by Jasmin Ramsey
In a letter today, a bipartisan group of senior foreign policy luminaries urged senators not to pass new sanctions against Iran, warning that additional sanctions would jeopardize ongoing diplomatic efforts and potentially move the U.S. closer to war. The letter’s nine signers include Ryan Crocker, former [...]]]>
by Jasmin Ramsey
In a letter today, a bipartisan group of senior foreign policy luminaries urged senators not to pass new sanctions against Iran, warning that additional sanctions would jeopardize ongoing diplomatic efforts and potentially move the U.S. closer to war. The letter’s nine signers include Ryan Crocker, former Ambassador to Iraq and Afghanistan, Daniel Kurtzer, former Ambassador to Israel and Thomas R. Pickering, former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, and former Ambassador to Israel, India Jordan, Russia and the United Nations. Last week another former official and prominent expert, Colin Kahl, who who served as the top Middle East policy official at the Defence Department for most of President Obama’s first term, provided an in-depth explanation for why new sanctions now will seriously endanger the diplomatic process with Iran.
The letter was delivered to the co-sponsors of the Nuclear Weapon Free Act of 2013 introduced by Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL). The bill would add more sanctions on Iran and purchasers of its oil as well as position the U.S. to support Israel militarily, economically and diplomatically if they choose to take military action against Iran. The full letter is reprinted below.
Chairman Robert Menendez
United States Senate
522 Hart Senate Office Bldg
Washington, DC 20510
January 6, 2014
Dear Chairman Menendez,
We ask you and the other cosponsors of the Menendez/Kirk bill, S. 1881, to review carefully whether that legislation serves U.S. national interests and those of our friends and allies. We believe it does not for a number of important reasons.
The bill will threaten the prospects for success in the current negotiations and thus present us and our friends with a stark choice – military action or living with a nuclear Iran. A military strike would not eliminate Iran’s nuclear capacity and may result in the very thing the U.S. hopes to prevent: Iran deciding to seek nuclear weapons. Living with an Iranian nuclear weapon is exactly the outcome the U.S. seeks to avoid with international negotiations.
President Obama’s decision to test the intentions of the new government of Iran offers the best opportunity in decades to see whether there is a peaceful way to achieve all of our most important objectives. More importantly if Iran were to agree to substantial and verifiable limits on its nuclear program — which they say they are prepared to do – the world would be a safer place than if the international community were to try to achieve such objectives through war.
You and your co-sponsors contend that since sanctions brought Iran to the table to negotiate seriously, then more sanctions or legislated threats of more sanctions would make Iran’s leaders even more determined to give us what we seek. To the contrary, Iranian leaders are more likely to see such Congressional action as a violation of the spirit and perhaps the letter of the Joint Plan of Action of November 24, 2013, and to harden rather than soften their negotiating position. Already, Iranian legislators have threatened to pass a bill requiring enrichment at higher levels — beyond 20% — in response to S. 1881. This kind of tit-for-tat spiral threatens to undermine any possibility of curtailing Iran’s nuclear program.
Once the new Iranian president declared his government’s readiness to negotiate immediately and seriously a comprehensive agreement to give the international community virtually everything it seeks in return for gradual sanctions relief, the Iranians had every right to assume that the US and the other nations involved in the negotiations would proceed in good faith. Based on our experience born of years of dealings with Iran, we do not believe the Iranians will continue to negotiate under new or increased threats.
The outcome of these negotiations is by no means certain. Should the U.S. Congress decide it must unilaterally seek to add even more burdens now on this complicated and critical process, it is unlikely that the goals of our negotiations can be achieved. Moreover our other negotiating partners (UK, France, Germany, Russia, and China) would be displeased and would conclude that the US is no longer proceeding in good faith in accord with the Joint Plan of Action. This bill could lead to an unraveling of the sanctions regime that the U.S. and its partners have so patiently built.
The United States and its allies in the region would better off if relieved of the concern that Iran might acquire a nuclear weapon. Israel would no longer have to be concerned that Iran could present an existential threat and would be in a stronger position to defend itself. This is particularly true in view of the capacity for self-defense inherent in Israel’s overwhelming military power, both conventional forces and its well-known strategic capabilities.
We urge you to take a second look at this legislation, accept that you have achieved your objective of putting down a marker for Iran, but not press this bill to a vote. You do not sacrifice any of your options by doing so. Negotiators now need a chance to continue to their work. We ask that you stand up firmly for the interests of the United States, as you always have, and allow the negotiations to proceed.
Sincerely,
Ryan Crocker, former Ambassador to Iraq and Afghanistan
Stephen Heintz, President, Rockefeller Brothers Fund
Daniel Kurtzer, former Ambassador to Israel
William H. Luers, former Ambassador to Venezuela and Czechoslovakia
Jessica Tuchman Mathews, President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Thomas R. Pickering, former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, and former Ambassador to Israel, India Jordan, Russia and the United Nations
Paul Pillar, former National Intelligence Officer
Jim Walsh, Research Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Frank G. Wisner, former Under Secretary of State for International Security Affairs and Under Secretary of Defense for Policy
by Mitchell Plitnick
In an article published in The Hill, Mike Coogan reports that some of the key legislation that emerged from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s (AIPAC) 2013 annual policy conference is running into significant difficulties in Congress. The bills, which Lara Friedman only half-jokingly called [...]]]>
by Mitchell Plitnick
In an article published in The Hill, Mike Coogan reports that some of the key legislation that emerged from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s (AIPAC) 2013 annual policy conference is running into significant difficulties in Congress. The bills, which Lara Friedman only half-jokingly called the “Israel Best Ally With Benefits” bills, have not gained close to the overwhelming support that AIPAC has come to expect from Congress.
Indeed, more than five weeks after the United States-Israel Strategic Partnership Act of 2013 was introduced in the Senate, it has gathered only 18 co-sponsors. That’s a shockingly low total for a focal point of AIPAC lobbying. It has done better in the House of Representatives, with 171 co-sponsors, but given the more hawkish nature of the House, even that’s not a success by AIPAC’s standards.
While one shouldn’t make too much of this, it certainly seems like AIPAC reached a little too far with this bill. The main issue is a portion of the bill which, in the Senate version, would grant a US visa exemption for Israeli citizens without requiring a reciprocal arrangement from Israel. The US has visa exemption arrangements with 37 other countries, but all of them reciprocate.
Ron Kampeas quotes a staffer from a leading pro-Israel lawmaker in the US House of Representatives as saying that “It’s stunning that you would give a green light to another country to violate the civil liberties of Americans traveling abroad.”
The US concern is particularly profound after a Palestinian-American, who taught English at the Friends’ School in Ramallah, was barred by Israel in January from returning to her West Bank job after a trip to Jordan, despite having a visa that allowed her to leave and re-enter Israeli-controlled territory. Israel, undoubtedly, is concerned that a reciprocal agreement would compromise its ability to bar not only Palestinian-Americans, but also pro-Palestinian activists, from entering the country.
The House version of the bill does not exempt Israel from reciprocity, but merely calls on the Secretary of State to report to Congress on the extent of Israel’s compliance with the reciprocity requirement and “…what additional steps, if any, are required in order for Israel to qualify for inclusion in such program.” That may be one reason the House bill has done better.
The bill includes other troublesome aspects. Friedman points out that the Senate bill includes shockingly weak language in support of a two-state solution: “…language that disconnects the issue from U.S. national security interests and in doing so creates a formulation that inconsistent with the actual foreign policy of the Obama Administration or ANY previous administration.”
Even so, it remains surprising that a bill that emerged as a focal point from an AIPAC policy conference would have this much trouble. Coogan thinks this is a sign that AIPAC’s grip on Congress might be weakening.
It certainly adds to a sense that AIPAC might have reached a tipping point. Equally telling is what Coogan says about how AIPAC brought this bill to the Hill: “Numerous public reports and off-the-record accounts from legislators and staff signaled that the brazenness and late release of the Israel lobby’s legislative demands blindsided both individual members and various committees. Provisions appeared tone deaf and legally problematic, even among Israel’s strongest supporters.”
I haven’t been able to locate those “numerous public reports,” but my own sense from talking to people on Capitol Hill and other informed colleagues is that there is indeed some tension there. That’s on top of congressional bristling at AIPAC’s efforts to exempt aid to Israel from the sequestration cuts. Dylan Williams of J Street told The Forward that the possibility that AIPAC might try to lobby for exempting aid to Israel from the sequester “…seems a little tone deaf,” and that some Hill staffers were “surprised that some groups — that people from AIPAC — were asking for this.”
Does all this mean AIPAC is losing its grip? Probably not, but as members of Congress grow less enthusiastic about complying with AIPAC’s demands, the possibility that more politicians will test the widely-held but unproven maxim that opposing AIPAC is electoral suicide arises. That could make things very interesting.
]]>Among the new provisions that appear intended to ensure that the Iranian public, including the Green Movement, will rally behind the regime and perceive the United States as an existential enemy, if not the “Great Satan,” is one that would make it illegal for
any U.S. person employed with the United States Government [to] contact in an official or unofficial capacity any person that—
(1) is an agent, instrumentality, or official of, is affiliated with, or is serving as a representative of the Government of Iran; and
(2) presents a threat to the United States or is affiliated with terrorist organizations…
Lest you think this too draconian, Ros-Lehtinen and her allies have added a presidential waiver provision whereby the president can waive the ban on contact if he
“determines and so reports to the appropriate congressional committees 15 days prior to the exercise of waiver authority that failure to exercise such waiver authority would pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the vital national security interests of the United States.
As Paul Pillar comments on his blog:
If enacted, this legislation certainly would have practical effects. It would prevent any exploration of ways to resolve disagreement over that Iranian nuclear program that we are supposedly so intensely concerned about. It would prevent soliciting Iranian cooperation in areas, such as Afghanistan, where some Iranian and U.S. interests run parallel, and the Iranians could be helpful rather than causing trouble. It would preclude discussion of miscellaneous matters of interest to Americans such as the recent return of those captured hikers. And it would prevent any diplomacy to keep U.S.-Iranian incidents or crises—the kind that retired joint chiefs chairman Admiral Mullen expressed concern about—from spinning out of control, unless the crisis conveniently stretched out beyond the fifteen-day notification period. (By way of comparison, the entire Cuban missile crisis lasted thirteen days.)
A second provision included in the proposed bill really got to me, if only because it’s hard to imagine anything that would alienate Iranians more easily given the infamous USS Vincennes shootdown over the Strait of Hormuz of Iran Air Flight 655 on July 3, 1988, in which 290 people, including 66 children, were killed. This provision would revoke the president’s authority to permit the export of civilian aircraft parts and repairs for Iranian civilian aircraft to ensure flight safety for humanitarian reasons.
In contemplating the wisdom of this provision, consider that, over the past decade, more than 1,000 Iranian and foreign travelers have died in civilian airplane crashes in Iran believed to have been caused by worn-out equipment that would have been replaced but for U.S. sanctions against Iran’s civilian aviation industry. As noted by the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), the regime has cited these crashes as evidence that the U.S. is the enemy of the Iranian people. “[E]liminating the humanitarian waiver authority for civilian aircraft parts and repairs only plays into this propaganda,” according to NIAC. That’s an understatement.
Now consider a not-altogether-inconceivable scenario as the Obama administration yields to pressure to build up its naval assets in the Strait of Hormuz to make the threat of military action “more credible.”
A civilian airliner — remember: both Iran Air and Mahan Air, the country’s two biggest commercial airlines have already been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury for their alleged ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force — takes off from an Iranian airport headed for Dubai (as Iran Air Flight 655 still does) or some other destination that takes it over the Strait. Due to the lack of a spare part, that could have been sold to the airline had the proposed sanction not taken effect, or some other problem (like a simple delay), the plane strays from its regular course and approaches a U.S. warship that perceives or misidentifies it as a possible and imminent threat.
If Ros-Lehtinen’s version becomes law, the ship’s captain couldn’t even radio Iranian naval vessels, or air traffic controllers, or airline officials (including the pilot) to identify the plane without 15 days’ notice by the president. And if that captain, not willing to take chances with the lives of his crew then orders the aircraft shot down…. What then?
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