āDO WHATEVER the hell you want,ā said Iranās president Masoud Pezeshkian after being fed up with Donald Trumpās maximum pressure tactic on Iranās nuclear programme. He wants Iran to āagree to never make a nuclear weapon.ā He offered Iran to choose between military action and peace talks. He sent a letter to Iranās supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei on March 5 stating his terms for peace. Ayatollah Khamenei is not comfortable to begin negotiation with a ābullying United States.ā
Iran agreed to a nuclear deal officially known as Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action which aimed at curbing Iranās nuclear programme being weaponised. It was a negotiated deal between Iran and P5+1 ie the United States, China, the United Kingdom, France, Russia and Germany. The parties signed the agreement on July 14, 2015 under the Obama administration. The deal infuriated Benjamin Netanyahu.
His loud opposition to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action strained relations with both the Obama administration and Democrats on the Capitol Hill. āHis March 2015 appearance before Congress at the invitation of the Republican majority in the House where he incited against the [US] presidentās key international policy initiative was unprecedented. Netanyahuās effort to sink the agreement failed, but the Israeli prime minister [and AIPAC] played an important role in mobilizing congressional opposition to the JCPOA, enabling Donald Trump, notwithstanding the UNSC endorsement [UNSC resolution 2231], to repudiate it.ā
Netanyahu is bitterly opposed to any deal even today. He wants military action but not without the United States. He wants the United States to do the job for Israel. According to former IDF chief Yair Golan, āAnyone who has some understanding of the issue knows that it would be irresponsible for Israel to handle Iran without the US.ā¦You need to have the US with you.ā
Trump entered the White House on January 20, 2017 as the 45th president of the United States in his first term. In a televised address to the Americans in May 2018, he showed his argument for withdrawal withdraw from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. He called Iran āthe leading state sponsor of terror, exporter of dangerous missiles, fuelling conflicts across the Middle East, and supporting terrorist proxies and militias such as Hezbollah, Hamas, the Taliban, and al-Qaeda.ā
He blamed the Obama administration for the ādisastrousā deal. Referring to an Israeli intelligence document, he said that the report had conclusively showed the Iranian regime was pursuing nuclear weapons. He called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action āhorribleā and āone-sidedā. He concluded his speech saying that after consultations with āour allies and partners around the world, including France, Germany and the United Kingdomā¦ we cannot prevent an Iranian nuclear bomb under the decaying and rotten structure of the current agreementā and he announced his decision to walk out of the deal. His allies, whom he consulted, did not follow into the US footstep to abandon the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. The US withdrawal and the re-imposition of sanctions eventually made the deal dysfunctional.
Israelās chief of staff said in March 2021 that he had viewed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action as a āgood deal although it may have flaws.ā According to him, āWe knew about them from the start. I was deputy chief of staff when the deal was signed and I was responsible for Iran in the General Staff. When the deal arrived, we held a discussion with all the officials and said to ourselves that if Iran complied with it, it would be an amazing achievement. The fact is that without the deal, theyād be closer to nuclear weapons than with it, so we need to take action to improve the deal and then create a new one, rather than fighting it and losing.ā
According to an analysis of Zack Beauchamp, a senior correspondent at Vox, āThe problem, though, is that the deal wasnāt ārottenā. The best evidence we have suggests Iran was actually complying with the deal. Iran has dismantled a huge portion of its nuclear programme and given international inspectors wide latitude to make sure it isnāt cheating; the country is significantly further from a nuclear weapon than it was when the deal came into force.ā¦ The Middle East just got a new crisis, and itās entirely on Trumpās making [in the first term]ā and the second term is making the region dangerously confrontational.
It is an open secret that Israel has achieved nuclear capability in the 1960s and has been enjoying a nuclear monopoly since then. US support for Israelās conventional military superiority, born out of the arms deals negotiated after June 1967, was intimately related to Washingtonās concern about the dangers that Israelās nukes posed for increased proliferation in the region. The US offered to assure Israelās regional conventional superiority, and in turn Israel agreed to maintain āambiguityā about its nuclear arsenal.ā Israel maintains a triad of land, sea, and air-launched nuclear-tipped bombs. Israel has its bombs in the basement, implicit and undeclared.
How close is Iran to a bomb? There is debate. The United States and Israel claim that Iran is pursuing to make nuclear weapon. Iran persistently denies the claim and says that its nuclear programme is for a peaceful use. An assessment on Iranās nuclear programme states, āIranās nuclear programme has reached the point at which, within about one week, Iran might be able to enrich enough uranium for five fission weapons. For that uranium to pose a nuclear weapon threat, however, it would have to be processed further, and the other components of a successful weapon would have to be ready to receive the processed uranium. Weaponisation activities could take anywhere from several months to a year or more, although the time frame is uncertain.ā
As the words of war is intensifying between the United States and Iran, China and Russia backed Iraās repeated claims that its nuclear programme is āpeaceful in nature.ā In a joint statement after a trilateral ministerial meeting in Beijing on March 14, China and Russia called for diplomatic talks based on mutual respect and an end to the unilateral illegal sanctions imposed by the United States and its western allies against Iran. If diplomacy fails, the world could see a US military strike against Iran, the last potential challenger to Israelās conventional military supremacy and nuclear monopoly in the Middle East. Or the world could see Iran displaying a bomb to avert the strike. A gamble between war and peace!
Ģż
Mohammad Abdur Razzak ([email protected]), a retired commodore of the Bangladesh navy, is a security analyst.
