Jennifer Loewenstein assesses the announcement that the U.S. and Iran reached an initial agreement to open the Strait of Hormuz and further extend a shaky ceasefire in the Iran war; how Israel’s ongoing attacks and invasion of Lebanon could derail this peace deal; and the lasting impact of Donald Trump’s war will have on America’s standing in the world.
SCOTT HARRIS: Right now, I’m very happy to welcome to our program Jennifer Lowenstein, former associate director of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Jennifer has been a frequent guest talking about Middle East issues. Certainly we’ve talked a lot about Gaza and what’s happened in this U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. And we’re very happy you could join us tonight because of course there’s been some major developments, Jennifer. So thank you for being here.
JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN: Oh, thank you very much for inviting me on.
SCOTT HARRIS: So Donald Trump announced Sunday yesterday that the U.S. and Iran had agreed on a Memo of Understanding to end the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran. The memo to be signed this Friday in Geneva, if it really happens, will extend a ceasefire for another 60 days during which all sides are supposed to negotiate the specifics of a final agreement. Most details of the Memo of Understanding have not been made public as yet. And initially, Jennifer, I wanted to get your overview of what this announcement could mean given there’s a lot of skepticism as much of the world has witnessed previous announcements from Donald Trump as he’s talked, I think he said 39 previous times that the peace agreement was right around the corner. This one might be a little different. It seems there’s more substance in the other side and Iran is actually sort of corroborating some of it.
But what’s your overview of what’s happened here?
JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN: Well, I have to say first of all, it’s a good thing if countries are not dropping bombs on each other. So that in the most abstract sense, I do think it’s a good thing, but there are good grounds for the skepticism that is going around. I don’t think that the U.S. will be militarily attacking Iran again. And I could, of course, be wrong, but I think if you do look at the Memorandum of Understanding, the few items that have been leaked are very good for Iran and not good for the United States. I think we have to view this as a U.S. loss. I think it’s a deserved loss considering we started the war and we started it for no good reason. But the skepticism remains and part of that is in my view, the biggest part of that has to do with Lebanon and that is because I don’t see either the Netanyahu government or any government that comes in after him—if he’s not re-elected—honoring the parts of that agreement that have to do with Lebanon.
And in fact, there have already been ceasefire violations in the south today, not major ones, but enough to cause many people to raise their eyebrows and to say, “What’s going on here?” So I think that the U.S. and Iran do want to stop pounding each other. And again, I would stress that Iran was the one attacked. We were the aggressors and aggression is the supreme international war crime as Justice Robert Jackson said at the Nuremberg Tribunals. So there are good reasons to be glad, but there are also many reasons to be skeptical and we have to understand that this is not a peace agreement. This is a Memorandum of Understanding that has only 60 days in which some of the really thorny issues are supposed to be decided and agreed upon. So we have yet to see whether that comes to pass.
SCOTT HARRIS: Thank you for that, Jennifer. Now one interesting feature of all these negotiations and this Memorandum of Understanding is a reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, one-fifth of the world’s oil and gas goes through that passage. So this is important to the world’s economy. I mean, there are ripple …
JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN: Absolutely. Yes.
SCOTT HARRIS: … ripple effects all across the entire world from what’s happened there in the Strait of Hormuz. There’s a lot of discussion about how reopening the strait will be a victory, but they were open before this war started. They’ve never been closed until Donald Trump and (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu launched this war. And it’s as if we’ve seen this before, right? Donald Trump acts as the arsonist and then he comes in as the fire department puts it out and wants to be called a hero.
JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN: Right. I think that’s a good way to put it. I think we should also remind listeners that this is essentially an Israeli war. The United States started it. We dropped to the first bombs in the opening salvo of the war on Feb. 28, but this was a war that Netanyahu and his ilk basically did their utmost to talk Donald Trump into for very shaky reasons or very shaky intelligence. The idea being that killing the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and bombing Tehran would cause regime change in Iran overnight, which of course was deluded from the outset because the Iranian government is similar to the United States government in one respect and that is that it’s a structure. It’s not just located in Tehran, the capital. The Iranian government has institutions and departments and officers throughout the country. So just as taking out the United States president wouldn’t destroy American democracy overnight, killing Ali Khamenei was not going to cause regime change overnight.
And of course, the most predictable element of that is that somehow the Iranians would rush to overthrow the current government and a new government would come in and that doesn’t usually happen in wars like this. What happens is that the people rally around—if not the government itself—the idea of their land being attacked. So Iranians, whether they like or dislike their current government, and many of them dislike it intensely, they’re still going to be angry at the aggressor, at the country that is bombing them and killing their citizens and destroying some of their homes and businesses and mosques and hospitals. And, of course, that’s exactly what happened.
SCOTT HARRIS: Right. And what could you tell us about Israel? You mentioned Israel upfront in our conversation. There’s a lot of skepticism about Israel and its compliance with whatever peace agreement comes out of this, even over these next 60 days where the ceasefire has been extended. But what do you think Netanyahu’s goal is in Lebanon in terms of the attacks on both Hezbollah, but also the civilian infrastructure of even the capital city of Beirut?
JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN: Right. And I just returned from Beirut, so I have an especially personal experience of having been there and all I can say is that I think what Israel’s goals in Lebanon are will depend very much on how serious Trump wants this to be the end of the war because if Netanyahu and the government, and I want to add that at least 80 percent of the Israeli public supports Israel in Lebanon, supported the Iran war, etc., support what Israel’s been doing in the Gaza Strip. If Trump is serious about ending hostilities on all fronts, he’s going to have to exert an awful lot of pressure on Netanyahu to stop doing what he’s doing in Lebanon. Already today we had Netanyahu and (Israel) Katz, the defense minister, saying quite bluntly that they had no intention of withdrawing from the occupied zone in south Lebanon where they are. And of course, Hezbollah responded today with a letter to the Israelis and to everyone else who read it, that they’re not going to accept that.
Basically, Hezbollah will continue to defend Lebanon as long as Israel is occupying it, even if Israel isn’t bombing and killing. And of course they have absolutely every right under international law to get to drive the Israelis out because the occupation is illegal and it always has been illegal since 1978 when Israel first invaded and occupied south Lebanon, invaded and tried to occupy, didn’t occupy it until 1982, ’83. But Israel does not want to relinquish its goals of doing what it’s doing in Lebanon. And even though that is advertised as trying to destroy Hezbollah, I don’t believe that is ultimately Israel’s goal because what it wants more than anything else is to turn Lebanon into another Syria, a nation that is weak, demilitarized, divided, bordering on internal chaos, especially in Lebanon if there’s any kind of civil war that results from the various factions of the government not being on the same page with each other, that’s what Israel wants.
It doesn’t want to destroy Hezbollah because that would get rid of the main source of destabilization as far as the Maronite and Sunni sects are concerned. So what it wants is to weaken Hezbollah enough that it ceases to be a kind of deterrent power to Israel, but that it continues functioning as a destabilizing and divisive force within Lebanon and that’s what Israel wants.
So I actually believe that if Hezbollah didn’t exist, Israel would still be in Lebanon right now because (Israel is) in Syria and there was no Hezbollah in Syria. In fact, there’s a government that is essentially friendly to Israel in the government of Ahmed al-Sharaa, the new prime minister, president of Syria, who actually offered to make a security agreement with the Israelis without ever saying that Israel had to give back the territory it occupied. It offered a security agreement without getting anything back of what Israel took or bombed and Israel still refused. It doesn’t want a security agreement with Syria. It wants the right of freedom to act whenever it feels like it. The freedom to bomb Damascus or bomb anything they consider a potential threat. That’s what it wants and it wants that in Lebanon and it wants it in Iraq and that’s ultimately what it wanted in Iran and that’s one reason why there are so many people within the Israeli government and elsewhere who are going insane now with this Memorandum of Understanding because they view it as a huge defeat to Israel, which it very well could be.
SCOTT HARRIS: We’re speaking with Jennifer Lowenstein, former associate director of Middle Eastern studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Jennifer, we’re almost out of time, but I wanted to ask you, what do we know about some of the initial steps or possible areas of agreement on Iran’s nuclear program or is that pretty opaque? Is that pretty opaque at this point? Because there’s a lot of comparisons that will be made about President Obama and John Kerry’s JCPOA …
JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN: Right, right.
SCOTT HARRIS: … JCPOA that was negotiated and signed in 2015. What do we know?
JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN: Well, I think the most absurd thing that we know, and this goes back to, well, Trump wants the Strait of Hormuz open, even though he’s the one responsible for (it) being closed in the first place because he bombed Iran. Well, the nuclear program, in my view, is just as crazy an issue. Iran didn’t have a nuclear weapon as long as Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader was alive. It would never have gotten a nuclear weapon because Khamenei had issued a fatwa against it ever having one. So while we were harping and harping and bombing nuclear facilities and going insane about Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon, it had a fatwa basically saying Iran will never have one. Well, now that they’ve killed Ali Khamenei there’s no fatwa against it anymore and any intelligent Iranian government, the first thing they’ll do is say, “We got to get a bomb because that’s the only way we’re ever going to be protected.” So the Americans and the Israelis have really dug themselves into a hole with this one.
Of course, right now for the immediate future, Iran is agreeing and saying it doesn’t want a nuclear bomb and I don’t think it will quickly go and build one in the next couple of years because it’s got so much reconstruction it’s got to do. But the fact is we have pushed Iran much closer to wanting a nuclear bomb than it ever would have been had we never bombed in the first place.
Details are fairly easy to iron out. I mean, basically the details are don’t have a bomb, have inspectors or inspections done. And I think the sticky problem has to do with the enriched uranium because Iran had enriched a stockpile of uranium to 60 percent, which makes it much closer to the 90 percent it would need for a nuclear weapon. And the Israelis have basically come out and said, and they did this last fall, that Iran can have no uranium enrichment at all and that whatever material it has has to be gotten rid of or exported. And Iran has basically said, “nothing doing. It has the right to enrich uranium,” which it does. So that is one of the thorny issues that will need to be ironed out. I can’t imagine Israel changing its position on this. If the United States negotiators have any sense, they will agree that Iran has the right under international law to enrich uranium and if anything, we’ll get a copy of the JCPOA or one that is probably even less favorable that is agreed upon between the United States and Iran.
All of this never had to happen. None of this had to happen as far back as 2015, had Trump not ripped up that agreement in the first place (in 2018). All of this could have been avoided.
SCOTT HARRIS: Right.
JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN: But that was the neocons and the pro-Israel lobby pushing again the American government to do what it wanted.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, Jennifer, we packed a lot of good information and analysis about where these negotiations are headed. So thank you so much for joining us tonight. We’re hopeful that the killing will stop. I think everybody, most people who are seeing—hope maybe there’s some in Israel who aren’t on board that. But yeah, we are going to certainly call upon you again in weeks to come about this and maybe some good news. Thanks.
JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN: Yes, I hope so. Thank you very much for having me on.
SCOTT HARRIS: Thank you, Jennifer. Always appreciate your analysis. Very helpful to understand what’s happening in the Middle East. Appreciate it. Thank you. Goodnight.
JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN: Bye-bye.
SCOTT HARRIS: That’s Jennifer Loewenstein, former associate director of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
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