by Jay Solomon
Arab governments were also stunned by the terms of the agreement. None of them were willing to take to the political stage like Netanyahu. Nor did they have the same lobbying apparatus in Washington to amplify their voices. But diplomats from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and other countries made it clear to Washington policy makers that they too believed the agreement could stoke an arms race in their region, with some saying they’d be forced to follow Iran’s lead and develop nuclear technologies. “There’s no way the Saudis won’t match whatever Iran has,” an Arab foreign minister said at a dinner party for foreign policy experts held in Washington weeks before the agreement was finalized in Vienna. He noted Riyadh’s financial support for Pakistan, which had an expanding nuclear weapons arsenal. He said the Saudis could basically call in a bomb from Islamabad.
The White House responded by setting up an “anti-war room” in the basement of the West Wing to mobilize its campaign for the agreement. Computer screens remained logged on to Twitter to monitor commentary from opponents, and a small television helped staffers keep tabs on the cable news debate. For weeks the operation buzzed with senior White House officials, digital gurus, and rank-and-file aides running a rapid-response operation. The “anti-war” name of the room underscored the White House’s realization earlier that year that the nuclear deal was unlikely to win any Republican votes in Congress and would require a battle plan focused on mustering support among Democrats skeptical of the deal.
The heart of the message crafted by the Obama administration during months of political plotting was a sharp yet divisive one: those who opposed the agreement were lobbying for another Middle East war. Despite the fact that only a few on the right were advocating military strikes, the White House weeded out nuance in its messaging when selling the deal. “Are you for solving this diplomatically or being forced…to war?” Ben Rhodes, one of Obama’s closest foreign policy advisors, privately told Democratic activists in describing the message they should sell to Congress and their constituents back home. In an interview, Rhodes said about the congressional brawl: “I loved it. I thought it was healthy….Maybe we didn’t change minds on the other side, but we answered their questions.”
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CONGRESS DEMANDED ITS SAY on the nuclear agreement, and some form of oversight. President Obama had made it clear he would veto any moves to block the deal. But with Democrats joining the Republicans, lawmakers succeeded in winning a ninety-day period over which to review the terms of the deal. A vote would be scheduled at the end of the fall to show either support for the deal or the announcement of legislative efforts to kill it. Republicans needed to win over two-thirds of the Senate to garner enough votes to block the agreement and override an expected presidential veto.
Obama and his supporters pressed forward with the White House’s plan to typecast the deal’s opponents as warmongers. They specifically sought to tie critics of the agreement to those in Washington who supported the invasion of Iraq. The White House grumbled about the neoconservatives who were seeking to sabotage Obama’s most important international initiative. Jewish leaders were worried the White House’s campaign was taking on a not-so-subtle anti-Semitic tone, with its references to moneyed lobbyists and their ties to Prime Minister Netanyahu.
Mobilizing opposition to the deal in Congress was the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC. AIPAC has historically sought to be bipartisan and maintain good ties to both Democratic and Republican administrations. The organization took no position on the Iraq War (nor did the government of Israel). But AIPAC came out forcefully against the Iran agreement and oversaw a $20 million ad campaign to try to overturn it.
The White House was livid. In early August, President Obama met with two AIPAC leaders to fire a shot across their bow. The president accused the organization of spreading false messages about the terms of the agreement and of failing to allow his administration to correct those messages before AIPAC’s members. Some Jewish groups had run ads describing the president as an appeaser and comparing him to the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, who had signed the Munich Agreement with Adolf Hitler in 1938. Obama told them he wanted to maintain good relations with AIPAC, but also that he would challenge what he thought was a distorted position on the Iran deal.
A day later, Obama gave a nationally televised speech at American University. His aides chose the school specifically in order to dust off memories of John F. Kennedy—the Democratic icon had given a speech there at the height of the Cold War to warn against the dangers of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Obama raised similar concerns about the threat of conflict with Iran during his comments. But he also sent a clear warning to AIPAC and many in the pro-Israel crowd that his administration would not take the attacks on the agreement lying down. “If the rhetoric in these ads and the accompanying commentary sounds familiar, it should,” Obama said. “Many of the people who argued for the war in Iraq are now making the case against the Iran nuclear deal.”
A number of Jewish leaders worried that the White House was essentially blaming them for the string of Middle East wars that had consumed the United States and dredging up old tropes about Jews and their power to control politicians and governments. “Words have consequences, especially when it’s authority figures saying them, and it’s not their intent, perhaps, but we know from history that they can become manipulated,” said Malcolm Hoenlien, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, who was among those who met with Obama in August. “Of all political leaders, he certainly should be the most sensitive to this.”
Almost a dozen Republican presidential candidates, meanwhile, ganged up on the nuclear deal and uniformly rejected it. Many used their opposition to the deal to enhance their pro-Israel credentials, often through hyperbolic language and personal attacks on Obama. “By doing so, he will take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven,” former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee said. “This is the most idiotic thing, this Iran deal. It should be rejected by both Democrats and Republicans in Congress and by the American people.”
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THE BATTLE FOR THE NUCLEAR DEAL at home grew personal, with critical coverage in the press targeted by the White House and its army of supporters as the fight in Congress intensified. The ghosts of the Iraq War still hadn’t been exorcised in Washington in the spring and summer of 2015. The middle ground in the Iran debate essentially evaporated. Those in the media who voiced criticism of the emerging deal were often typecast as hawks or pro-Israel activists. Other reporters seemed to turn into cheerleaders for the merits of the agreement and how Obama was ushering in a new era of foreign policy.
Traveling to Switzerland in March 2015, I found it difficult to navigate the divide between the administration and its opponents, both at home and abroad. Even before the talks concluded, I was briefed by European diplomats that there was growing concern about the terms on which Kerry and his team were making concessions. France wanted the United States to press Iran to provide access to a number of nuclear scientists and military sites in order for the IAEA to gain clarity on just how far Iran had gone in developing nuclear weapons technologies. They were worried Kerry had relented on this point.
I followed up on the topic of France’s ire and asked senior U.S. administration officials in Lausanne if discord with France could undercut the push for an agreement. I was assured this wasn’t the case. These American diplomats privately belittled the French as being minor players in the talks and two-faced. They said that for all of Paris’s tough talk and bravado, the French would be the first to travel to Iran to seek business deals once the agreement was forged. They also said that at the end of the day, the Americans were making all the tough calls.
I continued to follow up on the issue of the French concerns with a colleague who covered the White House. President Obama had called French president François Hollande in the middle of the talks in Switzerland to discuss tactics. We wan
ted to know from the White House if the president had browbeaten the French leader for insubordination. The administration wasn’t amused by our inquiry: I was informed I had been kicked off Kerry’s next flight to the nuclear negotiations, which was coming up in just a few days. They said I had violated the terms for traveling with the United States’ top diplomat, because I’d followed up on issues I’d heard discussed on his plane—a zone of silence—and in particular the tensions with the French. I’d never realized there was such a rule. The last reporter kicked off a State Department flight had broken a news embargo on when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s plane would land in Iraq, raising widespread concern inside the State Department’s diplomatic security bureau about the future presidential candidate’s safety. I didn’t feel my questions equated to a national security threat.
Others in the press corps got it even worse. David Sanger of The New York Times was subjected to a coordinated White House–State Department Twitter assault after writing that Iran might not have the technical capabilities to dispose of its nuclear stockpile, as required by the nuclear accord. George Jahn of the Associated Press, meanwhile, was accused by White House supporters of being an Israeli asset after receiving a leaked document from the IAEA. His story documented how the Iranians wouldn’t allow agency personnel to conduct their own soil sampling at a suspect military site. Instead, they would provide their own samples and would videotape the process, which Jahn equated with “self-inspections.” Supporters of the White House, including in the nonproliferation community, charged that the document was forged and that Jahn had no journalistic ethics. Weeks later the agency announced that the major points raised in the AP’s story were accurate.
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THE ULTIMATE FAILURE OF REPUBLICANS to derail the deal was greeted with euphoria in the White House and State Department and among President Barack Obama’s closest political supporters. Democrats hailed the Iran deal as a victory for a new era of U.S. foreign policy dominated by diplomacy rather than war and coercion. They raised hopes that an opening to Tehran would put an end to five decades of enmity between the United States and Iran and breed regional cooperation and business ties. They cited the deal as a major advancement in the quest to stop the spread of nuclear weapons.
“The new agreement doesn’t overthrow the clerical regime ruling Iran. It doesn’t change Iran’s policies toward Israel or its Arab neighbors. And it doesn’t force Iran to end the repression of its own people,” wrote Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, an organization that emerged as one of Washington’s biggest champions of the Iran deal. “The agreement forged between Iran and the world’s powers does only one thing, but it is a big one: It reverses and contains what most experts consider the greatest nuclear proliferation challenge in the world.”
On the day the Republican gambit failed in the Senate, President Obama made an unannounced trip to the State Department to meet with the U.S. negotiating team. John Kerry wasn’t in his office when the president arrived, causing him to make a beeline up to the exclusive seventh floor to greet his boss. They cracked champagne and made toasts near a balcony that overlooked the National Mall, the presidential memorials, and, in the distance, the Potomac River. They discussed the many obstacles that had stood in the way of achieving the agreement, and how they had been overcome step by step.
At the heart of Obama’s philosophy was a sense that they had righted history. The United States had rushed into a war in Iraq a decade earlier, and the president and his team believed they had narrowly avoided the same mistake in Iran, thus rewarding the voters who elected him. The era of a militarized foreign policy was over, they believed. “The president was proud that we found a diplomatic solution,” said a senior U.S. official who joined in the State Department celebration. “Without an agreement, the likely fallout would have been a conflict. Sooner or later.”
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FAR FROM OPENING IRAN UP to Western ideas and communications, the nuclear deal, at least initially, hardened the regime both against Washington and against its own internal opponents in Tehran during the months around the deal’s completion in July 2015.
The Revolutionary Guard continued its pattern of arresting American citizens in a bid to gain leverage over the United States and the White House in any dispute, whether concerning the nuclear deal or regional issues. Exactly a year before the deal, the IRGC’s intelligence unit arrested The Washington Post’s Tehran bureau chief, Jason Rezaian, and charged him with espionage. This was in addition to two Americans already held in Iranian prisons. The Revolutionary Guard then arrested four more U.S. nationals after the deal, including a prominent Iranian American businessman named Siamak Namazi and his eighty-year-old father, who had worked at the UN.
The Obama administration responded to the arrests by again returning to a secret negotiating track with Tehran, this time through Geneva, Switzerland. Many of the United States’ interlocutors were Iranian intelligence officials, rather than the smooth Westernized diplomats who ran the nuclear channel, such as Foreign Minister Zarif and Vice President Salehi. In January 2016, the White House approved a prisoner swap that resulted in the release of four Americans—including Rezaian, though not the Namazis—in exchange for seven Iranian nationals convicted of arms smuggling in the United States, as well as the dropping of extradition requests for fourteen Iranian government officials and business executives. The administration hailed the deal as another sign of the strength of direct negotiations with Tehran. But critics accused the White House of bowing to Iranian extortion. The day before the Americans were allowed to leave Tehran, the U.S. Treasury sent $1.7 billion to Iran. The administration said it was repayment for debts that went back to the shah’s rule, but many in Congress viewed it as ransom. The money was later deposited in Iran’s Ministry of Defense.
By early 2016, Iran had made good on its pledges under the nuclear deal to scale back its program. It took thousands of its centrifuges off line, shipped out most of its fissile material, and poured cement into the core of the Arak reactor. This was no small achievement, given that both the United States and Israel feared Iran had been just months away from building a nuclear bomb. The administration’s claim it would take Iran a year to build a bomb if the Iranians mobilized now appeared to be accurate. “There are serious constraints on their nuclear program for fifteen years,” Energy Secretary Moniz told me. “Fifteen years, with serious verification measures, should give considerably more comfort to our allies in the region.”
But progress on the Iran deal was undercut by Iranian aggression elsewhere. Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guard stepped up ballistic missile tests, defying UN bans and raising fears they were moving ahead on a nuclear weapons program, even if the production of fissile material had largely been mothballed. U.S. officials have long acknowledged that there’s little need for an Iranian missile program unless the country eventually plans to mount its rockets with nuclear payloads.
The joint Iranian-Russian moves into Syria, meanwhile, only stoked fears in Israel and the Arab states that Iran was going to use the end of its economic isolation to extend its regional role. Tehran was expected to get around $100 billion of its frozen oil revenues returned, in addition to the lifting of most international sanctions. Israeli officials said the Revolutionary Guard was using its presence inside Syria to plan joint military operations with Hezbollah on the Golan Heights. U.S. naval ships on numerous occasions interdicted Iranian ships ferrying arms to insurgents in Yemen, the Houthis, who had toppled the Saudi-backed government in San’a, fueling a furious air war launched by Riyadh in an attempt to drive them back.
In the Arabs’ eyes, the defense of Assad and the Houthis were just the latest Iranian power grabs, greatly abetted by the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the Iran deal. “Iran is an occupying force in Syria,” Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, Adel al-Jubeir, said on the sidelines of the UN assembly shortly after the deal. “We will devise a military solution if President Assad doesn’t cede power.”
The Saudis believed Iran was essentially in control of four Arab capitals—Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut, and San’a.
Counter to the White House’s hopes that the Iran agreement could help stabilize the Middle East, signs were emerging in the months after its completion that a broader war was a possibility. The Sunni states vowed to increase their support for co-religionist rebels who were fighting against the Russian-Iranian-Syrian alliance. And jihadist groups, including the Islamic State, were using Moscow’s and Tehran’s entrance into the Syrian war to mobilize their ranks. European officials worried that a new wave of refugees would flood into their countries from Syria and Iraq. They believed that the Islamic State could use the influx to send in terrorists, or recruit refugees, to launch more attacks on European cities like the ones in Paris and Brussels in 2015 and 2016. “This is the most dangerous time in the Middle East in decades,” said Emile Hokayem, a regional analyst at the Institute for Strategic Studies in London. “A fuse has been lit, and the White House has diminished its ability to confront it.”
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U.S. AND EUROPEAN OFFICIALS involved in the Iran diplomacy say it is too early to gauge how the nuclear agreement will impact Tehran in the long term. President Obama has told aides that he believes the deal will strengthen moderate leaders such as President Rouhani as the country’s economy improves and reconnects to the West. The Ayatollah Khamenei, who’s battled cancer over the past decade, will eventually exit Tehran’s political scene, possibly bringing an end to the theocratic system he helped bring into being in 1979.
In a positive sign, Rouhani’s political allies gained seats in the Iranian parliament in January 2016, after many campaigned on the merits of the nuclear deal. Even though the regime marginalized many of Iran’s democratic leaders after the 2009 uprising, the international community saw the vote as possibly the beginning of an era of reform. Iran is expected to reap considerably more economic gains in the coming years if the nuclear deal holds. “Historically, whether in Russia or eastern Europe, these types of political openings tend to bring political reforms. And you could make a good argument that the same will happen in Iran,” said Michael McFaul, who served as the Obama administration’s ambassador to Russia and worked on democracy promotion in the White House. “But is it a slam dunk? No!”
