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Reuters on Thursday published an extensive evaluation
- double bylined by the outlet's veteran U.S. foreign policy
correspondent Arshad Mohammed and its energy & environment
correspondent Timothy Gardner - conveying new responses from the Obama
administration to concerns over what outside experts have evaluated as seven straight months of Iran violating restrictions on its energy exports.
The Joint Plan of Action (JPA), announced in November, limits Iran to
exporting roughly 1 million barrels per day (bpd) of crude averaged out
over the JPA's six-month implementation window. Iran subsequently busted
through that limit every single month, until by late May Timothy
Wilson, a visiting fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies
(FDD), calculated that
it had become mathematically impossible for Iran to not end up
violating the JPA restrictions. When pressed on the issue at a late May
press briefing, State Department Spokesperson Jen Psaki gestured toward
an old administration talking point,
under which Iranian oil exports would drop so much in the coming months
that the average over the six-month period would end up around the
JPA's 1 million bpd figure. Figures that emerged a few days after
Psaki's comments had Iranian oil exports actually increasing
in May versus April, rather than precipitously sliding per the
administration's predictions. On Wednesday the State Department
confirmed that Iran has also been shipping crude to Syria in recent
months, which FDD Executive Director Mark Dubowitz described as
"of clear financial and strategic benefit to Iran" in direct violation
of the JPA's caps. The Thursday Reuters report summarized the
administration's new rebuttal to the range of new evidence and
calculations: "that condensates, a premium-price form of very light oil
found at natural gas fields and mostly used to make plastics, do not
count as crude oil; that Iranian gifts of oil to Syria are not "sales"
and so also do not count; and that Iran is allowed to sell between 1
million and 1.1 million bpd under the deal, a range slightly above the
White House's public estimate." Bloomberg on Thursday wrote up roughly the same story
- this one penned by the outlet's veteran foreign policy writer Indira
Lakshmanan and its Middle East energy correspondent Anthony DiPaola -
which it began by noting that Bloomberg's own numbers, in line
with independent estimates, had Iran far exceeding the JPA's caps. At
stake are analyst and lawmaker concerns, described in both articles,
that Iranian violations of straightforward export restrictions indicate
that the regime cannot be trusted to implement a comprehensive nuclear
deal.
The New York Times on Thursday conveyed remarks
from Palestinian Authority (PA) Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah - who
sits atop the newly formed cabinet agreed to by the rival Hamas and
Fatah factions - admitting that his unity government has functionally
zero control over the Hamas-dominated Gaza Strip, part of an interview
that was published on the same day that 88 senators dispatched a letter
to President Barack Obama demanding that the PA be monitored for
compliance with among other things its treaty obligations to Israel. The letter [PDF] referenced black-letter U.S. legislation
banning assistance to any government over which Hamas exercises an
undue influence, and blasted the terror group for its "refusal to meet
recognized international demands: recognition of Israel, renunciation of
terror, and acceptance of previous Israel-PLO agreements." The
convergence of the two dynamics - PA impotence in the Gaza Strip and
deepening congressional calls for scrutiny - may prove problematic for
Hamdallah and for PA President Mahmoud Abbas as they scramble to
circumvent congressional moves to block aid to the Fatah-Hamas
government. The 1998 Wye Accords obligate the PA
to "establish and vigorously and continuously implement a systematic
program for the collection and appropriate handling" of any weapons in
the Gaza Strip except those permitted by the earlier 1995 Oslo II agreements [PDF].
That treaty in turn sharply limits the kinds of arms that government
security forces are allowed to possess, and Hamas's forces and missile
arsenal fall far beyond that scope. The Thursday New York Times
article described Hamdallah as having "repeated political platitudes
about Palestinian unity, but offered no practical program to deliver
it." The language in the Wye Accords obligating Ramallah to disarm Hamas
and integrate its forces, which is applicable in "areas under
Palestinian jurisdiction," does not seem to allow the PA to ignore its
obligations in cases where implementing the required "systematic
program" would be really inconvienent or challenging.
Gains
being made across Iraq by the radical Sunni group the Islamic State in
Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) - Iraq's second largest city of Mosul on Tuesday, Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit on Wednesday, and what appeared to be further gains
aimed at marching on Baghdad on Thursday - have triggered an armed
Iranian response, with the Islamic Republic pouring assets into the
country to bolster the Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nouri
al-Maliki. The Wall Street Journal reported late Thursday
that Iranian forces had enabled the central government to regain
control of most of Tikrit, and there was evidence that Iraqi Shiite
forces currently waging war on behalf of the Bashar al-Assad regime in
Syria had been recalled
back into the country. Top Iranian officials declared that Tehran was
willing to push even more assets into Iraq, which they read as part of a
global war with Iran opposite the U.S. and its Middle East allies. Al
Monitor quoted one senior Iranian official declaring that
"the fire will burn those are backing ISIS. The United States and Saudi
Arabia will feel the heat soon." Nonetheless Thursday also saw the
development of what seems to be an inevitable debate in Western
capitals, and especially in Washington, over the degree to which
counter-terror coordination with Iran was desirable or possible. The Telegraph published an opinion
that tersely insisted that "as Middle East borders are redrawn by
jihadists, the West should regard Iran as an ally." Tony Badran, a
research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, responded by
predicting that "mind-numbing silliness of this sort [will] become
conventional wisdom now." As a policy argument the stance is not new,
stretching back to the immediate post-Sept. 11 era when it was argued by
some that the U.S. and Iran shared 'mutual interests' in stabilizing
the Middle East. The argument fell into disfavor in subsequent years as
intelligence revealed that Iran was actively destabilizing Iraq and
Afghanistan, and was providing insurgents with weapons to kill American and allied troops. The State Department's 2014 country-by-country terrorism report assessed that
"despite its pledge to support Iraq’s stabilization, Iran trained,
funded, and provided guidance to Iraqi Shia militant groups." The same
report revealed that
Iran was also facilitating the transit of Sunni jihadists, effectively
fueling both sides of instability-generating regional Sunni-Shiite
conflicts.
Reuters on Thursday conveyed comments
made at a Rome conference by Iran's Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas
Araqchi threatening that the Islamic republic "will return to 20 percent
enrichment if a deal cannot be reached" between Tehran and the P5+1
global powers, which have in recent days reportedly stumbled
over issues ranging from uranium enrichment capacity to Iran's refusal
to come clean over past military dimensions of its nuclear program.
Araqchi further told the conference attendees that "failure to reach a
deal will be a disaster for everyone." Agence France-Presse (AFP) had already assessed
a day earlier that the parties would fail to conclude negotiations by
the interim Joint Plan of Action's (JPA) July 20 deadline, and that
instead talks are "increasingly likely to be extended given the
seemingly huge gap that remains between the two sides." The JPA had
swapped Iranian concessions on its uranium and plutonium program for billions in sanctions relief that Tehran badly needed to stabilize its teetering economy. Critics of the deal had repeatedly and across a variety of contexts
called attention to the essential asymmetry of the agreement's terms,
which traded an irreversible infusion of capital for reversible Iranian
moves. Araqchi's threat to reverse the Iranian regime's core concession
on uranium - the dilution of some of the 20% enriched stock to 5% purity
- may be taken as strengthening the case of those skeptics.
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