The Fallacy of the Iran Nuclear Deal Agreement

Omar Sindi | Exclusive to iKurd.net

During the US Presidential Campaign in 2020, Joe Biden stated he would revive the Nuclear Deal Agreement with Iran; the agreement that the President Donald J. Trump criticized and walked away from. The Biden Administration shouldn’t fall onto fallacy notions of the Theocratic Iranian Regime’s denuclearization promises.

The Iranian Cleric Ayatollah Khomeini took power in 1979, who overthrew the Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi Dynasty and pronounced it the Islamic Republic of Iran: The theocratic regime’s grandiose ambitions have long sought to dominate the Middle East through the “Shiite Crescent”, spanning from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea… in the 1980’s, 8 years of the Iran-Iraq war was also part of their ambition to expand the Shiite Crescent.

They are backing Bashar Assad’s Regime in Syria’s civil war crisis, militarily through IRGC and also providing economical support to the Assad regime in which Iran exhausted their own economy. That’s why they have established a proxy militia chain in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and other places; these militias served under the Qassem Soleimani’s leadership, as a section of the Quds Force, which is a wing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)- In 2020, Qassem Soleimani and some of his associates were killed by the US drone airstrike at Baghdad international airport.

Iran’s quest to achieve a stockpile of nuclear weapons is a hegemonic dream of ascending back to their height of the 12th century Fatimid Dynasty. In one of my previous essays, I called their ambitions of control in this region a “train project” and the other writers have called it a “landbridge”.

Iran’s sincerity of denuclearization is highly doubtful; for them, it appears to be just another step in the quest of acquiring nuclear weapons; It’s just a race against time. Iran has a trust deficit. “The IAEA (The International Atomic Energy Agency) concluded that Iran was actively designing a nuclear weapon through at least 2009. Iran’s lack of cooperation with the IAEA probe makes it impossible to verify if Tehran has halted all such efforts”…

“The Iran nuclear agreement, formerly known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)” the agreement reached between Iran and many world powers including the US in July 2015. In the JCPOA, Iran gained a lot more favorable leverage points than Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif and his associates expected to gain from this international agreement which released international sanction and allowed access to over $100 billion of Iran‘s assets which had been previously frozen in western banks. European, Russian and Chinese companies rushed into Iran to do business and to help Iran’s battered economy; they disregarded Iran’s gross human rights record and their malign behavior in the Middle East and beyond. Iran only agreed to delay time, which did not include all the nuclear components or ballistic missile programs.

IAEA and the UN nuclear watchdog group didn’t have the autonomy to check a suspected site without allotted time, the allotted time is 24 days, and in 24 days Iran could hide anything it wanted to hide. In my view, US foreign policy during President Trump was mostly based on personal friendships; however, at the time of President Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA agreement in 2018, he advocated that it had “failed to curtail Iran’s missile program and regional influences”. He reimposed sanctions, which hampered many of Iran’s ambitious projects in the region and caused great dissatisfaction among many Iranian people economically. People took their anger to the streets, but they were brutally put down by the IRGC.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, May 8, 2019. Photo: Reuters

Because of Iran‘s gross human rights violations inside Iran, especially against minorities and their malign behavior in the region, the credibility of the theocratic regime is highly questionable. If Iran is nominally to become a nuclear power in the Middle East; it will become a race among the authoritarian regimes in this region, including but not exclusive to Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt to acquire nuclear weapons, and it will be hard to stop. It will be just like in the 1970’s, when India became a nuclear power state. Then Pakistani minister of Foreign Affairs Zulfikar Ali Bhutto said “if India builds the bomb, we will eat grass or leaves, even go hungry, but we will get one of our own.”

Alas, autocrats, dictators, and authoritarian regimes fall onto the fallacy notion of thinking that their skulduggery projects will outsmart that of their predecessors and they will continue ruling with their “iron fist policy”. They should reassess and think again; just to name a few dictators in the last 2 decades who met the consequences of their misguided policy:

1) Ali Abudulh Salih, who destroyed himself and Yemen politically and economically, currently Yemen is in the catastrophic fallout of civil war

2) Mu’ammar al Gaddafi, he too destroyed himself and Libya, politically and economically and Libya currently is in civil war

3) Bashar Assad’s dynasty in Syria, mismanagement and misrules led to Syria as it is in its current state, in the 9th plus year of civil war which is still ongoing

The list goes on, but one must ask, what would trigger the Authoritarian regime(s) to come to a bargaining table? As it stands now, they would only come when they feel their role is in a perilous condition or it’s totally in their advantage…

Since 2015, meetings between Iran and the “P5+1” (which refer to the five permanent security Council of the United Nations (UN) plus Germany), these countries leaders

“believe” that Iran will pursue the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons; in other words, they don’t actually believe Iran, but are willing to look the other way for the sake of business.

Many changes have happened, most likely Iran is far more advanced in their nuclear program, their “uranium enrichment” is probably at weaponization level, and Iran has not backed down on its malign activities in the region, nor it’s ballistic missile technology program. Both the US Secretary State John Kerry, and Mike Pompeo are gone, and many members of the Security Council from P5 +1 are also gone, but the theocratic regime’s foreign minister Javid Zarif is still at his capacity, which it indicates that the theocratic regime in Iran doesn’t believe in the democratic principle. In this way, they are telling the ordinary people of Iran we are God’s policemen, if you commit any sin, we’ll punish you on Earth, so when you die you can directly go to Heaven not to Hell! Mr. Zarif scored good for Iran in that nuclear deal agreement!

Now the new US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will deal with the “cat-and-mouse game” with Mr.Zarif if, when it happens.

“force can be a necessary adjunct to effective diplomacy” – Antony Blinken

Omar Sindi, a senior writer, analyst and columnist for iKurd.net, Washington, United States.

The opinions are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of iKurd.net or its editors.