Iran is in the news again for several reasons, and here is my two-bits worth. First from the American point of view: The average American has almost nothing to gain out of an agreement by Iran with the P5+1 nations: United States, European Union (EU), France, Germany, China, Russia, and the United Kingdom (UK). The likelihood of war, albeit not nuclear, will be increased because lifting of economic sanctions will allow Iran to rebuild its large armed forces and to relieve the strain the country is enduring with its Hezbollah and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)s’ involvement in fighting ISIL, supporting the Houthi insurgents in Yemen, and carrying on its wide spread terrorist activities against the West and against Sunni Arabs—such as Saudi Arabia in the current conflict in Yemen. Saudi Arabia, remember, is Iran’s rival for regional hegemony. Sanctions have halved Iran’s export earnings (even before the fall in oil prices) and have crippled the economy.
America and the average American young person especially will be more at risk for being involved in a major armed conflict between Iran and Israel, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been trying to explain to an inattentive Obama administration. As a point of historical fact, Iran has been secretive and uncooperative for decades with the rest of the civilized world with regards to its nuclear arms program. They are more likely than not to continue their research and clandestine activities once the sanctions and worldwide scrutiny are relaxed. The term of close scrutiny is slated to last ten years—a paltry number for the patient Iranians.
From the point of view of the government of Iran and the citizens enriched by the 1979 revolution, lifting of sanctions is worth almost any concession. The kleptocratic religious government and its cronies will be able to skim far more money from the increase in GDP than ever before. Supreme Leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is one of the richest men in the world having expropriated the former Shah’s holdings and by siphoning taxes for himself and his family. The nuclear agreement will be a boon for all of those kleptocrats. The average citizen and the country’s infrastructure have suffered significantly from the sanctions; and as soon as the agreement is finalized, it is possible that the average citizens will be dropped a crumb or two. It is even possible that average citizens may be able to resume foreign travel which will lessen internal tensions in Iran.
The Iranians demand immediate lifting of sanctions and are angered by the so-called “flip-back” clause insisted upon by the other side wherein failure would result in immediate resumption of sanctions. On a practical level, that is highly unlikely to happen once the deal is sealed. President Obama will have earned his chance for a second Nobel Peace Prize; U.S. and European parliaments will be very reluctant to try and finance and re-energize the machinery of sanctions. China and Russia have indicated almost total disinterest in joining a flip-back process. For them, it is easier and more profitable to let sleeping dogs lie. As a cynic and skeptic, I would predict that the executive branches of the western nations will give in to almost anything Iran demands in the end. However, those holding the purse-strings and the interest of the people are likely to balk at any concessions for Iran. That is particularly true of the right-wing hawks who appear to be in control of the Republican party. They have already sent a letter to Iran announcing that they will kill the accord if they get into power, and they have a list of more stringent demands that will never be agreed to by the Iranians.
Iran has stated that the vague and incomplete agreement constituting the nuclear accord meets its so-called red-line deal breaker requirements. However, no accord was reached in the deadline period because Iran demands that “ambiguities” over the lifting of sanctions must be resolved. The two sides have only agreed in very vague and abstract terms and are oceans apart on what the final deal will be. The United States has said that sanctions removal on Iran will be phased in gradually, but Iranian officials, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, are firmly on the record that sanctions on Iran must be lifted as soon as a final agreement is concluded. Mohammad Ali Jafari, the commander of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has made that point painfully clear. Hardliners on the western side demand more details on the parameters of the agreement to remove sanctions and insist that their parliaments be involved. The Republicans in the U.S. Congress have vowed to sabotage the agreement. It is fairly apparent that Iranian hardliners are in agreement at least with the U.S. Republicans on that one point.
Most level-headed western officials and students of the Iran v. The West issues since 1979 caution that it is definitely not yet time to break out the champagne. The government of Iran is controlled by unyielding religious zealots who have been following a terrorism supporting national policy which is the will of God. Right-wing Christian zealots in U.S. politics bear sway on a grand scale in U.S. political decisions. They have political, religious, historical, and military agendae that oppose everything the Iranian Islamic State stands for and have vowed to have near absolute guarantees that the Iranian nuclear armament program is entirely dismantled before substantive agreement can be achieved and also stringent levels of verification at all steps along the way—forever, if they were to get their way. As some sage said, “There’ll have to be a heap of compromisin’ before we meet that horizon.”
In other ways—the Iranians have done pretty well, albeit not as well as they claim. America’s initial position had been that sanctions would come off only in stages, and would depend on Iran establishing a record of strict compliance. It now seems likely that American and European sanctions will be suspended at roughly the same time, not least because extraterritorial provisions in the American measures would otherwise expose European firms to lawsuits.
The Iranians say that “at the same time as the start of Iran’s nuclear-related implementation work, all of the sanctions will be annulled on a single specified day”. In other words, all sanctions would go within days of the signing of the final agreement. By contrast, America and its European co-negotiators (France, Britain and Germany) are insisting that sanctions will only be suspended after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) “has verified that Iran has taken all of its key nuclear-related steps”—ie, at the end of the first stage of implementation, not at the beginning. Lifting sanctions could take between six months and a year, according to John Kerry, America’s secretary of state.
A further disagreement is over reimposing sanctions should Iran violate the terms of the accord. The Iranians bridle at the mention of it, but the principle of sanctions “snapback” is key for the West and is reflected in the careful wording of the undertakings. The EU will “terminate the implementation” of nuclear-related sanctions; America will cease their “application”. While Iran can rejoice that sanctions have gone, the reality is that their architecture will remain in place. The UN sanctions are less painful in economic terms (they deal mainly with arms and technology transfers, and target individual people and firms), but trickier politically. Once lifted through a new Security Council resolution they may be well-nigh impossible to slap back on unless the Iranian violation is both severe and flagrant enough even for Russia to refrain from using its veto.
An interactive guide to the Middle East's tangled politics
Lastly, some of the (mainly American) sanctions on Iran have nothing to do with its nuclear activities, but have accumulated over the past four decades in response to abuses of human rights, the promotion of terrorism and the country’s threatening missile programme. If ordinary Iranians think that all these will disappear too, they are in for a disappointment.
On inspection arrangements, the Iranian fact-sheet is silent, beyond the commitment voluntarily to implement the “additional protocol” of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty’s system of safeguards. Yet for the agreement to be credible, Iran must be willing to go even further and allow international inspectors to visit any sites deemed “suspicious”, while answering the many questions the agency has asked about past and possibly continuing research on nuclear weapons.
Disagreements over verification give opponents of the deal on both sides their best chance of undermining it. If leaders of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard block access to some military sites, or if there is a refusal to engage with the IAEA on the “possible military dimensions” of the programme, Mr Obama might lose the votes he needs to head off critics in Congress who want the right both to review the deal and to introduce new sanctions should agreement on all issues not be reached by the deadline of June 30th. A lot has gone right, but there is plenty that could still go wrong
Iran held a presidential election in June 2013 that was won by Hassan Rouhani