Many years ago, the writer’s grandfather gave him a lesson about labour contract negotiations from the perspective of a long-time union official. The older man’s early experiences in that world had come about at a time when standard management tools – if a strike or union organising drive seemed on the brink of success – could include hiring scab labour or even a private security force – “goons” – armed with truncheons and axe handles. Eventually, however, his union became recognised and many of the worksites became union shops that fell under regularised industry-wide contracts. By that point, the union participated in the ritualised biannual contract negotiation.

In dealing with “the suits” from management, one tactic he and his colleagues found very useful was to go into the actual contract negotiation meetings wearing suits and shirts they had already been wearing for a day or so, often with some carefully placed food stains or dirt smudges on the material – on that white shirt or even right on a necktie. The point, of course, was to signal that this was business and that they didn’t care how long it took to get to the conclusion of the negotiations. If that meant they would be a bit of a sartorial mess when they finally emerged contract in hand, well, so be it. This was in sharp contrast to the company guys who showed up all smart and tidy at the beginning, and who would then become increasingly irritable, uncomfortable and interested in just getting out of the negotiations while the talks dragged on and on, all through the night, and then on into the next day – or even beyond.

This image came to mind when reports of the final days of the P5+1/Iran negotiations (P5 for the US, UK, Germany, China, Russia and France) for the preliminary agreement (it is still a stretch to call it a treaty since there is, as yet, no agreed-upon text) began surfacing. There were stories of diplomatic all-nighters, discarded, half-eaten meals left on the floor of the conference room in that swanky Lausanne, Switzerland hotel, and increasingly dishevelled negotiators talking across the table in increasingly bleary relays, all through the night. And there was image of Wendy Sherman, the US’ chief negotiator, being trailed around the hotel by a bedraggled staffer carrying a portable white board on which had been scribbled wording for those constantly morphing points still under discussion, for those finally agreed to, as well for as the different, mutually clashing proposed provisions.

The untidy, very ad hoc-ness of this negotiation (akin to the mid-point of those long-ago labour management contract negotiations), however, paradoxically offers some hope the agreement will be refined, slowly, bit by bit in the coming weeks, until the next check point at the end of June when everything is supposed to be nailed down between the two sides. This very ad hoc quality means there remains much wiggle room. And there is still some significant space for disagreements and ambiguities that will need to be refereed, once the process moves further along, or as the inspections now called for by the preliminary agreement actually begin to take place so as to ensure compliance with what finally ends up being signed by the parties.

As now announced, the agreement covers a wide range of elements, all designed to restrict the ability of Iran to process Uranium up to weapons grade, to provide inspections of the continuing operation of its various nuclear facilities, and to provide a mechanism by which western economic sanctions now in effect against Iran fall away (or at least go dormant). According to press reports, such as appeared in the AP, the agreement covers the following:

ENRICHMENT

Centrifuges can still be used to enrich uranium to levels ranging from uses in energy, medicine and science to weapons-grade used in nuclear warheads. Iran says it is enriching only for peaceful purposes and now has nearly 20,000 of the machines set up at Natanz, its main site, with almost 10,000 enriching.

The June deal aims at restricting the number of centrifuges standing to 6,104, and those running to 5,060. All will be mainstay IR-1- models, Iran’s present workhorse, which enriches at much lower rates that the more developed machines Tehran would like to install.

Iran has committed to enriching uranium substantially below weapons-grade and to reduce its enriched uranium stockpile from about five tons to 300 kilograms (less than 700 pounds) for 15 years.

BREAKOUT TIME

Experts assess Iran’s current breakout time — the time it could enrich enough uranium for one weapon — at two to three months. That timeline will be extended to at least a year for at least 10 years, according to a fact sheet on the commitments, which does not detail how that will be accomplished beyond reducing uranium numbers and stockpiles.

UNDERGROUND ENRICHMENT FACILITY

The Fordo enrichment facility is dug deep into a mountainside and is thought impervious to air attack — an option neither the United States nor Israel has ruled out should diplomatic efforts to contain Tehran’s atomic assets fail. Iran commits not to enrich uranium there for at least 15 years and will convert the site into a nuclear physics and technology research centre.

It also commits Tehran not to do uranium enrichment-related research and development or store fissile material at Fordo for 15 years.

Centrifuges will still run at Fordo — one Western official told The Associated Press that almost 1,000 of the machines will be spinning. But they will not enrich uranium. Instead, the official said, they will produce isotopes for medical, industrial and research uses.

TRANSPARENCY

The U.N’s International Atomic Energy Agency will monitor enrichment and former enrichment facilities and related assets using ‘the most up-to-date, modern monitoring technologies.’ Iran also agrees to implement an agreement with the IAEA giving the agency ‘much greater access and information regarding Iran’s nuclear program, including both declared and (possible) undeclared facilities,’ than it has now.

Tehran also commits to address IAEA suspicions that it worked in the past on nuclear arms under terms still to be agreed on. The agency has essentially been stalemated in trying to follow up those suspicions for years.

REACTORS AND REPROCESSING

Thursday’s preliminary agreement commits Iran to redesign its nearly-built reactor at Arak from a facility that would spew out enough plutonium to arm several nuclear weapons a year to a type that will not produce such material.

It also agrees to ship all spent fuel — which contains some fissile material — for the reactor’s lifetime.

SANCTIONS

U.S. and European Union nuclear-related sanctions will be suspended after the IAEA has verified that Iran is hewing to its commitments. If at any time Iran fails to fulfil its commitments, these sanctions will snap back into place.

All past UN Security Council resolutions on the Iran nuclear issue will be lifted simultaneously with Iran’s compliance with its commitments at Fordo, Arak, its implementation of agreed-on transparency and honouring other responsibilities.

UN Security Council resolutions dealing with the transfer of sensitive technologies to Iran will be reworked to allow a procurement channel for some now restricted goods. The resolutions also will endorse any final agreement and urge its full implementation.

American negotiators and others were quick to point that these features of the tentative agreement would not eliminate the possibility of Iran ever achieving what was called “break out status”. As several have said, even a military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities would not be able to erase the knowledge of how to do this. Rather, the agreement would push any such a possibility well down the road – in what the deal’s critics dismissed as merely kicking the can down the road. This would prevent an Iranian nuclear weapon from being developed in a matter of months to something that would require several years to be accomplished, per the best estimates of briefers, advisors and scientists.

Still, various naysayers about the nascent agreement quickly began their criticism of what was in the agreement. Pre-eminently, the Israeli government started out insisting it was a thoroughly bad instrument that would threaten its national security, and began to utter discreet rumblings about the need for a military solution if things go on as they are now.

However, a few days after the negotiations came to the pause, the Israelis began to modify their tack somewhat, instead coming forward with statements that while they were not opposed to an agreement, rather, they stood against what in their view were the deficiencies in the tentative handshake between the P5+1 and Iran. Most specifically, they were in disagreement with the idea that under the agreement the Iranians could continue to operate some of their Uranium separation centrifuges, thereby continuing to build up stocks of concentrated fissile material – and thus theoretically still putting Iran in a position of being able to bang together a nuclear device in a three months or so.

Instead of a simple, emphatic “No!” to the proposed agreement, the Israelis began to issue increasingly detailed ideas of how to alter the agreement to make it more to their liking. Even as these comments were being issued, some Israeli commentators were also warning that continued, strenuous objections to the tentative agreement might well make legitimate Israeli concerns increasingly irrelevant to the future, at the negotiations coming up, on the grounds that since the Israelis would seen to be perpetual nay-sayers anyway, there would be little point in trying to take their concerns under advisement during the negotiations. As Haaretz commented, “It was Elie Wiesel, one of Benjamin Netanyahu’s great admirers, who once said, in another context: ‘The opposite of love isn’t hate. It’s indifference’. This is the emerging nature of the prime minister’s current relations with the Obama administration and with liberal public opinion in America: instead of sparking anger, Netanyahu is being increasingly ignored….”

In tandem with many of the Israeli objections, the Republican-controlled Senate has been firing its own warning shots over the proposed agreement. On the one hand, many Republicans, led by Tennessee Senator Bob Corker (the new chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee) and some Democrats have been concerned that the agreement, once it is finished, must be thoroughly debated in the Senate and then treated as a regular treaty – thus making it an agreement where the Senate must exercise its power to “advise and consent”, per the American Constitution. Moreover, other senatorial concerns centred on the way economic sanctions would presumably be handled (especially since the Iranian commentary suggested that they saw the sanctions falling away the moment the agreement came into force) – and that they represented the real carrot in the deal that should not be lightly given away to Iran.

Leading Republican Senator Lindsey Graham even chose to argue that Hillary Clinton could get a better nuclear deal with Iran than President Barack Obama has been able to do. As was reported in the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, Graham said on one of the Sunday news TV discussion shows, “‘The best deal, I think, comes with a new president,’ Graham said in an interview on CBS’ Face the Nation program. ‘Hillary Clinton would do better. I think everybody on our side, except maybe Rand Paul, could do better.’ ”

Many senators, in their comments, were also concerned about the impact of Iranian capabilities (and especially the possibility of cheating) that could further destabilise the military balance in the region between, say, Iran and Saudi Arabia, as well as Iran and Israel. The most pessimistic argue that the failure of this accord could easily provoke the Saudis to embark on their own nuclear weapons development program to counterbalance a re-energised Iranian one.

All of these concerns by Israel and of some in the US – and the consequent difficulties President Obama may face over the deal with the Senate and Republicans – somewhat masked the question of how Iranian President Hassan Rouhani would be able to hold up his end of the deal with those in his own country who objected to giving way on the centrifuges, the inspections, and those limitations on the holding of fissile material. At the same time, some analysts and observers were arguing that the domestic pressures for the benefits from the relaxation of sanctions would help keep Iran in compliance with the deal – and that such benefits would even more fundamentally change the dynamic of Iran domestically over the duration of this planned agreement.

But, of course, the P5+1/Iranian nuclear agreement is just a part of the larger security environment of the region. In a way, of course, it is easy to say the current circumstances are significantly a consequence of the hubris of the Bush/Cheney administration in its 2003 Iraq invasion that broke Saddam Hussein’s regime. That action eventually unleashed the chaos in Iraq that ultimately led to the rise of IS, the further civil strife in Syria, and also helped strengthen Iranian involvement in civil strife in Syria, Yemen and support for Hamas and Hezbollah. All of that may well be true, but it is also the case that some of these very same circumstances have their antecedents rather further into history.

Source: The Economist

In Yemen, the virtual collapse of the US supporting, western-leaning government and its overrunning by the Houthi militia from their mountain strongholds has put the Iranians on a collision course with Saudi Arabia. The Iranians have been supporting the Houthis (a variant Shiia sect) while the Saudis have opposed them, backed the former government and finally begun carrying out bombing runs on Houthi forces and their strong points. In the midst of that, a humanitarian crisis has taken hold and al Qaeda prisoners, formerly in jail, have apparently made their escapes from their incarceration as well. Yemen, of course, was the scene for another proxy war a half century ago when Saudi forces battled Egyptian-backed rebels in the 1960s. Interestingly, or ominously, the Saudis have been calling upon Pakistan for further military support, adding a broader regional dimension to the conflict in Yemen. (And Pakistan, it might be remembered is already a nuclear power.)

Meanwhile, in the rubble of much of what is Iraq, IS, the largely Sunni populated, heavily armed, marauding force, has been able to maintain control of major chunks of that country as well as Syria. In the case of Iraqi territory, the largely Shia-supported Iraqi central government, together with US support (among others) and Iranian help is trying to wrest control back from IS. In Syria, meanwhile, IS is in a triangular struggle. The largely Alawite (another sect similar to Shia Islam) Syrian government is fighting against various rebel groups as well as IS, even as it also continues to receive backing from Iran. And, of course, Iran maintains close relations with Hezbollah and Hamas, two groups locked in a struggle with the Israelis.

Given the place of Iran in the Middle East, looked at from the tangle of these power relationships and conflicts and from the perspective of Israel, Iran’s apparent efforts to achieve nuclear weapons capabilities is simply one part of a larger strategy to reach a position of regional military and political hegemony. That circumstance would represent a profoundly unhappy future from the Israeli and Saudi point of view, as well as those of the other conservative regimes along the Persian Gulf and Egypt. And that, in turn, helps explain the military actions of the Saudis, as well as the profound discomfort of the Israelis towards the Iranian agreement, even if the Israelis have not engaged in any direct military actions against Iranian activities. (Of course they carried out their attacks in Gaza last year, hoping to degrade the military capacities of Hamas irregular fighters – and Hamas continues to be aided by Iran.)

But, stepping further back from this, while the P5+1 nations would not take pleasure in any such outcome that so starkly favours the Iranians, were it to come to pass, their responses in large measure have been based on a somewhat different dynamic. Instead of directly confronting Iran, they have been striving to blunt Iranian nuclear ambitions – and simultaneously find tacit, below-the-radar ways to cooperate with the Iranians in dealing with a common enemy like IS, but without having to say as much internationally and formally.

The goal here would seem to be increasingly enmeshing Iran in a larger network of cooperation – from the nuclear to the restoration of a semblance of a regional power balance. The great fear for the Obama administration, therefore, is that the continuation of these hostilities would in fact be the very things most likely to ensure the success of Iran’s achievement of an effective regional hegemony, both through its own direct actions against IS and through those of its clients and allies.

Or, as the AP described the challenges, “On a basic level, the framework deal between world powers and Tehran will be judged by whether it prevents an Iranian bomb, but that will take years to figure out. A more immediate issue is the projection of Western power. Supporters of the framework deal can argue that the U.S. and world powers extracted significant concessions from Iran, breaking a decade-long impasse and proving that diplomacy backed by tough sanctions can bring about positive change even in the Middle East.

“But if, as critics contend, the agreement ends up projecting U.S. weakness instead, that could embolden rogue states and extremists alike, and make the region’s vast array of challenges – from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Syrian civil war to the fighting in Libya and Yemen – even more impervious to Western intervention.

“The United States wants to rein in Syria’s President Bashar Assad as his ruinous civil war grinds into year five. It would like to encourage more liberal domestic policies in Egypt and push Iraq’s leaders to govern more inclusively. Despite years of setbacks, the U.S. would still like to see a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

And, as The Economist described these challenges, coming down editorially, ultimately on the side of the agreement, “A less hostile interpretation of Mr Obama’s actions is possible, and more persuasive. Mr Obama was elected promising to reduce America’s role in the Middle East, and sees no evidence that changing tack would actually do much good. Thus his decision to withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan; his ‘lead from behind’ policy in Libya in 2011; and his reluctance to strike Syria in 2013 without congressional approval.

“When he has acted, it has been to stave off disaster at minimum cost. So he ordered air strikes, with a small ground presence, to halt the march of IS when it seemed Baghdad might fall. And he has come close to a deal that may substantially delay, but will not necessarily halt, Iran’s nuclear ambition. By supporting the Saudis in Yemen, he proves that he is not beholden to Iran.

“On this analysis the blame for Iran’s increased power goes not to Mr Obama’s caution, but to his predecessor’s toppling of Saddam and the Taliban with insufficient thought of the consequences. Gary Samore, a former Obama administration nuclear negotiator, reckons that Mr Obama’s strategy is ‘a reflection of the crazy, mixed-up Middle East. He is trying to muddle through a mess of unresolvable problems, most of which are the consequence of the Arab spring.’ Unwilling to commit troops, the only option is ‘to let them fight it out, and occasionally place his thumbs on the scale.’ Now that Iran is fighting IS, and Saudi Arabia the Houthis, Mr Obama’s attempt to let the countries of the region deal with their problems might seem vindicated—though it condemns many to untold violence which may well turn against America, or its interests.”

The next three months – when the actual agreement must be hammered out in precise, finicky detail, with all the “t’s” crossed, “i’s” dotted, and every technical determination exhaustively examined by teams of nuclear scientists and intelligence specialists – will be crucial. If the agreement is effectively defined and is enforceable to the satisfaction of the specialists; and if Iranian President Hassan Rouhani can sell it to his country and President Barack Obama can convince a recalcitrant Senate where a number of its members are already gearing up for the next presidential race, it will represent a major win. Moreover, if the Israelis, the Saudis and others can be convinced to put away their most serious doubts and offer grudging support for the agreement; if the roll-back of economic sanctions can bolster support in Iran for more engagement and less hostility; and, if the agreement becomes a signpost towards sorting out some of the other regional conflicts, then Barack Obama might ultimately gain the accolades of being the peacemaker that he so obviously seeks. And if, just by the way, the rapprochement with Cuba similarly puts an end to still another long-running conflict for America, 2015 could conceivably be a good year for American diplomacy – as well as for the others involved in the Middle East. DM

Photo: (L-R), European Union High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Federica Mogherini, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, an unidentified Russian official, British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond and US Secretary of State John Kerry arrive during a press event after the end of a new round of Nuclear Iran Talks in the Learning Center at the Swiss federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), in Lausanne, Switzerland, 02 April 2015. EPA/LAURENT GILLIERON

Read more:

• G.O.P. Senator, Bob Corker, Is Key Player in Iran Accord in the New York Times;
• Saudis Ask Pakistan to Join the Fight in Yemen in the New York Times;
• Analysis: Nuclear agreement risks projecting US weakness at the AP;
• United States Embassy, Tehran — A Hermetic Iranian Nuclear Deal Is Unlikely, a column by Roger Cohen in the New York Times;
• Israel Suggests Ways to Make Iran Nuclear Deal ‘More Reasonable’ in the New York Times;
• The Most Troubling Line in Obama’s NYT Interview, a column by Michael Rubin in Commentary;
• The Damnable Consequences of America’s Cooperation with Iran in Iraq, a column by Max Boot in Commentary;
• Israel official: Military action against Iran still possible at the AP;
• Outline of Iran Nuclear Deal Sounds Different From Each Side in the New York Times;
• Corker: Congress must play ‘rightful role’ in Iran deal in the Washington Post;
• The Obama Doctrine and Iran, an interview with Barack Obama by Tom Friedman in the New York Times;
• Bargaining with the Great Satan – The consequences of the agreement on Iran’s nuclear programme for a Middle East in turmoil at the Economist;
• Bibi: ‘Still time to get a better deal’ with Iran at Politico.com;
• White House looks to scientists to sell Iran deal – Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz has emerged as the face of the push at Politico.com;
• Hillary Clinton would have gotten a better deal with Iran, says Sen. Lindsey Graham at Haaretz;
• Marathon Iran nuclear talks yield a milestone agreement — but the deal is not yet done at the Brookings Institution;
• Yemen Melts Down: Is There a Solution? At the Wilson Center;
• The interim Iran nuclear deal is worth celebrating, but it’s just a small piece of a much bigger puzzle at Foreign Policy;
• Swing Democrats on Iran bill: ‘Yes, but’ at Politico.com;
• Netanyahu faces new danger in U.S. following Iran deal: Being ignored at Haaretz;
• Iran’s Leaders Fall Into Line Behind Nuclear Accord in the New York Times;
• Outline of Iran Nuclear Deal Sounds Different From Each Side at the New York Times;
• A glance at commitments under preliminary Iran nuke deal at the AP;
• The unfolding farce of Obama’s deal with Iran, a column by David Horowitz at the Times of Israel.