TPM prints the AP wire report on the backstory to last night's nuclear deal with Iran. Secret talks with Iran have been ongoing for at least a year, long before the more moderate Rouhani administration was elected last summer. Also, the key player promoting the talks, in the AP version of events, was President Obama himself, following the initiative laid out in his initial inaugural address nearly six years ago now.
The AP defines the stakes of the deal here:
The diplomatic gamble with Iran, if the interim agreement holds up and leads to a final pact preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, could avert years of threats of U.S. or Israeli military intervention. It could also prove a turning point in decades of hostility between Washington and Tehran -- and become a crowning foreign policy achievement of Obama's presidency.
But if the deal collapses, or if Iran covertly races ahead with development of a nuclear weapon, Obama will face the consequences of failure, both at home and abroad. His gamble opens him to criticism that he has left Israel vulnerable to a country bent on its destruction and that he has made a deal with a state sponsor of terrorism.
Given the timeline of secret Iranian-US negotiations and the closeness of the Assad regime in Syria to its Iranian allies, one also needs to wonder if the budding Washington-Tehran axis might not have played a role in Syria's sudden and momentous decision to abandon its chemical weapons program. Obama skeptics abound, but with the progress in Syria and the promise of the Iranian nuclear deal the Middle East is being reshaped before our eyes. And at the same time, Obama and Kerry are pressing Israel,
hard, to finally strike peace with the Palestinians.
Follow me over the Persian fleur de lis for the details on how the deal was struck
The AP reporters note that the Obama administration reached out to Iran shortly after the inauguration in 2009, but were rebuffed by the hardline Ahmadinejad administration in Tehran. However, the kidnapping of three American hikers, who had inadvertently crossed the Iranian-Iraqi border in 2009, led to the opening of diplomatic channels between Iran and the US. These discussions, which finally led to the release of all three hikers in 2011, were facilitated through the offices of the Sultan of Oman, and once they were completed Oman offered to continue sponsoring ongoing talks in the hopes of reaching a rapprochement between Washington and Tehran. Then UN Ambassador Susan Rice took part in these early rounds of conversations, with the Iranian UN Ambassador participating on the other side.
The secret contacts took on new shape about eight months ago, when Obama sent high-level officials, including Deputy Secretary of State William Burns and Jake Sullivan, a foreign policy advisor to Joe Biden, to meet with an equally high ranking delegation of Iranians in Muscat, Oman. The group of six had sustained its first round of public negotiations with Iran shortly before, and Obama apparently wanted to see if less public talks might prove fruitful in demonstrating both resolve and good intentions. Burns and Sullivan arrived in Oman in March, and when they met with the Iranians (the AP is not clear on when the meeting actually took place), the discussions also included Iranian-Syrian relations, Iranian threats to close the Strait of Hormuz, and the status of an FBI agent believed to be in Iranian custody. Secretary of State John Kerry met with Iranians in Oman in May, and then the election of Rouhani in June opened the possibility of real progress in the talks.
There were two meetings in August and another two in October between high level American and Iranian teams, with Burns, Sullivan, and US nuclear negotiator Wendy Sherman taking part on the US side. The August talks contributed to the Rouhani-Obama conversation by phone during the UN meeting in September, a historic moment that represented the first such communication between an Iranian and an American leader since the Iranian Revolution in 1979. US allies, including both Israel and the other members of the P5+1, were only informed of the US-Iranian talks after the Rouhani-Obama phone conversation.
According to the AP, the agreement reached last night closely follows the deal outlined by the US and Iranian secret negotiators.
As we assess the significance of these events, it is worth remembering that regime change in Iran has been a long term goal for the foreign policy right wing in the United States for many years now. Some analyses of the 2003 Iraq War, in fact, point to a neo-conservative strategic vision of a post-war Iraqi ally willing to serve as a military staging ground for such efforts as a major factor behind launching the war.
Israel, as we all know, is livid that the US is making a deal with Iran. The Israeli right fears, rightly so, that it will now find itself under greater and more effective international pressure to reach a viable and sustainable peace agreement with the Palestinians. Such a deal would mean Israel finally giving up its pretensions to make permanent its occupation of the most livable sections of the West Bank, which the settler movement has been working so hard to achieve.
In other words, this deal, if it works, could finally remove two major stumbling blocks to peaceful interaction in one of the most volatile regions of the world. If he pulls this off, Barack Obama will have truly earned his Nobel Peace Prize.
