by Jim Lobe

Since Obama’s announcement last week that he will normalize relations with Cuba, a number of commentators have analyzed what impact this might have on US-Iranian ties, particularly with respect to the ongoing negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program.

Aside from neoconservatives, such as Elliott Abrams, and other hawks, like Lindsey Graham and John McCain—who predictably deplored the move and worried that Obama’s move portends US surrender at the negotiating table—the Wilson Center’s Aaron David Miller was one of the first to do a more thoughtful analysis of what it might mean for Iran policy. In his post, entitled “After Cuba Comes Iran,” Miller argued that, despite the key differences between the two countries, Obama’s decision to normalize ties with Havana “should be a clear sign of where he might like to go with Iran on the nuclear issue in coming months.”

Paul Pillar, a regular contributor to the National Interest, also alluded to the possibility that the Cuba initiative, coupled with Obama’s more assertive policy shifts on immigration and climate change, could indeed indicate where Obama wants to go with Iran and expressed the hope that these moves will encourage him to inject into the US negotiating position the flexibility that will be needed to conclude an agreement.

In another important contribution published by Voice of America Tuesday, the Atlantic Council’s Iran expert, Barbara Slavin argued what I’ve been thinking (but hadn’t put pen to paper) for the past week:

For those in the Iranian government who are pushing for a long-term nuclear deal with Washington, seeing Obama use his presidential authority to relieve the embargo against Cuba despite the vocal objection of some in Congress should increase confidence that he can waive key nuclear-related sanctions against Iran in a similar fashion.

In my opinion, Obama’s willingness to make a bold foreign policy move that is certain to provoke heated opposition from not insignificant domestic constituencies (that are also overrepresented in Congress) should—contrary to the narratives put out by the neoconservatives and other hawks—actually strengthen the Rouhani-Zarif faction within the Iran leadership who are no doubt arguing that Obama is serious both about reaching an agreement and forging a new relationship with the Islamic Republic.

I asked Farideh Farhi—whose analysis of internal Iranian politics and foreign policy is, as far as LobeLog (among many others) is concerned, the best available—about this Wednesday. She replied by email as follows:

I think Obama did himself a lot of good in changing the perception of him in Iran, as well as the rest of the world, as a weak and indecisive president. I think that perception just received a beating and will help those in Tehran who are making the case that Obama is serious and can deliver on substantial sanctions relief or that he is the best person to deal with (given the fact that he is relieved of election pressures). To be sure, all this will be focused on nuclear negotiations and not normalization of relations that developed in the Cuba situation, but if it happens, it will certainly be a breakthrough that may gradually open the path towards normalization.

Farideh pointed in particular to the official reaction by Iran’s Foreign Ministry to Obama’s Cuba announcement as offering some indication about how it was being interpreted in Tehran. That statement emphasized the president’s acknowledgment that more than 50 years of isolation and sanctions against Cuba had not worked and “I do not believe we can continue doing the same thing for over five decades and expect a different result.” Obama’s remarks about having learned “from hard-earned experience that countries are more likely to enjoy lasting transformation if their people are not subjected to chaos,” according to Farideh, were also likely to be seen favorably in Tehran as Obama’s repudiation of “regime change.” (Related points were made in another analysis, “If It’s True on Cuba, It’s True on Iran,” published in the Huffington Post by Trita Parsi and Ryan Costello shortly after Obama’s announcement.)

I would add that the fact that the Castro brothers, who have “resisted” Yanqui imperialism and “global arrogance” for even longer than Tehran, are now willing to establish a new relationship with their own “Great Satan” may also count for something in the internal debate that swirls around Ayatollah Khamenei’s office. If, after all, revolutionary Cuba is willing to turn the page with their historic nemesis—defiance of which has largely defined Cuba’s out-sized standing and status in the world—shouldn’t hardcore revolutionaries around Khamenei at least consider the idea, if not of normalisation (which appears out of the question for the moment), then at least moving with greater confidence toward some rapprochement?

That view is shared by Kenneth Katzman, the senior analyst of Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Persian Gulf Affairs at the Congressional Research Service. “I think we should also not minimize how the Cuba rapprochement might play in the inner counsels in Tehran,” he said in an email. “Surely, Rouhani and Zarif can now go to the Supreme Leader and say ‘The Castro brothers are at least as distrustful of the United States as you are, and they were able to reach a deal with the United States. Why wouldn’t you do the same??”

Of course, opponents of Obama’s normalization of ties with Cuba will try to rally a Republican-led Congress behind their efforts to restrain Obama’s efforts by, among other measures, denying funding for an embassy, refusing to confirm a nominee as ambassador, and introducing legislation designed to constrain the president’s authority to waive or lift certain sanctions or further ease the trade embargo. And, if they succeed, particularly with respect to the sanctions issue, there’s no doubt that such action will be used by hard-liners in Tehran to argue that Obama lacks the power to follow through on any promises he makes about lifting sanctions and related concessions, in a nuclear deal.

But it’s pretty clear that Obama is determined to fight such actions, and it’s most unlikely that anti-Castro diehards like Marco Rubio and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen will be able to gather enough Democratic supporters to overcome a presidential veto. Indeed, given the strong support for Obama’s action from such quarters as the US Chamber of Commerce, the National Foreign Trade Council, and various agricultural lobby groups whose members are eager to significantly increase their exports to Cuba, normalization’s foes may find it more difficult than they anticipate to rally a large majority of Republicans behind them despite the party leadership’s determination to deny Obama any kind of foreign policy success.

At the same time, any serious effort by the anti-Castro forces on Capitol Hill will pose some difficult questions for key players on Iran, especially the Israel lobby and the various groups associated with it. The Cuba and Israel lobbies have worked closely together for decades—their common interests have converged perfectly in the persons of the outgoing chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and former House Foreign Committee chair Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. And now is the moment when the Cuba lobby needs all the help it can get. Moreover, if the leadership of the Israel lobby believes that normalization with Cuba will make a nuclear deal and rapprochement with Iran substantially more likely, will it decide that this is a fight worth fighting? Of course, the leadership is not monolithic, especially on a question that, at least on the face of it, is so far removed from Israel itself, and it will be very difficult to mobilize all but the lobby’s most right-wing constituents behind preventing normalization with Cuba. But it will be fascinating to watch.

Photo: US President Barack Obama talks with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani of during a phone call in the Oval Office, Sept. 27, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

• Commentary: The Foundation for Defense of Democracies‘ Benjamin Weinthal blogs on Commentary’s Contentions blog that Switzerland has finally “relented and announced that it will fall into line with EU sanctions targeting Iran’s energy sector,” but only after “touting its ‘active neutrality’ position, whatever that means,” over the past year. Weinthal characterizes the Swiss Foreign Ministry as going “to great lengths to maximize their gas and other economic deals with the mullah regime.” He emphasizes, “The gas revenues from the [Swiss deal] with [National Iranian Gas Export Company], whose parent company, National Iranian Gas Company, was placed on Britain’s Proliferation Concerns List in February 2009, would end up funding Iran’s nuclear-weapons program as well as its wholly owned subsidiaries, Hamas and Hezbollah.”

• Council on Foreign Relations: George W. Bush administration Deputy National Security Advisor Elliott Abrams blogs his evaluations of the Obama administration’s Middle East Policy thus far. On Iran, he writes, “Diplomatic efforts to stop the Iranian nuclear program continue, but any deal is more likely to concede to the Iranian regime some limited right to reprocess and enrich uranium than to stop the Iranian bomb,” and “Sanctions and sabotage have slowed the Iranians down and credit is due to some combination of the EU, the United States, and Israel, but the Iranian centrifuges continue to spin.” He claims that the administration has insufficiently engaged with individuals in authoritarian countries, claiming, “We seek ‘engagement’ with the Asad regime in Syria and the Mubarak regime in Egypt, and with the ayatollahs in Iran, not with the people who live under their thumbs.”

• The Jewish Telegraph Agency: Ron Kampeas, JTA’s Washington bureau chief, speaks to a number of close followers of U.S. Middle East policy in Washington. On the hawkish side, he speaks with Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA), who tells him, “Iran is still enriching uranium. It is absolutely critical we bear down with a comprehensive strategy of which sanctions is a critical part.” The Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Mark Dubowitz takes an even more hawkish tone, saying, “If you’re going to target a hard-line regime, you’ve got to have a military option on the table.”

Amano acknowledges that many questions remain unanswered by the Iranians about their nuclear program, but emphasizes that it is premature to conclude that Iran is building a nuclear weapon.

SPIEGEL: According to the most recent estimates, Iran is only a year away from building a bomb.

Amano: I’m not so sure about that. Despite all unanswered questions, we cannot say that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program.

Der Spiegel presses Amano on this answer but he holds fast to his position.

SPIEGEL: Because you lack the conclusive evidence, the “smoking gun?”

Amano: That’s not my choice of words. I’m talking about unanswered questions. What purpose do components for a highly explosive ignition system serve? What are neutron triggers needed for? Are there nuclear developments that suggest a military background? Iran must provide clarity on these issues. That’s the point.

The Wonk Room’s Matt Duss points to the parallels between Amano’s language and that of the CIA’s March 2010 report (PDF) on Iran’s nuclear program, which reads:

We continue to assess Iran is keeping open the option to produce nuclear weapons, though we do not know whether Tehran will eventually decide to produce nuclear weapons. Iran continues to develop a range of capabilities that could be applied to producing nuclear weapons, if a decision is made to do so.

Both Amano and the CIA’s language should be looked at closely by Iran hawks as well as those in the media who suggest that Iran’s intent to produce a nuclear weapon is a foregone conclusion. This language does not preclude such a development but, as emphasized by Amano’s list of unanswered questions, it is far too early to draw conclusions about the Iranian nuclear program.

But it doesn’t seem like the Iran hawks think much of the CIA and the IAEA’s cautious analyses.

On Friday, the Council on Foreign Relations’ (CFR) Elliott Abrams called on House Republicans to increase pressure on Iran to stop an Iranian “weapons program.”

They should be asking right now what more the United States and our allies can be doing to stop the Iranian nuclear weapons program, make our sanctions more effective, and support democratic dissidents in Iran.

Mark Dubowitz, the Executive Director of the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), wrote in The Wall Street Journal Asia edition last week:

…[F]urther measures, and time for them to work, will still be needed to convince Iran to abandon its nuclear weapons program.

And the Journal‘s editorial board fired off an op-ed last week with a factually baseless assertion.

Since Iran announced its intention to build a nuclear bomb, it has had a friend in India.

As discussed by Ali, Iran has made no such announcement.

Both Dubowitz and Abrams have access to huge audiences (Abrams’ blog is hosted by the CFR and Dubowitz appears regularly in the Journal’s editorial pages), so it’s worth asking why prestigious institutions and newspapers, such as the Journal and CFR, permit such questionable fact-checking in their blogs and opinion pages.

Perhaps more importantly, why do platforms like CFR and the Journal give an audience to individuals–or, in the case of the Journal, an editorial board–who are blatantly overstating the case against Iran’s nuclear program?

• Council on Foreign Relations: George W. Bush administration Deputy National Security Advisor Elliott Abrams blogs that the pronouncement by retiring Mossad head, Meir Dagan, that Iran will not have a nuclear weapon until 2015 should give new momentum to sanctions. Abrams, who is a curently a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, writes that “increasing sanctions may damage the Iranian economy in ways that create additional political tension.” He says that Republican leadership in the House “should be asking right now what more the United States and our allies can be doing to stop the Iranian nuclear weapons program, make our sanctions more effective, and support democratic dissidents in Iran.”

• The Washington Post: Jennifer Rubin, in her first day on the job blogging on her new Right Turn blog, interviews former UN ambassador  and current American Enterprise Institute fellow John Bolton. Bolton tells her that “Arab states don’t want Iran to have nuclear weapons any more than Israel does, and they fear that Obama is going to deliver them into the hands” of a nuclear-armed Iran.” He considers Obama is “in over his head on national security” and that “unlike every president since FDR, this president doesn’t think foreign policy is a top priority.”

• The Wall Street Journal: Former deputy national security adviser and Project for the New American Century signatory Elliot Abrams writes that the double-speak of non-democratic Arab leaders, who “[t]ell the truth to foreigners but not to your own population[s],” is being put to a test by the WikiLeaks releases. “We find the king of Bahrain telling American officials privately that the Iranian nuclear program ‘must be stopped,’ while in public he carefully avoids any comment that might anger Iran’s aggressive leaders,” he writes. Abrams writes that it is easy to criticize the “gap” between the public and private discourse of the United States’ non-democratic Arab allies, but “when we consider the identities of some of the people they fear—the ayatollahs in Tehran, terrorists in Hamas and Hezbollah, al Qaeda itself—we see that the WikiLeaks disclosures are less likely to promote more open government than to give aid and comfort to the enemy.”

• The New Republic: Reuel Marc Gerecht, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, writes that the WikiLeaks document dump should prove that those “…who have suggested—or asserted boldly—that Arab leaders don’t want the United States to stop militarily Iran’s nuclear program have been (i) fibbing, (ii) hopelessly ill-informed, or (iii) so ideologically purblind that they now appear intellectually dishonest.” Gerecht concludes by quipping, “They at least owe Mr. Assange a ‘thank you’ for helping them see, as the Quran says, ‘the straight path.’”

The two key takeaways from Hosford and Riedel’s analyses are:  a) a disastrous Israeli military strike is possible if Israeli leadership genuinely believe that Iranian leadership are “crazy” and b) an effective deterrence strategy can only be implemented if Israel is willing to acknowledge the existence of its nuclear arsenal.

It’s an interesting coincidence that neocon pundits consistently challenge Ahmadinejad’s rationality  (see Bret Stephens‘ most recent column or Reuel Marc Gerecht‘s article in the October 4 Weekly Standard) while enthusiastically defending Israel against any attempts to force transparency regarding Israel’s nuclear arsenal. (See Elliott Abrams‘ blog in the Weekly Standard after the June NPT conference.)

Hosford writes:

Riedel reaches back to deterrence theory by proposing that the United States offer Israel the benefits of American nuclear umbrella. This, of course, only works if those with their fingers on the hypothetical Iranian nuclear button are rational, and Riedel’s mention of the Netanyahu quote claiming Iran is “crazy” casts doubt on the views of the Israeli leadership, to say the least.

Though Riedel could very well be accurate in his analysis, in order to keep his deterrence argument intact he needs to downplay the possibility that Iran would transfer a nuclear weapon to a third party. So, perhaps not surprisingly, he does not offer any evidence for why Tehran would keep it nukes to itself. On the surface, it does seem as though a Hizbollah nuclear attack on Israel would not be in the interest of either Hizbollah or Iran, but gut feelings and hunches are not likely to convince the Israelis to sit back and watch while Iran goes nuclear.

The second part of the two-fold Riedel plan would call for the United States to bolster Israel’s second strike capability. That is, once the U.S. eases the Israeli population’s fears with promises to employ the formidable American nuclear force in the event the unthinkable occurs, an arsenal of American-supplied hardware would ensure that a stricken Israel would still be able to retaliate with its F-15Is, Jericho IRBMs, and increasingly sophisticated missile defense system. This would enable permit Israel to maintain strategic dominance, even facing a nuclear Iran. Among other items, Riedel advocates selling F-22s to Israel, though they are probably not the most appropriate platform for Israeli defense needs, and are perhaps further obviated by recent Israeli cabinet agreement to allow the United States to give Israel 20 stealthy new F-35s.

Of course, one problem with publicly boosting the Israeli deterrent — which Riedel readily admits — is that it is exceedingly difficult to do without first acknowledging that Israel possesses nuclear weapons. While Israel should, in fact, officially announce its arsenal, there is little benefit for it in doing so, at least at the moment. It would gain little, given that everyone knows of the Israeli nukes anyway, and could potentially entangle them in international debates over the NPT and a nuclear-free zone.

So, could the U.S. out them instead? Doubtful. Washington has been extremely hesitant to adopt a tough approach toward Israel in the past, but if an Israeli action might risk significant consequences to U.S. personnel and strategic interests, perhaps we will be surprised …