viewpoint: ben cohen

Deal or no deal? Shut up and make one, says Iran

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As everyone seems to be saying, there is less than a fortnight to go before we hit the Nov. 24 deadline for a final agreement with Iran over its nuclear program. And as more and more people are forecasting, things aren’t looking too good.

The issue isn’t whether we get an agreement, but what kind of agreement we get. Moreover, if we don’t get an agreement, what happens next?

Fundamentally, Western negotiators are being hampered by the same knowledge and intelligence gaps that have dogged the entire Iranian nuclear saga for more than a decade. Put simply, the Iranian regime’s deliberately obstructive strategy has been to prevent inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) from building up a true, verifiable picture of Iran’s nuclear installations and capabilities. While IAEA experts are frequently very good at guessing what they haven’t been told, the fact remains that the Obama administration is pushing for a deal without the critical data on which success depends.

Indeed, so unreliable have the Iranians been that the Joint of Plan of Action agreed to in Geneva on Nov. 24 last year wasn’t actually implemented until January of this year, leaving Iran’s uranium and plutonium production programs “significantly closer to breakout capacity than if the Joint Plan of Action had been implemented on November 24, 2013,” according to former IAEA deputy director general Dr. Olli Heinonen. 

When I conducted a long interview with Heinonen earlier this year, he sounded a warning that may come to haunt those seeking an Iranian deal at almost any cost. “Everything that happens [with Iran’s nuclear program] is at a known, declared place,” he said. “There is no assurance that there isn’t another enrichment plant under construction somewhere else.”

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