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Obama’s Israel-Iran nuclear problem: Tough economic sanctions brought Tehran to the table

In the small ocean of printer’s ink consumed since Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech of March 3rd to the U.S. Congress swim four not-so-imaginary fish.

The most frightened one is Israel. A 2012 opinion survey by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs revealed that two-thirds of Israelis believed that “if Iran will acquire a nuclear weapon it would use it against Israel.” The strongly peace-seeking Shimon Peres as Israel’s president asked in 2012 how the world could allow the Iranian leadership to “openly deny the Holocaust and threaten another Holocaust.”

A former Iranian president, Hashemi Rafsanjani, in 2001 claimed that a single bomb would end Israel’s existence. Israelis fear both a direct strike by Tehran and one by a non-state actor with a nuclear weapon provided by it. Many also believe that the Middle East as a whole, with Iran in the lead, rejects Israel’s right to exist as a country.

Other concerns about a nuclear-armed Iran relate to the toxic consequences of such a development for the region’s strategic environment. Tehran with nuclear weapons would become even more assertive regionally, quite possibly inducing other nations to confront Israel more aggressively. Approximately three quarters of Israelis agreed in 2012 that if Iran develops nuclear weapons “the Palestinians and Hezbollah will grow more belligerent towards Israel.”

What if a fiercely aggressive second fish, a nuclear-armed Tehran, declared that any attack on Hezbollah would be deemed an attack on Iran? A nuclear-armed Iran might well unleash a highly dangerous nuclear and other WMD proliferation with Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other states in the Middle East.

How would Israel continue to attract large amounts of foreign direct investment and keep high tech personnel in Israel with the risk of having their families perish in the same mushroom cloud that could destroy Israel? An Iranian bomb could lead to the shrinking of Israel and its economy even if not deployed.


Opposing view: The United States has nothing but bad choices


The third fish, breathing heavily, is the proposed agreement, which purports to prevent Tehran from building the nuclear bombs, which all independent observers of Iran say is the regime’s goal. One of the proposed features of the agreement is a ten-year expiry date for curbs on Iran’s nuclear program. In his address, Mr. Netanyahu correctly termed a decade “the blink of an eye” in the life of a regime committed to “conquest, subjugation and terror” across the region.

Israel’s leader reminded Congress that Tehran’s adherence to a freeze on amassing weapons-grade uranium is to be monitored by international inspectors, adding that in 2005, 2006 and 2010 Iran’s regime defied the inspectors. IAFA, the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog, noted on March 2 that Tehran is still refusing to come clean on its military nuclear program.

Earlier, IEFA did not know that Tehran was running secret nuclear facilities at Natanz and Qom. A few days before Netanyahu’s speech, another top-secret nuclear facility, known as Lavizan-3, buried underground at a military base in the suburbs of Tehran, and using advanced centrifuge machines to enrich weapons-grade uranium, was revealed. It has been hidden from the international inspectors.

A somewhat less aggressive fourth fish is the current regime in Tehran without nuclear weapons. Only yesterday, Dr Alejo Vidal-Quadras, former Vice-President of the European Parliament (1999-2014), reminded a conference in Geneva about the situation of human rights in Iran: “Iran, under the so called moderate Rouhani, has executed many more prisoners than Ahmadinejad during the same period. In fact, it is number one in the world for the highest number of executions per capita with 1300 or 1400 executions during Rouhani’s term.”

Straun Stevenson, president of the European Iraqi Freedom Association (EIFA) and a European MP representing Scotland from 1999 to 2014, noted in Europe the same day Netanyahu spoke in Washington, Tehran regards ISIS as direct Sunni competitors in this struggle to enslave the world in a medieval corruption of the Muslim faith...The West must wake up to the fact that any cooperation and alliance with Iran to fight ISIS is extremely dangerous and will turn this war into a sectarian war between the Shiites and Sunnis, and even if it is temporarily suppressed, it will again surge and will encase the region for decades.

Finally, Netanyahu, speaking for Israel, laid out three additional conditions that he thinks should be imposed on Tehran before any sanctions are lifted: “First, stop its aggression against its neighbours in the Middle East. Second, stop supporting terrorism around the world. And third, stop threatening to annihilate my country.”

It is really no answer for President Obama to assert blandly that this would amount to “no deal." Tough economic sanctions brought Tehran to the table and a much better agreement can still be achieved.

David Kilgour is co-chair of the Canadian Friends of a Democratic Iran and a director of the Washington-based Council for a Community of Democracies (CCD). He is a former MP for both the Conservative and Liberal Parties in the south-east region of Edmonton and has also served as the Secretary of State for Latin America and Africa, Secretary of State for Asia-Pacific and Deputy Speaker of the House.