It will be recalled that President Obama originally pitched the negotiations with Iran as a last ditch effort to get Iran to abandon its nuclear program by means of diplomacy rather than a military option. Thus, the president often spoke of the goal of a nuclear-free Iran. Yet the negotiations soon morphed into a process involving negotiations between Iran as an equal partner with the world’s leading powers. And as the negotiations wore on, it became clear that Iran somehow had positioned itself to successfully demand major concessions from those powers.
How and why this stunning turnaround took place would do much to inform the congressional inquiry. The administration’s oft-heard claim that it couldn’t get more from the Iranians and therefore settled for what it could get leaves unanswered the question of why a solution couldn’t be forced on the Iranians, as originally seemed to have been contemplated by the president.
The effectiveness of the agreement will obviously be a direct function of the inspection program and the conduct of the administration in this regard is instructive. Indeed, inspections have always been a topic of discussion in the media as well as in Congress, where some had demanded random and unlimited inspections as part of any deal.
On April 7, President Obama’s national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, told CNN’s Jake Tapper that “under this deal, you will have anywhere, any time 24/7 access as it relates to the nuclear facilities that Iran has.”
On July 14, the day after the agreement was announced, President Obama said:
Because of this deal, we will, for the first time, be in a position to verify all of these commitments. That means this deal is not built on trust; it is built on verification. Inspectors will have 24/7 access to Iran’s key nuclear facilities.
Mr. Obama went on to say:
Because of this deal, inspectors will also be able to access any suspicious location. Put simply, the organization responsible for the inspections, the IAEA, will have access where necessary, when necessary.
Yet on the same day it emerged that the standard of access “any time, anywhere” or its equivalent formulations had in fact not been achieved and the deal calls only for IAEA requests for access to which Iran can object, which would triggering a 14-day process of negotiation. If there is no resolution during that period, the two sides would take the matter to a joint commission that would come up with a plan of action within seven days. If Iran disagrees, it has three days within which to comply with the direction of the commission.
This means there could not be any inspection until 24 days after a request had been made. In any event, Iranian military leaders have repeatedly stated there will not be any inspections allowed on military bases.
When questioned about the discrepancy, Secretary of State Kerry said on Sunday that “This [any time, anywhere] is a term that, honestly, I never heard in the four years that we were negotiating. It was not on the table. There’s no such thing in arms control as any time, anywhere.”
Again, why the change in the American position on such a key and pivotal issue? Surely it was something the Iranians wanted. But why would the U.S. go along?
And then there’s the matter of President Obama’s extraordinary decision to submit the agreement to the UN Security Council for approval. The resolution of approval, which had the effect of making the agreement part of international law, was adopted 15-0.
In fact, Mr. Obama actually had the audacity to caution Congress to “pay attention to that broad consensus.” Yet the president, under some political duress, supported the legislation several months ago that gave Congress 60 days to review the agreement.