The perfect year for a deal with Iran

This is the Chinese year of the sheep; the UN’s International Year of Soil; and the year that NASA plans to land a spacecraft on a planet called Ceres, wherever that is. It’s also the year that the West should make a deal with Iran.

Although it’s mentioned far too infrequently in the Western media, there isn’t much likelihood of Iran ever nuking Israel, Europe or the United States. Any discussion of a nuclear deal with Tehran should be set within this broad context, but it rarely is.

Since 1992, when America’s then Secretary of Defence Robert Gates first accused Tehran of secretly planning a nuclear Armageddon (a claim for which no evidence existed) the “Iranian threat” has been the most enduring and successful illusion created by the American neo-conservative movement, assisted ably by its friends in Tel Aviv. Iran’s religious leaders long ago issued fatwas forbidding the use of nuclear and chemical weapons. During the Iran-Iraq war, despite twenty thousand of its citizens killed by Saddam Hussein’s WMDs and five times that number injured severely, Iran resisted the urge to deploy its own chemical arsenal.

Nearly all the information flowing into the debate is biased, misrepresented or simply made up. Since 2008, for example, the International Atomic Energy Agency has shifted from being a technical inspection agency to a highly politicised opinion-spouter. Nowadays, instead of providing impartial advice, its assessments highlight circumstantial evidence of nuclear weapons development, while not mentioning the host of other evidence that contradicts this view. Senior officials within the agency who have broken with this pattern have been edged out by powerful forces in both Washington and Tel Aviv.

Israel’s Mossad spy agency has been caught providing dodgy evidence on several occasions; “intelligence”, for example, was provided by an anti-regime group in Iran which was proscribed on America’s own terrorism list. In a 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, the US Intelligence Community assessment was that Iran had ended all “nuclear weapon design and weaponization work” back in 2003. In 2012, US intelligence agencies updated the report: Iran, they claimed, was pursuing research that could enable it to produce nuclear weapons, but was not attempting to do so.

Despite all the evidence pointing away from an Iranian nuclear weapons programme, Washington has traditionally listened to the allegations because Israel is worried. This is reasonable, not least because Israel is an awful lot closer to Iran. However, for anyone wanting to get the sanctions against Tehran lifted, there has never been a better time to advise Washington to ignore Israel’s constant demands.

Relations between the US and its main Middle East ally are at an all-time low. According to an anonymous White House official quoted in The Atlantic magazine, Benjamin Netanyahu is regarded privately as a “chicken shit” or even worse: “recalcitrant, myopic, reactionary, obtuse, blustering and pompous.” Each time Obama meets the Israeli prime minister in public, it’s palpably awkward. Across the Western world, Israel is increasingly becoming that terrible guest at the wedding, the one you have to invite as they’re an old friend, but you’re increasingly loathe to because they also beat their wife.

Obama has shown his willingness to be radical in his foreign policy; opening up relations with Cuba is a particularly relevant example. Could Iran get the same treatment?

It’s possible, but the window is closing fast; after 2016, Obama will be replaced, either by Hillary “I’m not a neo-con, honest” Clinton, or Jeb “you may have heard of my brother” Bush. Neither seem like candidates for instigating rapprochement on anything, let alone nuclear Iran.

There are, though, wider moral questions about lifting the sanctions on Iran. This is the nation that has backed war criminal Bashar Al-Assad to the hilt, and which has a fairly appalling human rights record. Both issues deserve scrutiny. Are these really the guys who the West want to be letting up on?

Tehran made the wrong choice by backing Assad immediately in 2011. The Iranians should have done what every nation should have done, and backed the rebels from day one. The context was broadly that for this generation of Iranian leaders, Assad has been the only Arab friend in the neighbourhood, and so there was a feeling that they were indebted to the Syrian leader, and his father before him. The Iranians also didn’t want to see another Arab nation fall into the Western or pro-Saudi bloc, which is a fairly understandable response from a nation with so few international friends.

However, it quickly became clear that Assad was prepared to take extraordinarily brutal measures to stay in power, rather than capitulate in a relatively decent fashion. This made Iran’s support for the Syrian regime extremely costly in political terms, with a supposedly Islamic nation quixotically backing a brutal dictator.

Three years down the line, though, the tide is turning. Either by design or circumstance, the nature of the Syrian opposition has morphed into something very different and very dangerous. The secular rebels have proven themselves no match for a new breed of super-jihadist, and while Assad’s regime is bad, many fear another Libya scenario or worse, an unchallenged Islamic State.

In political terms, therefore, the fact that Iran backs the murderous Assad regime is now no longer a condition for automatic moral disqualification, in a way that it certainly was three years ago. Even voices in the West are talking tentatively about going a little easier on Damascus. All this paves the way for an easier sell on rapprochement with Iran.

Finally, in terms of human rights concerns, it’s a close run race but Iran does win out. In Tehran there is a Jewish Member of Parliament, and it was decreed recently that enforcing the wearing of the hijab is unconstitutional; Iran also has far fewer political prisoners than Saudi Arabia and it treats them far better. Iranian women can vote, drive and leave the house without a guardian. Saudi women can’t do any of that and a whole lot more.

Agreeing on a deal with Iran will lift a sanctions regime that has punished millions of people needlessly. It will also divert Western politicians away from Middle East fantasies to real regional issues. There are challenges, of course; Iran needs to be more transparent, to suppress hard-liners and shut down some of its more fiery rhetoric. And while Riyadh-Tehran relations have ameliorated somewhat recently, there will be a cost to pay with the Saudi alliance.

Nevertheless, The West needs less tension in the Middle East. The presence of ISIS in the background puts the Iranian “threat” into context. Those in favour of a deal with Tehran should grab the opportunity to seal it now.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.