Trustworthy is as trustworthy does
by digby
So the hawks are having a hissy fit because the Iran deal doesn’t allow for no-notice spot inspections whenever we feel like it. They are simply shocked that we would allow Iran to get away with such a thing.
Unfortunately, it’s partly our own fault. Iran is just learning from our earlier arms control behaviors. Jonathan Schwarz explains:
[D]uring the 1990s the U.S. demonstrated with Iraq that it would routinely abuse the weapons inspections process in order to uncover such legitimate secrets — and use them to target the Iraqi military and try to overthrow the Iraqi government.
The United Nations Special Commission, or UNSCOM, was created in 1991 after the Gulf War to verify that Iraq no longer had any nuclear, chemical or biological weapons programs. And though we now know Iraq was essentially disarmed within several years, UNSCOM stayed in business thanks to a combination of Iraq’s lies about its past WMD activities and a U.S. desire to maintain harsh economic sanctions justified by Iraq’s purported WMD.
By the mid-1990s, Iraq claimed that the U.S. was using UNSCOM as cover for espionage aimed at things that had nothing to do with WMD, such as Saddam Hussein’s location. While the U.S. strenuously denied this for years, it turned out to be true. Moreover, former UNSCOM inspector Scott Ritter contends that the U.S. attempted to manipulate UNSCOM so that it could be used as a tool in an attempted coup against Saddam Hussein organized by the U.S. in 1996.
Iraq acted at the time just as the U.S. would if the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons had been infiltrated with “inspectors” who wanted to assassinate Bill Clinton and then showed up at the White House. For instance, when Clinton bombed Iraq in Operation Desert Fox in 1998, one of the justifications he gave was that Iraq had “shut off [UNSCOM] access to the headquarters of its ruling party.” The CIA later discovered that Saddam had in fact been at the party headquarters when UNSCOM arrived, and had stopped UNSCOM from entering “to prevent the inspectors from knowing his whereabouts, not because he had something to hide.”
Moreover, the U.S. made extensive use of UNSCOM to target Iraq for bombing campaigns. According to Ritter, toward the beginning of the UNSCOM process CIA agents who were part of the inspection team used GPS to record the precise location of sites used for Iraqi military manufacturing — sites that soon afterwards were struck by U.S. cruise missiles. And as the Washington Post reported and the U.S. Air Force later confirmed, the U.S. used UNSCOM’s data to choose targets for Operation Desert Fox, including many that had nothing to do with Iraq’s purported WMD programs. (In retrospect, what’s remarkable about the history of UNSCOM isn’t Iraq’s real but largely minor obstruction, but its extensive cooperation. Ritter remembers inspections when he was “looking through a logbook dealing with presidential security, such as how they arranged convoys” and at Iraqi intelligence headquarters “examining the darkest secrets of how they recruited agents and how they paid them.”)
So Iran’s refusal to allow snap inspections doesn’t prove that its leadership wants to conceal a nuclear weapons program. It more likely suggests that its leadership simply wants to preserve its conventional military and personally remain alive. This is especially plausible given that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was crippled in an 1981 assassination attempt carried by out the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, or MEK, an Iranian opposition organization that supported Iraq during the 1980s Iran-Iraq war. Making this even more threatening from Iran’s perspective, the MEK is now beloved by much of the U.S. foreign policy elite, and has apparently killed numerous Iranian nuclear scientists with Israeli funding and training.
Yes, they are liars too. That’s why these deals are so hard to negotiate — nobody trusts each other. If they did, there wouldn’t be a need for an agreement in the first place. But let’s not pretend that we have been paragons in all this. One of the reasons why it’s so hard to get this done is that our history in the region is also replete with double crosses and interference.
The hawks basically want Iran to cry uncle — or rather they want to show the world that they made Iran cry uncle. Unfortunately, the only method we have for efficiently getting that job done would be self-defeating — Armageddon takes us out too. Just standing around demanding stuff doesn’t seem to work for some reason.
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