Iran – where Biden and Israel's legal fraternity converge
By Caroline B. Glick
Israel Hayom
April 30, 2021
Iranian President Hassan Roughani at one of Iran's nuclear facilities
The US media is treating the leaked recordings of Iranian Foreign
Minister Javad Zarif's conversations with a journalist allied with
President Hassan Rouhani as a major scoop. The recordings were allegedly
set for release after Rouhani leaves office following this summer's
presidential elections.
While there is good reason to doubt their authenticity, assuming the
recordings are authentic, Zarif told his interlocutor two notable
things. First, he said the Iranian government is merely a mouthpiece.
All decisions related to Iran's foreign and security affairs are made by
the Revolutionary Guards in conjunction with Iran's dictator Ayatollah
Ali Khamenei. Zarif said that his own contribution to foreign
policymaking was "nil."
As a historical document, the recordings, (if authentic) were helpful.
It was good to hear Zarif admit this truth in his own voice. But he
didn't say anything that wasn't already widely known.
Since the first "moderate" Iranian president appeared on the scene
with Mohamed Khatami's election in 1997, thousands of articles and still
more intelligence reports have been written asserting and proving that
Iran's president and his ministers have no actual decision-making power
in regards to anything with strategic significance to the regime.
All Iranian government decisions rest in the hands of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
When Rouhani, the "moderate" presidential candidate was elected in
2013, Israel brought reams of proof to the Obama administration that
Rouhani had no influence on regime policy and that anyway, there was
nothing moderate about him. Then-President Barack Obama, his vice
president Joe Biden and his secretary of state John Kerry along with all
of their advisors were unmoved. They didn't care. They wanted to say
the Iranian government was "moderate" to sell the policy of realigning
the US towards Iran. It was an ideological position and they had no
interest in reconsidering it. So the facts were dismissed.
The second significant thing Zarif allegedly said was that Kerry
essentially acted as his agent. Zarif said that Kerry told him about 200
Israeli military strikes on Iranian targets in Syria. It bears noting
that Zarif cultivated ties with Kerry since his service as Iran's UN
ambassador. Zarif's time at the UN overlapped with Kerry's tenure as
chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In the recordings,
he indicated that Kerry had developed an emotional attachment to Zarif
over the years.
While Kerry denied transferring the information to Zarif during his
tenure as Secretary of State or in their meetings after he left office,
Kerry didn't mention his actions in the Senate.
Whether or not Kerry actually told Zarif directly about Israeli
operations, the fact is that senior Obama administration officials
repeatedly leaked the media information about Israeli military strikes
against Iranian targets in Syria to the media. And since they told CNN,
why wouldn't they tell Zarif and his associates?
Kerry is currently a member of Biden's National Security Council and
also serves as his envoy for climate change. Zarif's alleged revelations
provoked calls from Republican lawmakers that Biden fires him from his
positions.
Even in the unlikely event that Biden dumps Kerry, it won't have an
impact on his administration's policies towards Iran. Every senior
official involved in the administration's Iran policy shares Kerry's
pro-Iran and anti-Israel positions.
Take Colin Kahl. Biden's appointment of Kahl to serve as
Undersecretary of Defense for Policy was confirmed this week by the
Senate. After word broke of the Mossad's May 2018 seizure of Iran's
nuclear archive, Kahl posted a tweet insinuating that the archive was
faked and the entire operation was an Israeli conspiracy to drag the US
into war with Iran.
Speaking in opposition to Kahl's confirmation, Senator Ted Cruz
called Kahl, "the most virulently anti-Israel nominee that would serve
in the Biden administration."
Recalling Kahl's conspiracy theory about the Iran's nuclear archive,
Cruz remonstrated that Kahl has "a lifelong obsession with and antipathy
for the State of Israel, and he's demonstrated a willingness to
endanger Israeli lives and American lives to advance that hostility."
Cruz placed Zarif's claims about Kerry in the context of Kahl's
appointment saying that like Kerry, Kahl, "has been credibly accused of
weaponizing and leaking classified information."
Now, thanks to the Democrats who approved his nomination, Kahl is
responsible for determining the US security posture towards Iran
together with the Robert Malley, the State Department envoy to
negotiations with Iran. Like Kahl, Malley has a long history of
obsessive hostility towards Israel and support for Iran and its
terrorist proxies.
Working with them is CIA Director Bill Burns, who ran secret
negotiations with Iran for then secretary of state Condoleezza Rice
towards the end of George W. Bush's second term. This week Iran scholar
Michael Rubin reported that Burns was in Baghdad over the past several
days. There he reportedly met with Iranian officials in private homes.
Rubin reported that top administration officials have asked Iraq to
release $4 billion "from an Iran escrow account that the Iraqi
government had established during the Trump administration in order to
ensure that Iraq could purchase Iranian fuel while ensuring that the
proceeds would not subsidize Iranian terror."
These moves align with the Biden administration's previous successful
effort to persuade South Korea to unfreeze $1 billion in Iranian funds
after Iranian forces illegally seized a South Korean ship and held its
sailors captive.
The goal of these efforts is clear. The Biden administration is
seeking to give Iran money now, before it is in a position to cancel the
economic sanctions the Trump administration applied to Iran because
Iran refuses to curtail its illegal nuclear activities.
Burns moves, it should be noted are taking place as Malley is
carrying out indirect negotiations with Iran in Vienna. The goal of
those talks was previously to bring Iran into full compliance with the
2015 nuclear deal in exchange for the end of US economic sanctions.
Malley has since adopted a position that Iran must merely return to the
state of its nuclear activities before the Trump administration
abandoned the deal. That is, Iran may continue to cheat, but at the
level that it was cheating in 2018.
Under the 2015 agreement, all limitations on Iran's nuclear
activities are due to end in nine years. So at best, all Malley's talks
will do is postpone Iran from fielding a nuclear arsenal until 2030.
This brings us to Israel. This week, the heads of Israel's security
establishment traveled to Washington to brief top Biden administration
officials on the latest developments in Iran's nuclear project. On its
face, the trip was an obvious move. The Americans are holding diplomatic
talks with Iran. As the US's chief Middle East ally, Israel sent its
top officials to coordinate its efforts to block Iran from becoming a
nuclear power with those of its ally. Unfortunately, the trip was an
exercise in futility.
Even before Mossad Director Yossi Cohen, National Security Advisor
Meir Ben Shabbat and head of Military Intelligence Dorector Maj. Gen.
Tamir Heyman left their offices, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki
said that their briefings would have no impact on US policy towards
Iran. Like the Obama administration before it, the Biden administration
is ideologically committed to realigning US policy towards Iran and away
from Israel and the Sunni Arab states. And no facts will sway it from
that course.
So too, just as Kerry could not be trusted with classified
information Israel shared with him and his Obama administration
colleagues, so his colleagues in the Biden administration can be
expected to misuse information Israel provides them about Iran.
Facing this reality, in which the US – the most important strategic
actor in the region – is now openly in Iran's corner, Israel needs to
conceive and implement a strategy to bypass the US and achieve its goal
of preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power.
As a general rule, strategic policies are developed through political
processes. Although it will be difficult, Israel has the ability to
develop an international political strategy that achieves its goal while
bypassing Biden. But this brings us to Israel's domestic political
morass. Here it is far from clear that Israel's elected leaders have the
political power to develop and implement a coherent and successful
strategy for preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Moreover,
the domestic political obstacles harm Israel's ability to implement a
successful international strategy.
Consider past efforts. According to a 2012 exposé by Israel's investigative journalism program Uvda ("Fact"),
in 2010, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Defense Minister
Ehud Barak ordered the IDF and Mossad to prepare plans to attack Iran's
nuclear installations. Then-Mossad director Meir Dagan and then IDF
chief of general staff Gabi Ashkenazy refused to follow the order. They
claimed that Netanyahu and Barak lacked the legal authority to give such
an order. At the time, current attorney general Avichai Mandelblit
served as the IDF's Military Advocate General. In a posthumously
broadcast interview, Dagan insisted that Netanyahu's determination to
destroy Iran's nuclear program was driven by "political" considerations.
In 2016, Uvda broadcast an interview with Leon Panetta. In 2010, as
Obama's CIA director, Panetta was Dagan's counterpart. In the interview,
Panetta revealed that after refusing Netanyahu's order, Dagan travelled
to Washington and informed Panetta about the order – thus alerting the
US to Israel's plans.
Dagan's move was arguably treacherous, but more to the point, the
fact that in 2010 he had faith in the Obama administration's commitment
to Israel's security than he had in Netanyahu shows that at a minimum,
Dagan had no understanding of international politics. The year before,
at his address at the American University in Cairo, Obama declared
before the world his intention to realign US policy away from Israel and
the US's traditional Sunni Arab allies and towards Iran and the Muslim
Brotherhood. Dagan clearly failed to grasp the implications of the
speech. Netanyahu and Barak clearly understood them.
As Attorney General, the same Mandelblit who claimed in 2010 that
Israel's elected leaders lacked the authority to determine strategic
policy has even more aggressively eroded the governing powers of
Israel's political leadership, while arrogating those powers and
authorities to himself and his office. Just this week, Mandelblit took
his legally ungirded efforts to new heights by declaring illegal a legal
vote of the government which approved the appointment of a justice
minister that Mandelblit didn't want.
In this state of affairs, with elected leaders hamstrung by unelected
lawyers devoid of international political awareness or accountability
to the voting public, the likelihood that Israel's elected leaders will
be capable of conceiving and carrying out a policy to block Iran's rise
as a nuclear power is not high.
The Israeli public discourse about legal reform generally focuses on
the domestic implications of the legal fraternity's seizure of the
political powers of elected officials. But as the episode from 2010
makes clear, the current power imbalance between unelected lawyers and
elected politicians has acute strategic implications. Until Israel's
elected leaders seize back their powers from the government attorneys,
they will be unable to contend with the strategic challenge posed by the
Biden administration's embrace of Iran and gutting of the US-Israel
alliance
Kobili Traore
