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Why The Deal With Iran Needs To Stick

05.08.2015 11:12

As the US and Iranian leadership work to sell their nuclear deal at home, Israel's leadership is set on sabotaging the agreement.Nobody ever expected the Israeli leadership to like the deal. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been against the deal since the beginning, labeling it a mistake.

As the US and Iranian leadership work to sell their nuclear deal at home, Israel's leadership is set on sabotaging the agreement.
Nobody ever expected the Israeli leadership to like the deal. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been against the deal since the beginning, labeling it a mistake of historic proportion. However, as Britain's Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond recently stated, there is no deal with Iran that Israel would like. While the deal does have some flaws, such as the prolonged waiting period before inspectors can enter certain sites, more broadly it is a comprehensive accord and I personally support it and believe it will help bring greater security and stability to the region.
Israel does have genuine security concerns which have been clearly recognized by the international community, in particular the US, and the deal is not going to make Iran any friendlier to Israel, as least in the short term. However, at the same time, for the last 25 years Israel has pressed the US to maintain a policy of containment over Iran, but this policy has not stopped Iran from developing its nuclear program.
Furthermore the reasons for Netanyahu's opposition to the deal go far beyond Iran's nuclear program. Israel fears the return of Iran to the global community. What will this mean for the balance of power in the region, which is certainly going to change, and what would increased cooperation between the US and Iran mean for Israel's relationship with Washington? Yet claims about Iran becoming a regional policeman and the possibility of Washington abandoning Jerusalem are exaggerated.
Several former Israeli security figures have stated that things could be much worse. Maj. Gen. Israel Ziv, the former head of the Israeli Army's Operations Directorate branch, wrote in an op-ed for Ynetnews.com that “there is no one in Israel who thinks the nuclear agreement is a good agreement, but the discussion should not focus on that…because this agreement is the best among all other alternatives, and any military strike -- as successful as it may be -- would not have delayed even 20 percent of what the agreement will delay, not to mention the risk of another flare-up with Hezbollah, which an operation against Iran would have generated. The agreement is an established fact, and it's not particularly bad as far as Israel is concerned.”
It is no secret that Netanyahu's relationship with US President Barack Obama is the worst that any Israeli leader has had with a US president, and his current behavior will bring about a further deterioration. As Reza Marashi from the National Iranian American Council wrote earlier this week, “no regional power -- Israel included -- can balance and contain Iran without US support, and America is no longer willing to pay the increasingly costly price that is required to keep Israel's preferred policy of containment in place.” By pursing this policy Netanyahu is leading his country towards a dead-end, which ultimately risks Israel becoming isolated.
In their deliberation over whether or not to support the nuclear deal, the US Congress needs to think carefully about the implications of what will happen if it kills the deal and understand how killing the deal will almost certainly create a far more dangerous situation. Killing the deal will be a significant blow to the US's global political and diplomatic clout and national security; the international will for tough sanctions will evaporate; the EU, which has already begun the process of suspending sanctions, will likely stick to the agreement. Other countries in the region, including Russia, India and Turkey, will blame the new crisis on the US and also lift sanctions.
For sanctions to be successful they require wide multilateral support. Furthermore, Iran's leadership has already stated that if the deal is usurped they will continue their nuclear program more robustly than now. Moreover, it will probably be the end of the road for the country's moderates with the hard-liners striking President Hassan Rouhani and his team, which may see them finished. As Suzanne Nossel recently wrote in Foreign Policy, “The only thing worse than a nuclear-armed Iran may be an Iran that can claim the moral high-ground vis-à-vis a United States that turned down a deal the rest of the world -- and its own president -- thought was fair.”

AMANDA PAUL (Cihan/Today's Zaman)



 
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