Imam Sayyed Ali Khamenei has backed the negotiations over Iran's nuclear program—so far.
Despite the gloom that some unnamed insiders say has permeated the multilateral negotiations over Iran's nuclear program in the past few days, the odds that a preliminary agreement will be reached seem to have improved in the past 24 hours. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov left the talks to go to Moscow Monday, saying he would return Tuesday if a deal appeared close. And he's back now, saying prospects are "very good" a deal will be agreed to. Still, key differences must be resolved.
The objective is to keep Iran from building a nuclear weapon. That's something Iran said it's not doing and not interested in doing. But it is widely distrusted in the matter. Short of actually stopping it from building an A-Bomb via close monitoring of its facilities, negotiators want to devise an agreement that makes it unlikely Iran could build one more quickly than within one year. That would provide enough warning time for the U.S. and others to take action against Iran, presumably including military action.
The supposed deadline for producing a preliminary agreement with Iran is just hours away. Midnight in Switzerland, 3 PM PT. But if that deadline passes without an agreement being reached, it may not be quite as big a deal as it has been depicted by some heavyweight U.S. media.
For one thing, all the other nations engaged in negotiations—Britain, Germany, France, Russia, China and Iran itself—don't view the deadline as important as the 15-member U.S. negotiating team led by Secretary of State John Kerry does. Although congressional foes of anything other than outright capitulation by Iran might use a missed deadline as a catalyst for passing legislation sabotaging an agreement—say, by passing new sanctions—Congress is in recess until April 13. That provides nearly two extra weeks for negotiators to achieve a breakthrough that would satisfy enough members of Congress to support an agreement.
Even if no deal verifiably restricting Iran's nuclear program is sketched out by tonight, or even by April 13, talks are almost certain to continue because the deadline for signing a full agreement is June 30. That's the expiration date of the interim deal under which the negotiations are taking place. That deal has temporarily relieved some U.N. economic sanctions on Iran in exchange for freezing its nuclear program while talks are underway.
Nonetheless, failure tonight to announce that a firm deal on at least some key points has been reached would certainly generate gloom. For without an agreement, the only two options being publicly mentioned are tougher sanctions or military action.
Hardliners in Iran and the United States don't want a deal. Leaders of Israel, the only nation in the Middle East already to have nuclear weapons—wants only a deal in which Iran completely gives up its ability to concentrate any uranium, something Tehran is adamantly opposed to. In the past two weeks bombbombbomb op-eds have been published in The Washington Post and The New York Times from two leading neoconservatives who have long sought to take military action against Iran—Joshua Muravchik and the notorious superhawk John Bolton.
Follow me below the fold to see the major issues still to be resolved.
Insider reports over the past couple of months have focused on how many uranium-concentrating centrifuges Iran would be allowed to keep operational—6,000 being most likely—on how much research and development Iran would be allowed to continue under the agreement, on the configuring of the not-yet-online Arak research reactor that could produce enough plutonium for one or two A-Bombs each year, on getting Iran to explain exactly what its alleged nuclear weapons work prior to 2003 was about and on PMDs—"possible military dimensions" of its nuclear program.
Apparently, most of those issues are now resolved or close enough so that details can be worked out by June 30.
Negotiators are said to still be working on removing several stumbling blocks to a preliminary agreement:
• Iran wants the economic sanctions that have weakened its economy to be lifted as soon as a full agreement on its nuclear program is signed. The five permanent U.N. Security Council members—all of them with nuclear weapons of their own—and Germany (known as the P5+1) want them to be phased out as Iran proves it is complying with the other terms of the deal. Iran's Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, is apparently adamant that all sanctions be lifted at once in return for Iranian acceptance of restrictions on its nuclear programme over a period of at least 10 years.
As Gareth Porter reported last week, the Iranian leadership fears that if the sanctions are only phased out, investors will continue to shy away from Iran until the situation is more amenable to their financial involvement.
• The P5+1 seek to limit Iran's nuclear activities for 10 years after which these restrictions would be removed gradually over the next five years. Iran wants all limits off after 10 years.
• The U.S., Germany, France and Britain want the agreement to include a set-up that allows for immediate, automatic reimposition of sanctions if Iran is found to be out of compliance.
• Iran wants to be able to continue developing advanced centrifuges to replace the ones using 40-year-old technology that it currently spins. The more advanced centrifuges are faster and can more efficiently concentrate uranium. That's a concern of the P5+1 negotiators because it would mean that Iran might be able to accumulate a stockpile of highly enriched uranium allowing it to shorten the "breakout" period for building a nuclear weapon to less than a year.
• While the talks seem to have settled on a maximum of 6,000 centrifuges, a key question is how many would be allowed to spin at Fordow, a fortified and once-secret underground facility. Negotiators have discussed allowing a few hundred of the Fordow centrifuges to operate and then only to concentrate zinc, xenon or germanium to generate isotopes used in medicine, industry or science. None of these could be used to make a weapon.
Many other questions remain.
What will the Israelis do if they feel Iran has been given too much slack? Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has recently said the outline of an agreement as reported is even worse than what he thought when he gave his speech to a joint session of Congress earlier this year.
What will the Saudis do if they feel the agreement gives too much to Iran? Will they opt out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and pursue nukes of their own, perhaps buying some from Pakistan? The Saudis, leading a nine-nation coalition, are already attacking Iranian-backed Zaidi Shia rebels in Yemen. This is the newest element in the chaos of proxy wars that has enveloped much of the Middle East, partly a product of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq that began 12 years ago this month.
How will Congress react? All but a handful of Senate Republicans are determined to undermine any agreement that is acceptable to Iran. Several leading Democrats have joined them.
And how will the Iranian leadership react? Jon Queally reported Monday on the views of Trita Parsi, president of the National American Iranian Council:
Parsi argued, the Iranians have been "accepting the demands the U.S. has asked of them. What they have not accepted is what the U.S. is offering in turn." However, he said, the Iranians—including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—actually do want an agreement to succeed. He explained:
I think what has been widely misunderstood in the U.S. in particular is that there’s been this belief that the supreme leader is an ideological opponent to a deal with the U.S. He is a skeptic without a doubt, but, part of the reason that I think he’s looking favorably towards a deal that he can live with right now is that it will be the first time in 200 years that the Iranians have had a major dispute with the West or the great powers and that it ended up with a negotiation in which the Iranians did not lose; it doesn’t mean that the U.S. lost. What he meant that Iran has managed to get the other great powers to the negotiating table and the end result is a mutual compromise rather than Iranian capitulation. That is, frankly, a first for any country in the Middle East.