March 29, 2024

What Would You Do?

July 30, 2015

Apparently the deal hammered out to slow down Iran’s nuclear weapons program was a terrible mistake for which Barack Obama is to blame.

In a none-too-shocking development, all 16 Republican presidential candidates have roundly criticized the agreement as feckless, reckless and a death knell for Israel. Mike Huckabee, low single-digits in the polls and desperate for attention, went so far as to declare Obama was leading Israelis "to the door of the oven."

One hardly knows where to begin so let’s start with the obvious: this isn’t "Obama’s deal." The agreement with Iran was cobbled together by negotiators from the so-called P5+1, the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council – the U.S., United Kingdom, France, China, Russia and Germany.

None of them have any particular reason to want Iran to become a nuclear power, further destabilizing an already out-of-control part of the world.

What does the deal actually do? The idea is to slow down or stop Iran’s ability to create a nuclear weapon. How will it do that?

Uranium ore, from which enriched uranium is born and plutonium can be created, must be purified in a process using centrifuges, and lots of them. Iran has agreed to reduce its number of centrifuges by half.

Typical nuclear fuel is enriched to about 5 percent. Modern nuclear weapons use uranium enriched to nearly 90 percent. Iran has agreed to limit their enriched uranium to less than 4 percent purity.

Of course, even stockpiles of low-enriched uranium can be further enriched to weapons-grade level. Iran has agreed to reduce their stockpiles of low-enriched uranium by 98 percent, below the level that could be weaponized.

Nuclear weapons can also be made with plutonium, most commonly created as a waste product in some types of nuclear reactors, including the heavy water plant being constructed by Iran. They have agreed to reconstruct the plant so it will not produce plutonium, and all waste products from the reactor will be shipped out of the country.

They’ve agreed to virtually unlimited inspections. And they’ve agreed that should they violate any of the terms of the agreement, economic sanctions will immediately return in force.

Will Iran live up to all of that? Maybe not. They are notorious deal-breakers run by a radical religious cabal not known for getting along with others. They have made the destruction of Israel a keystone of their government, and foment regional terrorism as a matter of course.

The real problem here is the lack of alternatives. Should we continue economic sanctions, hurting regular Iranians and making their day-to-day lives more difficult but with little impact on the government? Destroy their nuclear program militarily?

Republicans were quick to howl in protest yet none have come up with a reasonable alternative. Declaring what we "should" have made Iran agree to is just daffy. Those who believe we can simply force other countries to do what we want simply because we say so are living in a world that has not existed for a long time.

Some keep prattling on about a military solution, another adventure against yet another country in the Middle East where we’ve had, well, limited military success.

The current argument is we’ll just take out the places where they are doing all of this nuclear monkey business and then be on our way.

Iran’s land area is 50 percent bigger and their population more than Iraq and Afghanistan combined. They have about 500,000 active military personnel and an actual air force. The notion that we can accurately identify targets – our intelligence, or our interpretation of it, had better be much better than it was in Iraq – and then send our missiles and bombs dancing gaily through their airspace without consequence is preposterous.

The militarist wing of the GOP, which has also suggested bombing Libya, Syria and the Iraqi oil fields, is actually advocating another full-blown military adventure. There would be no other way to accomplish the mission. And this wouldn’t be chasing somebody out of a place where they don’t belong as we did to the Iraqis in Kuwait or the Taliban in Afghanistan. These would be people defending their own country. It wouldn’t be at all simple.

We’re left with a deal no one loves and many hate, with an untrustworthy and unreliable partner. At best, it could at least slow down the Iranians nuclear program while affording them the chance to end their role as the world’s perpetual pariah state.

The deal is a high-risk gamble. But the only alternative thus far discussed is another military escapade in the Middle East, with its attendant expenditure of blood and treasure.

So take a chance on the Iranians or start bombing? It’s your call. What would you do?

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