran, provided that they show progress toward reducing their dependence on Iranian oil. However, H.R. 850, as recently passed by the House, would effectively boycott sales of Iranian oil and cancel the president’s waiver authority, removing what little leeway he has to ease pressure on Iran.
Congress versus Obama
So where does Congress stand on easing Iranian sanctions? Large bipartisan majorities insist that economic sanctions are an effective lever to convince Iran to shut down its nuclear program. These majorities have continually backed up their beliefs with severe legislation, despite multiple pleas from the White House to forgo new sanctions. On July 31, the House passed H.R. 850 by a whopping 400-20 vote. A recent letter to Obama signed by six Democratic and four Republican senators indicates that the Senate is ready to move on new sanctions. Such a move could torpedo any preliminary deal the White House might negotiate with Iran.
The Senate, in fact, has a few sanction bills in the works and appears ready to move one of themout of the Banking Committee soon. While the Senate's most active sponsors of sanction legislation — Mark Kirk, R-Ill.; Robert Menendez, D-N.J.; Joe Manchin, D-W.V.; and Bob Corker, R-Tenn. — showed restraint as October negotiations got under way, they may not hold off for long. Further complicating the situation is the prospect of the House and Senate's mustering enough votes to override Obama's veto. Again, despite the administration's pleas for restraint over the last two years, the recent House vote on new sanction legislation passed with 95 percent approval, and the most recent Senate resolution calling for tougher sanctions passed 99-0.
Two critical dynamics are at work here: First, to get relief, Iran must prove several negatives: that its nuclear program will not produce any weapons-grade materials, that it is no longer supporting terrorism and abusing human rights and so on. Second, it took a long time to build the international and domestic coalitions necessary to levy consistent pressure on Iran. For instance, the European Union has its own laws on the books (some of which are considered tougher than U.S. sanctions) that prevent sanctioned entities from using the SWIFT banking communication system — a key device for ensuring smooth financial transfers. Letting current sanctions ease and then return them to full strength could take years, thus giving Iran more time to operate illicit programs.
If Obama really wants to make a deal with Iran, he will first have to convince Congress that Iran can and will verifiably and irreversibly shut down enrichment activities and turn over the uranium it has already enriched above 20 percent. It could only help matters if the Iranian government invited select U.S. senators and representatives to sit down for separate talks to build up trust on that end. If Congress ultimately does not embrace rapprochement with Iran and the quid pro quo sanction relief necessary for negotiations, the promise of a groundbreaking deal will be scuttled, and tougher sanction laws may ensue.
Christopher A. Bidwell is senior fellow for nonproliferation law and policy at the Federation of American Scientists.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America's editorial policy.
More details continue to emerge on the disagreements that prevented an expected weekend pact between the P5+1 and Iran, with a last minute side conversation between Secretary of State John Kerry and his French counterpart Laurent Fabius apparently keeping it from continuing.
Fabius demanded last second changes to the draft agreement, including removing a clause guaranteeing Iran’s right to civilian uranium enrichment. Kerry reportedly endorsed that demand.
Iran has, under its safeguards agreement, every right to enrich uranium for civilian purposes, and has insisted they are willing to limit that enrichment, but not abandon the right outright.
That already put the talks on shaky ground, and Fabius followed it up with a demand that Iran abandon the under construction Arak reactor, which runs on unenriched uranium. Between the two demands this amounted to a de facto demand to surrender their entire civilian nuclear program, but the US and France continued to insist on only minor sanction relief. At that point though, the deal was dead and everyone just decided to meet again later this month.
n anticipated weekend deal between the P5+1 and Iran never materialized, and while everyone is maintaining optimism that they’re “close” on a pact, the lack of a deal is also an opportunity for world leaders to deflect blame, and they all agree that the lack of a deal is someone else’s fault.
Though the general consensus from reports is that France is the one that ended up killing the deal, Secretary of State John Kerry issued two separate statements, each blaming Iran in a different way.
First, Kerry insisted Iran had simply waited until the whole deal got negotiated and said “no,” but then later he insisted that they didn’t really reject the deal, and just had to “consult with leaders in Tehran.”
Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif insisted that he was all set to make a deal during the meeting, but that the P5+1 appeared fragmented, and couldn’t agree on what they were after in the talks.
Iranian officials also insist that the US “gutted the agreement” during Thursday talks, and that Kerry’s many conflicting statements were damaging their confidence in the talks.
The big news coming out of the Iran negotiations at the end of last week was that France took an unexpectedly rejectionist stance in the talks and refused a deal that was all but agreed upon.
One of the reasons this was a huge deal is that the P5+1 and Iran really did seem to be on the cusp of a first-stage agreement. Secretary of State John Kerry canceled his travel plans and went to Geneva, presumably to be there to announce the historic deal.
Additionally, the negotiations were, quite literally, in a race against time, as hardliners in Congress, Israel, and back in Iran tried to derail any possible deal.
But France, strangely enough, beat them to it. And it may be terribly consequential, running the risk of putting the U.S. back on the war path to Tehran. As Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told FP, ”if months from now diplomacy has fallen apart and conflict appears more likely, the French could go down in infamy.”
This earned France some unlikely admirers in the two most militant figures in the U.S. Senate: Lindsey Graham told CNN “Thank God for France,” and John McCain tweeted the following.
“Fault is immaterial,” insisted State Dept spokeswoman Jen Psaki, who insisted the talks are simply a “complicated” issue that are going to take awhile to sort out.
With both houses of Congress shaping up to be the battleground for this debate, the House leadership still seems largely in favor of imposing new sanctions, with Rep. Mike Coffman (R – CO) expressing “deep concern” about diplomacy in general and seeing its sabotage as a net positive.
“If there is some agreement between the P5+1 and Iran and if we are requested to implement some verification measures, we are prepared to implement them,” Amano insisted.
Most of the fighting is stalemated, but the most recent territorial gains have been from Kurdish militias, which have ousted al-Qaeda
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