THE IRAN DEAL ISN’T ABOUT A BOMB

Iran can still get the bomb if it wants to, but the deal incentivises Tehran to restrain itself from doing so, by giving the West Asian power a stake in the global economy. However, it doesn’t tackle the issue of Iran’s subversive terror activities across the world

Last week, world powers signed a landmark deal with Iran that aims to rein in the controversial Iranian nuclear programme in return for relief from debilitating economic sanctions.  Much of the commentary about the deal has focused on the technical aspects: How many centrifuges are being removed? How much of the uranium stockpile is being destroyed? To what percentage can Iran enrich the remaining uranium? What kind of verification processes have been built into the deal? Are these good enough to ensure that Iran won’t cheat on the deal?

While this focus on the technical minutiae is understandable, and one can expect continued hairsplitting on the issue, it must not take away from the larger picture of what the deal means for Iran as a regional power and how it will affect the chronically unstable geo-politics of West Asia. In this context, let’s get one thing straight:  The Iran deal is not really about the bomb.

The Obama Administration wants us to believe that the deal closes all of Iran’s pathways to the bomb but in reality, it only contains the Iranian nuclear programme for a period of 15 years. For these years, Iran’s breakout period — the time needed to produce a bomb — has been increased from three months to a year. Some of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure will still be in place, and 15 years later, if Iran chooses to produce a nuclear bomb, it will be able to do so. Ultimately, Iran is an intellectually sophisticated and scientifically advanced country, and its ability to produce a bomb has rarely been under any serious doubt — deal or no deal.

So, if the bomb is not the issue, then what is the deal about all about? The deal is about two issues. On one hand, the sanctions were hurting the Iranians and the regime in Tehran understood that its interests were better served if it put aside its bomb-making ambitions and negotiated for sanctions relief. On the other hand, world powers, having acknowledged that Iran could get a bomb either way, realised that their best chance of preventing such a development was to incentivise Tehran to restrain itself — by lifting the sanctions and gradually giving it a stake in the global economy, in the hope that once within the international system, Iran will behave in a more responsible manner.

Now, this doesn’t seem like a fool-proof mechanism. What if Iran cheats? In all probability, Iran will try to push the boundaries of the deal and test the limits of the verification process. It isn’t clear at this point how world powers will react to this. Yes, they say that the sanctions will snap back at the slightest hint of bad behaviour but that’s far easier said than done. There will be punitive action, of course, for large-scale violation but there is lot of gray area in the case of low-level mischief. Expect Iran to play around here a bit but it is unlikely that it will go completely overboard because that makes no sense at all.

To better predict if Iran will be faithful to the deal, it may help to compare, as another columnist Abhijit Iyer-Mitra suggested in his column in The Pioneer earlier this week, the Iran deal with the Indian nuclear deal. Signed exactly a decade ago in July 2005, the Indian nuclear deal brought India, a non-signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty that had tested nuclear weapons, under the global nuclear tent. This cleared the pathway for not just better relations with the US but also India’s deeper integration into the global system. The Iran deal works on a similar idea: Resolve one nuclear issue to better engage on all other issues.

However, the Iranian case and the Indian case differ in two key aspects: First, unlike India, Iran was a signatory to the NPT and broke the rules of the nuclear club when it announced its nuclear weapons programme. Second, India’s entry into the nuclear regime was based on its spotless non-proliferation record and the acknowledgment that it is a responsible and rational power. Iran, however, has a long record of using regional proxies to secure its interests in an already unstable neighbourhood. Also, its repeated calls for the annihilation of Israel make it extremely difficult to accept Tehran as a responsible power.

Indeed, it is this kind of bad behaviour that actually makes the rest of the world jittery about Iran. Except for perhaps a handful of nuclear non-proliferation purists who are automatically opposed to any new power acquiring nuclear weapons, the thought of Iran getting the bomb would possible not have got the rest of the world so riled up had only ayatollahs in Tehran come across as more trustworthy folks.

Instead, the world sees the kind of de-stabilising influence that the Iran-supported Hezbollah has had in Lebanon; it sees the cravenness of Hamas, also supported by Iran, which uses Gazans as cannon fodder against Israel; it sees how the Iranian Revolutionary Guards are propping up the murderous regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria while supporting the Houthis in Yemen, not to mention stoking some ‘revolutionary fire’ in Bahrain. 

Over the years, Iran and Iranian proxies have been implicated in a series of terror attacks across the world. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Hezbollah, for example, was involved in a series of bombings and assassination of American and Israeli targets; it also had an understanding with Al Qaeda and the Taliban for training jihadis; the elite Quds force was involved in the war in Iraq. The hey-days of Iran-sponsored Shia terror (as opposed to Saudi-sponsored Sunni terror) may be behind us but it will be foolish to assume that hey won’t make a comeback.

Since the late 2000s, Iranian proxy groups have become more active with terror attacks planned across the world, from Azerbaijan and Cyprus to Jordan and Turkey to Thailand and even India. Most, including the 2011 bungled assassination attempt on the Saudi Ambassador to the US in Washington, DC, were foiled. But the extent of the criminal conspiracy was underlined with the serial attacks of February 2012 — a foiled attack on the American Ambassador to Baku; followed by the bombing of an Israeli diplomat’s car in New Delhi; followed by another bombing in Tbilisi in Georgia; followed by an explosion in Bangkok in a home rented by Iranians. The attacks were part of one big conspiracy and even though they were all operational failures, they did not dissuade the terrorists who tasted success with the July 18 bombing of Burgas airport in Bulgaria in 2012.

With the lifting of all (not just nuclear) sanctions, it is expected that about $100 billion will pour into Iran, at least some of which will most definitely be used to support these proxy groups, UN resolutions notwithstanding. Iran’s rival powers in the region know this, and they have already been the turning up the heat in response (think of the utterly pointless Saudi operation in Yemen). At least in the short term then, one can expect more instability in West Asia — as an ascendant Iran consolidates its position in the region.

Does this mean that the Iran deal was a bad idea? Not necessarily. The deal doesn’t guarantee peace but its still the best chance that the world has, to forge a change for the better. The alternative would have been maintaining the status quo which would have only alienated Iran further. This would have strengthened the hardliners in Tehran and made the bomb even more easily accessible to the ayatollahs. The deal is an opportunity to bring Iran into the global mainstream and give it one less reason to go rogue.

Also, in the immediate future, a rapprochement with Iran opens the door for more seamless Western cooperation with Tehran is some key strategic areas like the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and in efforts to improve Afghanistan’s economic prospects. In fact, it will be interesting to see if Iran can eventually emerge as a counter-balance to Saudi Arabia, the fountainhead of Sunni terrorism wreaks havoc across the world today.

(This article was published in the op-ed section of The Pioneer on July 23, 2015)