President Barack Obama on Wednesday confronted critics of the nuclear deal reached with Iran, saying they were at odds with “99 percent” of the world and had failed to offer any real alternative.
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The proposed deal would disconnect and store centrifuges in an easily reversible manner, but it requires no dismantlement of centrifuges or any Iranian nuclear facility.
Iran earlier agreed to limit its nuclear activities, in return for an end to worldwide sanctions against it. The United Nations Security Council is scheduled to vote on the resolution endorsing the Iran nuclear deal next week.
Former ambassador to the United States Bandar bin Sultan was less diplomatic about Saudi views, describing the accord as worse than an ill-fated agreement with North Korea. On the one side was a strikingly broad consensus of almost the entire arms control community, which recognizes what the deal can achieve in terms of nonproliferation and regional stability. It is essentially aimed at stopping Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, while at the same time easing worldwide sanctions against the country.
As HuffPost’s Akbar Shahid Ahmed reported, the Americans’ families have spent months advocating for their release, and the Obama administration says it raised their cases consistently when it met with Iranian nuclear negotiators.
Congress has 60 days to review the deal for final approval, but many GOP leaders have declared the agreement dead on arrival.
Netanyahu is obsessive about Iran, but even his own intelligence services do not believe that Tehran has actually been working on nuclear weapons in the past decade. But Obama has vowed to “veto any legislation that prevents the successful implementation of this deal”.
In a tense face-to-face exchange that reflected the gulf between Israel and the six world powers who negotiated with Tehran, Mr Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, rejected the visiting British statesman’s efforts to sell the pact signed this week in Vienna.
Al-Jubeir said his country was “looking at this agreement and we will be studying it, and we are discussing it with our friends in the United States“.
Mr Hammond said he understood Mr Netanyahu’s concerns, but added: “We have always been clear that this deal was about the nuclear file”.
“Iran still poses challenges to our interests and values”, the US leader told reporters, citing “its support of terrorism and its use of proxies to destabilise parts of the Middle East”.
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For Iran, the debilitating economic sanctions that have been imposed through oil restrictions and cutting off banks and businesses from global banking systems will be lifted, giving hope for its struggling economy.
