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The Saudi Lobby’s Scheme to Destroy the
Iran Deal
Posted
By William D. Hartung and Ben Freeman On May 23, 2018 @
12:01 am In | 7 Comments
Benjamin Netanyahu’s April
30 presentation [1] accusing
Iran of lying about its nuclear program was clearly aimed at a Western
audience, and at one man in particular—Donald Trump. Trump was already inclined
to violate and exit the multi-party deal to block Iran’s path to a nuclear
weapon, but Netanyahu’s presentation offered a timely addition to the
administration’s rhetorical arsenal. His PowerPoint performance, filled
with misleading assertions [2] and stale information [3] dressed
up as new revelations, was referenced by Trump as part of the justification for
abandoning the nuclear deal.
While this garnered headlines,
another U.S. ally—Saudi Arabia—had been orchestrating a quieter but equally
effective lobbying and public relations push to dismantle the deal. The Saudis’
arguments were used just as much, if not more, by Trump in justifying his
decision for the U.S. to walk away from a carefully crafted agreement that even
some of his own military leaders had acknowledged [4] was
working.
The Saudi lobby’s push began long
before the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was formally announced on
July 14, 2015. In fact, Saudi lobbyists had been working behind the scenes in
the U.S. for years to ensure that the Kingdom’s concerns were incorporated into
any deal Washington would agree to with Iran—if there was to be a deal at all.
In total, the Christian
Science Monitor found [5] that Saudi Arabia
spent $11 million dollars on Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA)-registered
firms in 2015, and “much of this spending relates to Iran.” They were also
assembling former policymakers like Senator Norm Coleman, whose FARA disclosure [6] mentions his
work on “limiting Iranian nuclear capability.” More recently, Coleman penned an
op-ed in The Hill applauding Trump for leaving the deal without disclosing [7] that
he was being paid by the Saudi government.
Despite their strong
opposition to any deal with Iran, however, many of the Saudis’ concerns were
ultimately addressed by the JCPOA, specifically their demands that “snapback”
provisions be incorporated to quickly reinstitute sanctions if Iran violated
the agreement and that inspectors have access to military and other suspect
sites. Above all, the Saudis wanted an assurance that the deal would prevent
Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. The agreement provided this and President
Obama guaranteed [8] it. This led
to what many had thought impossible—Saudi Arabia supporting the Iran deal [9].
Obama sealed the grudging support of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States in a
May 2015 meeting at Camp David where he offered “reassurances” that the deal
would not jeopardize their security, underscored by a promise [10] to sell them
even more weaponry.
But Saudi support
for the deal was tepid and ephemeral at best. While publicly supporting it, the
Saudis and their lobbyists in D.C. were quietly working to undermine it. Their
arguments largely centered on two points: that the funds freed up by the deal
would underwrite Iran’s continued support for terrorist groups, and that the
deal would do nothing to halt Iran’s ballistic missile program.
While more than two dozen D.C.
lobbying and public relations firms working for Saudi interests have registered
under FARA since the U.S. agreed to the Iran deal, none has been more
aggressively pushing these anti-Iran talking points than the MSLGroup (which
acquired long-serving Saudi client Qorvis Communications in 2014). The
MSLGroup, which has been paid more than $6 million dollars [11] by
the Saudis just since the U.S. agreed to the Iran deal, has distributed a
variety of “informational materials” (formerly called propaganda [12]) on each of these
topics, including a five-page fact sheet on “Iranian Aggression in Yemen [13],”
and a press release on Iran being the “biggest state sponsor of terrorism [14],”
among many others. And of course, the MSLGroup wasn’t alone in spreading
anti-Iran propaganda on behalf of the Saudi regime. For example, as recently as
March 2018, the Glover Park Group distributed information on Iran’s “region,”
and Hogan Lovells distributed “facts about the Houthis and Iran [15],”
with a section on Iran’s ballistic missiles.
With these talking points
in hand, the Saudis saw an opportunity in the election of the neophyte Donald
Trump to up the ante on Iran, and they invested heavily in courting [16] him. Their
efforts paid off handsomely as Trump made his first overseas visit to the
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, initially supported them in their spat with Qatar
(until he learned the U.S. has a rather large military base in Qatar), kept
U.S. military support and bombs flowing for a Saudi-led campaign in Yemen that
has cost more than 10,000 civilians [17] their
lives, and agreed to sell them billions of dollars in additional U.S. weaponry
of all sorts, from more munitions to a costly missile defense system. But Saudi
Arabia still wanted more—they wanted the U.S. out of the Iran deal.
While Saudi Arabia’s most
unlikely ally in this cause, Israel, took a very outspoken approach to move the
president, which culminated in Netanyahu’s misleading presentation, the Saudis
used their well-financed lobbying machine to disseminate their message into the
D.C. bloodstream. Their primary talking points found their way to the
president’s ears and became routine features of his justification for
abandoning the deal. The White House statement [18] justifying
leaving the Iran deal is littered with Saudi lobby talking points, including
that “The JCPOA failed to deal with the threat of Iran’s missile program,” and
Iran “continues to fund terrorist proxies… In Yemen, the regime has escalated
the conflict and used the Houthis as a proxy to attack other nations.” The
president’s remarks [19] on the day he
announced that the U.S. was abandoning the deal are also rife with language
that could easily have been lifted from a Saudi-financed “fact sheet.” In fact,
Trump’s second sentence, “the Iranian regime is the leading state sponsor of
terrorism,” is nearly verbatim off of an anti-Iran talking point [14] distributed
by the MSLGroup.
Why did the Saudis
want the U.S. to abandon the Iran deal? A New York Times analysis [20] identified
what is probably the primary reason—a fear that the deal would be the first
step towards a U.S. rapprochement with Iran that would undermine the Saudi
regime’s power in the region in general and its campaign against Iran in
particular. “Exiting the deal, with or without a plan, is fine with the
Saudis,” the Times wrote. “They see the accord as a
dangerous distraction from the real problem of confronting Iran around the
region—a problem that Saudi Arabia believes will be solved only by leadership change
in Iran.”
Former State Department
official Jeremy Shapiro underscored [20] this point
when he noted that the Saudis and their Gulf allies “believe they are in this
existential conflict with the Iranian regime, and nuclear weapons are a small
part of that conflict…. If the deal opened an avenue for better relations
between the United States and Iran, that would be a disaster for the Saudis,” he
said. “They need to ensure a motivation for American pressure against Iran that
will last even after this administration.”
One disquieting
outcome of the trashing of the Iran nuclear deal is that Saudi Arabia has
threatened to acquire a nuclear weapon of its own if the end of the agreement
leads Iran to revive its program. This is not the first time Saudi leaders have
made such threats. Just after Trump announced the U.S. would be leaving the
deal, the Saudi foreign minister said [21] that if Iran now
builds a nuclear weapon his country “will do everything we can” to follow suit.
So on top of its implications for increased conventional conflict in the
region, the end of U.S. participation in the Iran deal could spark a nuclear
arms race in the Middle East—an outcome that would have been far less likely if
U.S. participation in the Iran deal had been maintained.
The potential for a Mideast
nuclear arms race is yet another example of the disastrous consequences of
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s reckless foreign policy, which
includes everything from his regime’s brutal, counterproductive intervention in
Yemen, to the Saudi-led effort to impose a blockade on Qatar, to its promotion
of regime change in Iran—preferably carried out by the United States.
In the wake of the U.S. pullout
from the Iran deal, we can expect the Saudi lobby, working in concert with
administration allies ranging from Jared Kushner to newly appointed national
security advisor John Bolton, to double down in its efforts to promote these
ill-advised, dangerous directions for U.S. foreign policy in the region.
Countering Riyadh’s blatant influence peddling should be part of an expanded
effort to distance the United States from its increasingly risky,
counterproductive relationship with Saudi Arabia. If Mohammed bin Salman’s
aggressive policies—and Saudi advocacy for them in Washington—continue, Riyadh
is one “friend” the United States should consider doing without.
William D. Hartung is the
director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International
Policy, and Ben Freeman directs the Center’s Foreign Influence Transparency
Initiative.
7 Comments To "The
Saudi Lobby’s Scheme to Destroy the Iran Deal"
#1 Comment By Howlvis On May 23,
2018 @ 12:11 am
Trump carries water for our
putative allies; he’s neither a nationalist nor a populist, he’s a dupe.
#2 Comment By Procivic On May 23,
2018 @ 4:27 am
Does the world’s only superpower
so easily succumb to pressure from a medieval regime of bogus “princes? Can
America be bought by a family clique while its mainstream media ignores the
Saudi war crimes in Yemen?
#3 Comment By john On May 23,
2018 @ 9:10 am
Procivic asks can America be
bought by a family clique. Quod erat demonstratum.
Does the Israeli settler wing in
the person of Netanyahu have the US government firmly in its grasp? Quod erat
demonstratum.
#4 Comment By Georgetownie On May
23, 2018 @ 9:31 am
“While Saudi Arabia’s most unlikely ally in this cause, Israel,”
“Unlikely” in what way? It is
well-known that Israel and its supporters in the West like Middle East
dictators and monarchs who kill and oppress Arabs while making nice with
Israel, e.g. Mubarak or Sisi in Egypt, and maybe some of the Gulf State
autocrats. That Saudi Arabia hates Iran is icing on the cake.
#5 Comment By b. On May 23, 2018
@ 2:11 pm
This is another good reference in
regards to the Democratic Party’s dishonest and reckless “Russia!” campaign,
claiming that actual and alleged “meddling” in US elections is somehow the
necessary, sufficient, and most compelling reason to consider Trump “unfit for
office”.
It would appear that those same
Democrats might well be equally “unfit” for their offices, for reasons of
Israeli and Saudi “meddling”.
There is also another observation
to be made here regarding the timeline: Saudi Arabia and its allies began the
invasion and occupation of Yemen in March 2015, and proclaimed it “over” just
before the May 2015 meeting at Camp David the author refers to. The US provided
fuel, targets and ammo from the start, and accelerated Saudi-US arms deals even
before that meeting, and Obama committed to tens of billions of weapon sales.
It stands to reason that the
pretend “buy in” by Saudi Arabia into JCOPA was purchased with tidy profits
generated by Saudi blood money, and US support for an illegal act of aggression
that has become a starvation campaign of collective punishment bordering on
genocide. Saudis are racists, too.
Obama’s decision making with
respect to Yemen shows the man as the callous profiteer that he is. History
will have to decide whether Trump’s willingness to perpetuate these crimes is
ultimately worse than the supreme crime in which Obama implicated the US, his
administration, and himself.
He’ll probably blame that on
Clinton, too.
#6 Comment By I Remember Jim Baker On
May 25, 2018 @ 1:58 am
The Saudis are only chiming in
with the Israelis on this. Netanyahu on the other hand has been whining about
Iran for over twenty years, including every one of his Stalinesque appearances
at joint sessions of Congress.
If you’re looking for a foreign
culprit for Trump pulling out of the Iran deal, it is clearly and obviously
Netanyahu and the Israelis, who have been bankrolling and blackmailing US
politicians far longer and with much greater success than the Saudis.
#7 Comment By JeffK On May 25,
2018 @ 10:12 am
To heck with the Israelis. To
heck with the Saudi Princes. Both sides of the same coin. Get the USA out of he
middle east. ASAP. Our incredibly stupid wars have turned it into Hell on
Earth. Welcome as many refugees as we can safely bring in, since WE (the good
old US of A) and the violence we started, condone, and actively support, are
the reason they are fleeing their homes.
The rest of the world should make
every reasonable investment available to limit demand for oil, which will hurt
the Saudi parasites, and Putin’s Russia, right where it hurts. Unfortunately,
the price of oil is going up again, providing the Saudis and the Russians with
the means to create mischief everywhere.
Meanwhile, Christian Today shows
that evangelicals are the least likely to endorse allowing middle east refugees
into the US. Even though Dick Cheney and George Bush 2 started this horror
show. And Israel continues to fan the flames with settlement building and the
shooting of protesting Palestinians.
[22]
Article
printed from The American Conservative: http://www.theamericanconservative.com
URL
to article: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-saudi-lobbys-scheme-to-destroy-the-iran-deal/
URLs in this post:
[1] presentation: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/30/netanyahu-claims-to-show-irans-secret-nuclear-files-obtained-by-israel.html
[2] misleading
assertions: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-43963677
[3] stale
information: http://foreignpolicy.com/2018/05/02/netanyahus-iran-lied-presentation-shows-why-trump-should-keep-the-nuke-deal/
[4] acknowledged: https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/iran/mattis-says-iran-nuclear-deal-includes-robust-verification-1.6032581
[6] disclosure: https://www.fara.gov/docs/2244-Short-Form-20140715-30.pdf
[7] without
disclosing: https://splinternews.com/the-hill-ran-an-anti-iran-deal-op-ed-by-a-paid-agent-of-1826045693
[8] guaranteed: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-saudi-jubeir/saudi-arabia-satisfied-with-obamas-assurances-on-iran-deal-idUSKCN0R42D420150904
[9] Saudi
Arabia supporting the Iran deal: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/23/world/middleeast/iran-nuclear-deal-saudi-arabia.html
[10] promise: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/15/world/middleeast/obama-saudi-arabia-iran-persian-gulf-security.html
[11] $6
million dollars: https://www.fara.gov/docs/5483-Supplemental-Statement-20170531-25.pdf
[13] Iranian
Aggression in Yemen: https://www.fara.gov/docs/5483-Informational-Materials-20170525-6.pdf
[14] biggest
state sponsor of terrorism: https://www.fara.gov/docs/5483-Informational-Materials-20170403-7.pdf
[15] facts
about the Houthis and Iran: https://www.fara.gov/docs/2244-Informational-Materials-20180313-7.pdf
[17] 10,000
civilians: https://www.cfr.org/interactives/global-conflict-tracker?marker=36#!/conflict/war-in-yemen
[18] statement: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/president-donald-j-trump-ending-united-states-participation-unacceptable-iran-deal/
[19] remarks: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-joint-comprehensive-plan-action/
[20] analysis: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/us/politics/trump-iran-nuclear-deal-news-analysis-.html
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