August 6, 2015
Dear Mr. Smith,
I write as your constituent to protest your opposition to the Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action negotiated with the government of Iran by
the Obama administration and the other P5+1 nations. This plan
represents the best hope of peace in the Middle East; it is one of the
most significant diplomatic efforts of our lifetime. It deserves the
full support of the U.S. government, thus your call to obstruct it is
neither prudent nor statesmanlike.
Your arguments
against the plan are not sound. The inspection regime it establishes is
among the most intrusive ever instituted by a non-proliferation
agreement. Even with the concessions made to Iranian security concerns,
there is no possibility that the Iranians could secretly develop a
nuclear weapon given the monitoring network the plan would put in place.
Moreover, the proposed inspection regime would provide the U.S. and its
allies with vastly more information than we currently have, so the idea
that “gaps” in the plan pose a greater threat than the status quo is a
patent fallacy.
Likewise, since the provisions of the
inspection regime never expire, it is simply not true, as you claim;
that once “restrictions [on the refinement of nuclear material] expire,
Iran could enrich on an industrial scale and the U.S. and its allies
will be left with no effective measures to prevent Iran from initiating
an accelerated nuclear program.” If Iran were to do as you envision,
inspectors would immediately be aware of this activity, and the U.S. and
its allies would possess all of the means currently at their disposal
(both military and non-military) to put a halt to such ambitions.
Moreover, because the Joint Comprehensive Plan, by mandating the
immediate surrender of enriched uranium and the destruction of the
majority of Iran’s centrifuges, increases the “breakout time” for a
nuclear weapon from three months to a full year, even once the most
severe restrictions of the plan expire, it provides the U.S. with
greater resources and more time to prevent an Iranian nuclear weapon
than it currently possesses. Thus, again, the provisions of the plan are
vastly superior to the status quo.
Even if one
accepts that, despite its profound improvements on the status quo, the
Joint Comprehensive Plan is not ideal, this would not redeem your
obstruction. In order to justify setting the perfect in opposition to
the good, one would need to demonstrate that there are practical means
to improve upon the current plan. Anyone who has paid attention to world
affairs for the past decade knows that this is not so. The Joint
Comprehensive Plan was only achieved through the painstaking cultivation
and maintenance of a broad coalition of allies that imposed punishing
sanctions on Iran at great cost to their own people. This deal
represents the outer limit of what that coalition was willing to
sacrifice in the cause of diplomacy. If the U.S. walks away from this
plan we will never marshal that degree of support again, and on our own
we will never be able to apply the level of economic and political
pressure that has forced this set of concessions from Iran. In that case
the only means left to achieve a more comprehensive solution to the
problem of Iran’s nuclear program will be military. Since those military
means are destructive and unpredictable, and since the plan does not
forfeit any of them in any case, it would be utterly foolish to refrain
from giving this plan a chance to work before rushing into another
foreign war.
As an American citizen, a Jew, and a
Zionist, I am deeply concerned with the security of both the United
States and Israel. A nuclear-armed Iran would pose the greatest threat
to those interests since the end of the Cold War. The Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action effectively forecloses the possibility of
an Iranian nuclear weapon and thus neutralizes that threat. It is the
duty of all U.S. officials to lend the authority of their offices to its
implementation. I urge you to do what is right for America and the
world. In any case I hope that this letter finds you well, and I thank
you for your attention on this matter.
Sincerely,
Andrew Meyer
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