The Final Call

Outraged over U.S.- Iran deal, Israel gets billion dollar pay off

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WASHINGTON - While the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany co-signed with the United States on an agreement limiting Iran’s nuclear ambitions for the next 15 years, the U.S. is now busying itself with attempts to ease the resulting political tensions with Israel, and to mollify enough members of Congress so that the deal can take affect.

The real “untold story” about the Middle East nuclear race is the fact that Israel already possesses atomic weapons. “This whole idea of talking about a nuclear arms race in the Middle East without admitting who’s racing is bizarre.” Grant Smith, Director, Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy

President Obama is defending the global agreement as critics—Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the loudest among them—are accusing the White House of appeasement. The agreement reached July 14 will see Iran reduce its stockpile of enriched uranium by 98 percent and cut its number of centrifuges with which to enrich more uranium by two-thirds. In exchange, Iran will see the immediate easing of $100 billion worth of international sanctions that have battered its economy. Congress has 60 days to review the agreement.

“If 99 percent of the world community and the majority of nuclear experts look at this thing and they say: ‘This will prevent Iran from getting a nuclear bomb,’ and you are arguing either that it does not or that, even if it does, it’s temporary, or that because they’re going to get a windfall of their accounts being unfrozen, that they’ll cause more problems, then you should have some alternative to present. And I haven’t heard that,” President Obama told reporters at the White House one day after the agreement was announced.

“And the reason is because there really are only two alternatives here: Either the issue of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon is resolved diplomatically through a negotiation, or it’s resolved through force, through war. Those are—those are the options,” Mr. Obama said.

The success in the nearly two-year-long Iranian nuclear negotiations came just one week after two soaring personal domestic victories for the president—the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision upholding the Affordable Care Act (ACA or “Obamacare”), and his moving, commemorative eulogy for the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, a Black South Carolina state senator and the pastor of Charleston’s Emmanuel AME Church who was slain with eight other parishioners in his church by a White supremacist, Confederate sympathizer.

Vice President Joseph Biden, who served for 35 years in the U.S. Senate, was at work immediately after the deal was announced telephoning and then visiting senators, and listening to their concerns about distrust of Iran. The administration will need at least 34 senators to support the agreement to sustain Mr. Obama’s veto, if legislation is adopted to block it. A two-thirds majority would be required in both houses to override a veto and disapprove the agreement.

Democrats “are getting a lot of pressure from constituents who are suspicious of any agreement,” Senate Minority Whip Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) said, according to Politico. Mr. Obama “has his hands full.” Republicans in the Senate and the House, as well as GOP presidential candidates are almost universally opposed to the deal.

Former Secretary of State and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who served in the Senate from New York and House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), both, joined Mr. Biden early, registering their support for the agreement.

Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose past warnings about Iran’s supposed nuclear capacity have contradicted the findings of his own spy agency, called the deal a “historic mistake. And Israel is not bound by this deal with Iran, because Iran continues to seek our destruction. We will always defend ourselves,” Mr. Netanyahu said according to published reports.

But Defense Secretary Ash Carter was in Israel with offers of more defense aid immediately after the agreement was reached. “Friends can disagree but we have decades of rock-solid cooperation with Israel,” Sec. Carter told reporters traveling with him. Among the proposals Mr. Carter was expected to discuss is a 50 percent increase in U.S. military aid to the Zionist state, increasing the gift from $3 billion per year to as much as $4.5 billion per year.

But while many Republican, Jewish, and conservative politicians oppose the agreement, a majority of Jews in both the United States and Israel support it, according to Jackie Goldberg, who served in the California State Assembly, on the Los Angeles City Council, and as president of the Los Angeles Unified School Board. “Fifty-nine percent of American Jewish people back the agreement,” Ms. Goldberg told Margaret Prescod on KPFK-FM’s “Sojourner Truth Radio.”

That information was revealed in “a poll by ‘J Street,’ the centrist, liberal voice of American Jews—not J-Pac, which is the Netanyahu wing, and certainly not Jews for Peace which is a much more progressive wing—this is kind of a mainstream group who did a poll and found that the deal was a good idea.

“The same poll gave Obama a 56 percent job approval rating, for example. What this business of Netanyahu saying that somehow it’s bad for Israel and then you wake up and find out that the United States has offered to increase military (aid) to Israel by a billion and a half (dollars per year). How is that going to help anything?” Ms. Goldberg said.

Investigative journalist Gareth Porter agreed. “The biggest news in the #IranDeal text is what isn’t there: the content of the new Security Council resolution & its arms embargo language,” Mr. Porter, who recently returned to this country after two weeks in Vienna where the agreement was negotiated said in a statement released by Washington’s Institute for Public Accuracy. “U.S. arms manufacturers have already exploited #IranDeal for $6 billion in new arms contracts with Gulf regimes,” said Mr. Porter who is author of Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.

The real “untold story” about the Middle East nuclear race is the fact that Israel already possesses atomic weapons, according to Grant Smith, director of the Washington-based Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy. “This whole idea of talking about a nuclear arms race in the Middle East without admitting who’s racing is bizarre. You can’t talk about a race without admitting that some have not only left the starting line, but have lapped the field,” Mr. Smith said in a statement released by the Institute for Public Accuracy.

Mr. Smith reported that the “U.S. Confirmed (the) Existence of Israeli H-Bomb Program in 1987.” That report states: “The 1987 report’s confirmation of Israel’s advanced nuclear weapons program should have immediately triggered a cutoff in all U.S. aid to Israel under the Symington and Glenn Amendments to the U.S. Foreign Assistance Act.

“Under two known gag orders—punishable by imprisonment—U.S. security-cleared government agency employees and contractors may not disclose that Israel has a nuclear weapons program. GEN-16 is a ‘no-comment’ regulation on ‘classified information in the public domain.’ ‘DOE Classification Bulletin WPN-136 on Foreign Nuclear Capabilities’ forbids stating what 63.9 percent of Americans already know—that Israel has a nuclear arsenal.”

All the while, Israel’s nuclear weapons arsenal—estimated at between 60 to 400 nuclear weapons has been virtually ignored. Unlike Iran and all the Arab countries, Israel is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Still, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu continues his country’s charade. “Today a terrorist nuclear superpower is born, and it will go down as one of the darkest days in world history,” he said after the agreement was announced.

“I think what we’re really seeing is an attempt to make it appear that somehow or another that we don’t have Jewish support for this, when in fact, nothing could be further from the truth,” Ms. Goldberg continued. “Even in Israel, a majority of Israelis support the pact. The most important issue is that it really does stop the attempt to build a nuclear weapon by Iran. It stops it. It stops it dead cold. And it would have the most stringent and intrusive inspections in monitoring history, of any regime in any time in the world.”

“I’m confident this agreement is a road to peace,” Ambassador Seyed Hossein Mousavian told Pacifica Radio’s “Democracy Now!” He’s an associate research scholar at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, former diplomat who, from 1990 to 1997 served as Iran’s ambassador to Germany. From 1997 to 2005, he was head of the Foreign Relations Committee of Iran’s National Security Council.

“The big issue, as President Obama said, the agreement prevented a war, could (have been) disaster for the U.S., for Iran, for the region and for international community. Second, the deal has closed all possible pathways toward possible militarization, weaponization of Iranian nuclear program. The U.S. and the West, they were worried if Iranian nuclear program in the future would divert toward weaponization. That’s why President Obama’s red line was zero nuclear bomb, no nuclear bomb,” said Mr. Mousavian.

“This red line was welcomed in Tehran very much, because Iranians, they believe and they were reiterating they have never been after nuclear bomb, and they would be ready to give every assurances that the Iranian nuclear program will remain peaceful forever. After 23 months of tough negotiations, they have finalized 159 pages, which would cover the American red line, which is no nuclear bomb,” Ambassador Mousavian said.

In addition, the agreement could result in substantial benefits to the American population, according to Dr. Gerald Horne, who holds the Moores chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston. Dr. Horne told Margaret Prescod: “The deal is potentially transformative. If all things work out properly, you’ll see an unleashing of a tidal wave of Iranian petroleum on the market. The price of gasoline at the pump in the United States might fall nationally to $2.25 per gallon, which is like a wage increase for U.S. workers.

“It’s going to wound Texas, because whenever the price of energy goes down, the most conservative state is wounded, and that also happens to be the main opposition to Barack Obama, and not to mention world peace in general. It will further weaken the Saudi’s oil weapon,” Dr. Horne said. “Vice President Biden let the cat out of the bag last year when he noted correctly that the Gulf Arabs—particularly the Saudis—are the main supporters of ISIS, which the United States is sworn to fight.”

But Dr. Horne is concerned that Congress may override Mr. Obama’s expected veto, scuttling the agreement. But the president has another important legislative ally in his corner, House Minority Leader Pelosi. “The historic nuclear agreement announced today is the product of years of tough, bold and clear-eyed leadership from President Obama. I commend the president for his strength throughout the historic negotiations that have led to this point. I join him in commending Secretary Kerry and Secretary Moniz for their leadership,” Mrs. Pelosi said in a statement.

“Without a deal, we risk even more war in the Middle East,” the president warned at his news conference, “and other countries in the region would feel compelled to pursue their own nuclear programs, threatening a nuclear arms race in the most volatile region in the world.”