Diplomacy Update

This morning brings news, clipped news thus far so perhaps not wholly accurate, that the U.S. government has taken responsibility for destroying Syrian chemical arms stocks—since, predictably, no other country could be found to agree to undertake the toxic task. That means, I’m assuming, that the U.S. government will also foot the bill. I’ve heard that we intend to perform these operations on ships at sea.  The mind boggles.

As noted in previous posts, most of the roughly 1,000 tons of Syria’s CW stocks are obsolete, which does not mean denatured and safe. It means they have been superseded by better munitions. Way more than 90 percent of Syria’s stocks are militarily superfluous and useless—but very expensive to dispose of. These are the stocks mainly in the declared sites, not in the 5 or 6 undeclared sites; that’s where the “good stuff” is.

Syria has never built any such disposal facilities. In the past, its leaders probably counted on the USSR, and later Russia, to manage this problem for them, since that is where the program and the stocks mostly came from (even by indirection, since there is some reason to think that some Iraqi stocks were transferred to Syria, likely through Russian aegis, during the lead-up to the March 2003 war). So thanks to the latest juke of the Administration’s juke-and-jive ad hoc diplomacy, we get stuck with the job and the bill, and of course the civil war itself goes gruesomely on, with all the stakes involved, notwithstanding this diplomatic “success.”

How long will this take and how much will it cost? No one can possibly know. To my knowledge, we have never tried to neuter large stocks of CW at sea. I would be surprised if we already had sea-borne facilities—physical and trained personnel—sufficient to do this. So any cost estimate, or time estimate, would be a guess. Is Congress going to be asked to approve more money for this operation, or is the cost going to be ripped from existing O&M budgets—presumably mostly from the Navy’s O&M budget? What about the environmental risks involved in a sea-based operation? Has anyone carefully studied this? (I doubt it.)  Where at sea are we going to do this—in other words, nearest which nations’ littorals? In the Med? In the Atlantic? Could that be a sensitive decision? I can’t imagine that it wouldn’t be.

Moral of the story? Well, one way to put it goes like this: If you impulsively or desperately jump off the lee shore with enough momentum to carry you from exposed rock to rock, you’d better keep moving if you don’t want to fall into the drink. And you better hope those rocks keep appearing within leaping distance until you reach the windward shore, because the more jumps you take the deeper the water’s going to be if you do fall in.

Now Iran. When I wrote about the November 24 deal on November 25, I made a faulty assumption about timing issues.  Sorry.  I assumed that with the P5+1 and Iranian government signatures, the deal went into effect—just as Cold War-era agreements did. Those old agreements were never signed until all technical issues had been resolved, even if sometimes they were not really resolved so much as papered over with unilateral “agreed statements” written into indices and sidebars. (Those who used to be in this business will remember well what I am referring to.) So I thought the interim accord would expire on May 24, 2014 and the aspirational one-year final accord completion date referred to November 24, 2014. Silly me.

I first became aware of my error when a colleague pointed out an astute question asked of State Department spokesperson Jan Psaki a few days later. Psaki for the first time, to my knowledge, acknowledged that the accord would not enter into effect until certain technical discussions had been completed. “Aw, oh!”, my brain involuntarily offered my consciousness. I know the model whereby the sherpas, technical and otherwise, bring the principals to the summit in order to toss ink on paper, but I never before heard of a model wherein the ink stays wet until the sherpas do their jobs post hoc. Gotta love all this change…….

So, so what? Well, in a Reuters dispatch dated 4:30 AM yesterday, we find out “so what.” It seems that Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said in a television interview that Tehran considered the November 24 deal not yet legally binding and Iran had the right to undo it if the Western powers failed to hold up their end of the bargain. “The moment we feel that the opposite side is not meeting its obligations or its actions fall short, we will revert to our previous position and cease the process”, the Iranian news agency Fars quoted Araqchi as saying. He added: “We are in no way optimistic about the other side—we are pessimistic—and we have told them that we cannot trust you.” The Reuters dispatch then noted that an unnamed senior Western diplomat described the implementation phase of the deal, slated to start next week in Geneva, as “extremely complex and difficult.”

What does this tell us? Does it mean that internal Iranian dynamics have shifted in the past week or so, so that the Supreme Leader has had a change of heart about proceeding with the deal? Does it mean that the President and Secretary of State misled us about all this, claiming to have in hand a done deal when in fact many of the tough but critical details had not been locked down?  It’s true that Obama and Kerry did not make outlandish Pollyannish claims about the deal as did some others, but where was any specific statement from either of them or their spokesmen about the need for technical talks to come in order to bring the agreement into force?  I sure didn’t hear one.

Dean Acheson once said, without a hint of irony, that “things are not always as they seem, but sometimes they are.” Well, here is a case—two cases, actually—where, depending on your perspective, both of Acheson’s possibilities are true simultaneously! These deals concerning Syria and Iran were evidently not what they seemed, unless you’d already become inured to this Administration’s amateur-hour grasp of policy process, in which case they were.  One can only wonder with anxious amazement what comes next.