“This deal grants Iran permanent sanctions relief in exchange for only temporary – temporary — limitations on its nuclear program – not a rolling-back, not dismantlement, but temporary limitations. At year ten, the UN Security Council Resolution will disappear along with the dispute resolution mechanism needed to snapback UN sanctions and the 24-day mandatory access provision for suspicious sites in Iran.
“The deal enshrines for Iran, and in fact commits the international community to assisting Iran in developing an industrial-scale nuclear power program, complete with industrial scale enrichment. While I understand that this program will be subject to Iran’s obligations under theTreaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, I think it fails to appreciate Iran’s history of deception in its nuclear program and its violations of the NPT.
“It will, in the long run, make it much harder to demonstrate that Iran’s program is not in fact being used for peaceful purposes because Iran will have legitimate reasons to have advanced centrifuges and a robust enrichment program. We will then have to demonstrate that its intention is dual-use and not justified by its industrial nuclear power program.
“What we get in return for removing sanctions is an inspection and verification regime of Iran’s somewhat-diminished, but still existent nuclear program, for which we will have to depend on Iranian compliance and performance for years to come.
“A significant part of that performance is dictated by an Additional Protocol of the IAEA agreement that ensures access to suspect sites in a country. But Iran has agreed only to provisionally apply the Additional Protocol if Congress has abolished all sanctions. This could mean that if Iran has been sanctioned for violations of the agreement, Iran won’t even have to seek ratification of the Additional Protocol until those sanctions have been lifted – regardless of Iran’s full compliance.
“This is hardly an ironclad commitment on which to base our right to inspect suspicious facilities. Of course if the Iranians violate the agreement and try to make a dash for a nuclear bomb, our solace will be that we will have a year’s notice instead of the present 3 months. So in reality we have purchased a very expensive alarm system. Maybe we’ll have an additional nine months, but with much greater consequences in the enemy we might face at that time.
“But what happens in the interim? Within about a year of Iran meeting its initial obligations, Iran will receive sanctions relief to the tune of $100-150 billion in the release of frozen assets, as well as renewed oil sales of another million barrels a day, as well as relief from sectoral sanctions in the petrochemical, shipping, shipbuilding, port sectors, gold and other precious metals, and software and automotive sectors.
“Iran will also benefit from the removal of designated entities including major banks, shipping companies, oil and gas firms from the U.S. Treasury list of sanctioned entities.
‘Of the nearly 650 entities that have been designated by the U.S. Treasury for their role in Iran’s nuclear and missile programs or for being controlled by the Government of Iran, more than 67 percent will be de-listed within 6-12 months,’ according to testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, of Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
“For Iran, all this relief comes likely within a year, even though its obligations stretch out for a decade or more.
“Considering the fact that it was President Rouhani, who after conducting his fiscal audit after his election, likely convinced the Ayatollah that Iran’s regime could not sustain itself under the sanctions, and knew that only a negotiated agreement would get Iran the relief it critically needed to sustain the regime and the revolution, the negotiating leverage was, and still is, greatly on our side. However, the JCPOA in paragraph 26 of the Sanctions heading of the agreement, says:
