AIPAC’s failure gives Biden a lane for Iran deal, if he has the spine

Last week 43 hawkish senators sent a letter to the White House pushed by the Israel lobby group AIPAC calling on President Biden not to return to the Iran nuclear deal, as he promised, without addressing Iran’s “destabilizing activities” in the region.

The great news is that only 43 senators signed the letter, including 14 Democrats, one of them Israel lobby tool Bob Menendez. Forty-three is quite a fall from an AIPAC lobbyist’s boast 20 years ago (to Jeffrey Goldberg) that “In twenty-four hours, we could have the signatures of seventy senators on this napkin.”

Foundation for Middle East Peace says the letter was a key part of AIPAC’s lobbying agenda this spring, and an embarrassment.

[The] letter has been circulating since at least March 12, and was the subject of intense lobbying starting last week with AIPAC’s virtual lobby extravaganza. The fact that only 43 senators signed on to the letter, notwithstanding this lobbying, makes this a notably unsuccessful letter, compared to other AIPAC-backed efforts. 

The headline at Responsible Statecraft was, “Hawkish Iran letter falls flat in the Senate.” Matthew Petti noted that only two Democratic members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — Ben Cardin (Md.) and Chris Coons (Del.) — signed on, and only three Republicans.

Sina Toossi of the National Iranian American Council says that the letter was an effort to “hamstring” Biden and it failed in part due to the lobbying against the letter by his organization and others, such as Win Without War and J Street, the Democratic Party Israel lobby group. Toossi says there is today a broad consensus inside the Democratic Party to return to the Iran deal; and in fact the vague language of this letter does not rule out a return by the U.S. to the deal.

The question remains, as we’ve said before here, whether Biden has the gumption to take on the Israel lobby threats to Iran and return to a deal. Because Israel is the only country in the world actively pushing the U.S. against the deal. And so far Biden has been very disappointing.

A year ago Biden issued a statement that the Trump administration should ease sanctions so that Iran can get humanitarian relief during the COVID crisis. Since he’s come into office Biden has done nothing himself to ease the “maximum pressure” sanctions that Trump imposed after he tore up President Obama’s signal foreign policy achievement in 2018. Biden could have lifted sanctions with a stroke of the pen, but he has “done absolutely nothing,” Toossi says.

“I have my doubts about whether Biden will return to the deal. I’m very concerned that it’s too late.”

Politico reports that Biden will offer Iran “a small amount of its billions” of dollars frozen by sanctions in exchange for major concessions; but Toossi says this is a piecemeal offer for Iran’s biggest bargaining chips, and is sure to be rejected. And the Iranian elections in June could bring in a hardliner, making it that much harder to return to the deal.

The failure of AIPAC’s Senate letter suggests that Biden actually has all the political capital he needs to push for a return to the Iran deal right now. And to lift sanctions as he urged Trump to do just a year ago.

Joseph Cirincione compares Iran to the Vietnam War for Lyndon Johnson, it destroyed his presidency. Biden was so afraid of rightwing attacks that he decided to hold off on diplomacy, but the result is a vacuum/crisis between the countries that could explode into “a war we cannot win and never need fight.” Just what the Israel lobby wants.

“Biden blew it,” Cirincione writes. “The real risk avoidance move would have been to rejoin the agreement in January.”

“The best way forward would have been to immediately come back to the [nuclear pact] with an executive order, and they didn’t do it,” Gérard Araud, the former French ambassador to the United States, said in Foreign Policy.  “The advice of the Europeans to the Americans was do it quickly and immediately, because all the signals they had from the Iranian side was as soon as the Americans come back, we will come back.”

There is clearly no American interest in not being in the deal. Iran has always been willing to work with the U.S., and Israel has repeatedly confused matters with its propaganda, Scott Horton says in his new book on the forever wars, “Enough Already.”

The common propaganda campaign has it that Iran is the ‘world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.’ This is simply laughable. They back Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. But though both have used terror tactics in the past, both groups are now elected political parties. And while they provide determined armed resistance to Israel, neither is an international terrorist group nor do either of them target the United States.”

Then there is the strategic damage of not returning to the deal. Iran has become a point of tension between the Chinese and the United States. China helped author the Iran deal in the first place back in 2015 and wants to stick by it. China and Iran signed a sweeping deal on Saturday that would provide China oil and help end Iranian isolation.

On March 18, in the very undiplomatic showdown with Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan in Anchorage, angry Chinese diplomats criticized U.S. foreign policy, saying the U.S. now has a bad global reputation for everything from the “slaughter” of black people in the U.S. to launching wars with “massive casualties” to “long-arm jurisdiction” in some regions. In a clear reference to Iran, China’s foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, said:

[O]n some regional issues, I think the problem is that the United States has exercised long-arm jurisdiction and suppression and overstretched the national security through the use of force or financial hegemony, and this has created obstacles for normal trade activities, and the United States has also been persuading some countries to launch attacks on China…

This is a clear reference to the fact that Canada arrested Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou at the urging of the United States for alleged violation of Iran sanctions in December 2018. China retaliated by arresting two Canadians working in China.

China is justly angry over this overreach, and Joe Biden could make the issue go away. Right now he seems intimidated by the Israel lobby. It took Barack Obama till his second term to forge the Iran deal, and he spent a ton of political capital on the matter. As Ben Rhodes wrote mordantly in his memoir, the Obama administration was involved in “multiple wars in which thousands were killed, and yet nothing in our foreign policy was as fiercely contested as the nuclear deal with Iran.” Joe Biden remembers that, and it has made him timid.