(Photo: AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
In the week since the Iran deal was announced, we've been watching the political theater of reactions to it. As with most theater, the first thing for the audience to remember is that the dialogue is deceptive. The characters skirt what's really on their minds.
In the Iran drama, America and Israel have become virtually one stage. Ostensibly the argument in both countries and between them is whether the agreement is a success or a surrender. But if it were a real debate about the accord itself, there would have been a long silence after the Vienna press conference, as ex-diplomats, retired generals, and the Strangelove-ian community of nuclear arms experts pored over the dense 159-page text. Instead, a host of politicians, lobbyists, and talking heads responded almost immediately. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu labeled it a "stunning historic mistake," apparently before the final text was released, but he wasn't alone in making up his mind in advance. Journalists familiar with the players could have written their reactions ahead of time.
The subtext of the reactions deserves at least as much attention as the text of the agreement. In part, what the people at the center of the stage are really talking about is their gut feeling about the very idea of an agreement: Do you believe that diplomacy is possible, that it is legitimate to negotiate with a dangerous adversary, and that something good may come of it-or do you see compromise as intrinsically being a form of appeasement? That is, do you believe that Vienna is the new Munich?
And in part, the real argument is ad hominem: What do you think of Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu? For some Republicans, what makes the agreement obviously nefarious is that Obama's name is signed on it. Were a latter-day Ronald Reagan to reach the same accord, they'd consider it worthy of trust and praise. And let's be uncomfortably honest with ourselves: This works both ways. Some of you reading these words support the Vienna Agreement because it's Obama's, or at least because the GOP and Netanyahu are attacking him for it.
The two subtexts are difficult to separate, because Obama explicitly believes in diplomacy and Netanyahu consistently labels every negotiated agreement as Munich-unless he negotiated it himself.
Or perhaps, in his heart, that would be true even if he did reach it himself.
Netanyahu's distrust of negotiation has been reinforced by his own abysmal record at it-a record with which his American fans are only vaguely familiar.
Netanyahu's name, for instance, is signed on the 2011 deal with Hamas, in which Israel freed more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, many convicted of murder, in exchange for one captive Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit. Netanyahu's predecessor, Ehud Olmert, resisted popular pressure to make such a deal for Shalit. It wasn't the first disproportional prisoner exchange between Israel and a terrorist organization, but it was the most lopsided. This week, the Shin Bet security agency linked Shalit releasees-again-to the murder of an Israeli civilian.
Netanyahu's record in domestic negotiations is nearly as dismal. In the coalition agreements he reached this spring, he made a series of contradictory promises to smaller parties that doom him to constant renegotiation and make it impossible to write a national budget. Two of those parties have already maneuvered to block the arrangement negotiated under his direction with the monopoly that holds the drilling rights to Israel's offshore natural gas reserves. That's a good thing, since the agreement is a giveaway of national wealth to corporate interests.
On the other hand, in the talks with the Palestinians forced on him by Obama, Netanyahu gave away nothing. Netanyahu cannot conceive of an agreement in which he doesn't sacrifice Israel's basic security, and therefore ignores the consequences of refusing to reach a deal.
So too with Iran, except that in these negotiations he has been a spectator. Just as he sees every negotiation as Munich, his vision of an acceptable outcome is also drawn from the World War II era: total surrender. Iran must give up its nuclear reactors, its very last centrifuge, its involvement in the brutal, multi-sided regional chess game, and for that matter, its regime.
The only means that might have a chance of achieving that goal is an American invasion of Iran. Even Netanyahu and his Republican sycophants know that the votes aren't available in Congress for that. So here's another subtext: Their rage at the Iran deal is partly anger at their inability to achieve their fantasy.
The one set of responses that has confounded expectations-albeit only among American observers of Israel-is that of Israeli opposition candidates from the center and center-left. Isaac Herzog, head of the Zionist Camp (a.k.a. Labor), immediately declared that as an "Israeli patriot," he believed the "dangerous agreement" was "bad for Israel."
Here context is even more important than subtext. Much as President George W. Bush did in the lead-up to the Iraq War, Netanyahu has succeeded in setting the terms of a national security debate. In the United States of 2002, it was difficult to challenge the presumption that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction; in the Israel of 2015, it's nearly as hard to challenge the presumption that an Iran left with any nuclear program is an existential threat.
Herzog's criticism is an embarrassing example of a slightly left-of-center politician who fears he'll fail the patriotism test-though not as embarrassing as Hillary Clinton's Senate speech in favor of invading Iraq.
By now, there are also detailed expert analyses of the agreement and of its likely impact on the Middle East. A CIA report reportedly says that Iran is likely to spend little of its post-sanctions windfall on regional adventurism. I'd like to cite that in support of the accord, but I know that the CIA has a record as abysmal as anyone else's in predicting what will happen in the Middle East. Will the deal strengthen moderates or hardliners in Iran? I submit that no one has a clue.
Here's what we know about the Vienna agreement: It creates a significant chance of keeping Iran from building a bomb for a long, but finite, time. It does not transform Iran into a more open society than Egypt or Saudi Arabia, or make it less likely than Turkey to support a brutal proxy in Syria. It reduces but does not eliminate the chance that the struggle for regional control will become radioactive.
Is this reason to celebrate or rage? More specifically, is it reason for members of Congress to vote against it, when their "success" could scuttle the deal without convincing most of the world to renew sanctions?
I submit that with few exceptions, the answers that people give to these questions have little to do with a close reading of 159 pages. The "no" camp believes that Netanyahu should be trusted because Obama cannot possibly be relied on. It believes, with Netanyahu, that compromise is closely related to catastrophe. To me, this sounds like madness. I'll be impolitely honest: My judgment begins with having no trust in Netanyahu's judgment, and with a belief that negotiated compromise is preferable to a fantasy of total victory.
