BIDEN ENJOYS IMPORTANT LEVERAGE IN DEALING WITH IRAN

BIDEN ENJOYS IMPORTANT LEVERAGE IN DEALING WITH IRAN

By Luis Fleischman

The elimination of chief Iranian nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, has led to all kinds of speculative interpretations.  The most common cliché is to say that the assassination aimed to undermine the prospect of Joe Biden’s re-entering negotiations with Iran.  Others claim that the operation was done to exacerbate a conflict between the U.S. and Iran. 

Whereas I agree that the operation would have been worthless if it failed to stop or seriously reverse Iran’s nuclear program (something we don’t know yet),  the arguments mentioned above do not provide a far-reaching explanation. 

First, the Iranian government has made Israel responsible for the attack, not the United States. If Iran is to retaliate, it will attack Israeli or Jewish targets as it did in Argentina in 1992 and 1994, and as it did in Bulgaria in 2012.

Second, there is still a sector in the Iranian government that desperately looks to relieve the sanctions, and their only hope is the Biden Administration. Should the Iranian regime seek military or another type of escalation with the U.S.,  it would be burning a vital bridge to its survival.

The only complication seems to be a situation in which Iranian hardliners undermine Biden’s plan to revive the Iran deal. 

This scenario, however, existed well before Fakhrizadeh’s assassination. Hardliners opposed talks with the Obama Administration before the JCPOA and, a quarter of a century earlier, they also opposed any interaction with America, even when it benefitted them. Iran’s hardliners disclosed the Iran-Contra affair to undermine any possibility of further engagement with the United States. As Georgetown Iranian American scholar Shireen Hunter has pointed out, this episode blocked any type of reconciliation between the United States and Iran until the 2015 JCPOA (which, although still opposed by  hardliners, passed due to fear that America would extend sanctions)

Obama, in his effort to appease the most conservative Iranian sectors, signed an agreement that left destabilizing Iranian activities and its missile development program intact. To ensure congressional approval, the former president managed to secure a vote that required a two-thirds majority to reject the deal. Of course, this cost him dearly when Trump dismantled the deal with a stroke of a pen. What is built without broad consensus and much consultation is also so dismantled. 

Most recently, the Iranian parliament approved a bill to suspend U.N. inspections and boost uranium enrichment. However, President Hassan Rouhani opposes the bill claiming it would make harder to restore the nuclear deal and ease U.S. sanctions. Rouhani understands that if Iran refuses to reach an agreement, the country will face the continuation of sanctions. If sanctions continue, mounting discontent on Iranian streets may give rise to another set of protests. 

Fakhrizadeh’s assassination also showed that even members of the Revolutionary Guards, the regime’s spine, can be targeted.  The attack may have been planned and orchestrated by the Israeli Central Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations (Mossad), but local Iranians perpetrated it. As New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman rightly observed, this shows the scope of internal opposition to the Iranian regime. With the number of successful operations inside Iran conducted by Iranian citizens, opponents of the government may have learned a skill that could subvert the Mullahs’ regime.

Furthermore, Israelis managed to penetrate deep inside the Iranian inner circles, including the Revolutionary Guards. According to recent reports, the Israelis  recruited more than a decade ago an Iranian official who quoted  slain Fakhrizadeh first-hand, saying he will produce “five warheads.” The Revolutionary Guards’ argument that a robot conducted the assassination, not by actual human beings, is aimed at concealing the regime’s vulnerability and weakness.  

 Biden will have much leverage to negotiate a better deal. The president-elect’s statements to The New York Times that he would seek to constrain Iran’s nuclear ambitions and address Iran’s missile program and destabilizing activities in the region are very encouraging. Iran is subverting countries in the Mid-East region. It is also involved in illegal criminal and seditious activities worldwide, including a hazardous presence in the Western Hemisphere, our region.  

Biden has an excellent opportunity to include people and experts from different viewpoints, including Republican foreign policy and national security experts, many of whom supported Biden. A team of rivals is needed to cover all the angles and make reasonable and pragmatic decisions. A deal of this type cannot have the status of an international agreement or a treaty if it does not have enough support. 

If Biden will succeed or not is far from certain, but he must do his best to restore America’s international credibility and learn from past mistakes. 

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About Luis Fleischman

Luis Fleischman is a professor of Sociology at Palm Beach State College, the co-founder of the think-tank the Palm Beach Center for Democracy and Policy Research. He is also the author of “Latin America in the Post-Chavez Era: The Threat to U.S. Security,” and the author of a forthcoming book, “The Middle East Riddle: The Arab-Israeli Conflict in Light of Political and Social Transformations in the Arab World,” to be published by New Academia.”