Kerry said he feels “strongly” that the deal will be good for Israel, despite Netanyahu’s denunciation of it as a “stunning historic mistake”.
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Whilst the Western media was promoting the success of the recent negotiations between the US and Iran, Israel said that this was a dark day and would bring more conflict.
In an nearly unipolar world of the last seventy years, it is understandable why the deal is understood to have been made only between the United States and Iran.
In practice, Obama has accelerated processes that pulverized the political map drawn 99 years ago between France and Britain in the Sykes-Picot Accord.
Kerry told the panel Thursday that under the terms of this agreement, Iran has agreed to remove 98 percent of its stockpile voluntarily. Rather, “it will enable Iran to get many nuclear bombs in a decade or so and could spark a regional nuclear arms race”. America is, in essence, arming the enemy and bolstering its economy so it can continue to attack U.S. allies in the region.
Not only is the agreement with Iran problematic, it carries disastrous repercussions that may aggravate the regional turmoil.
Perhaps not surprisingly, around the time Mr. Kerry spoke, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani was telling his own domestic critics roughly the same thing, warning that rejecting a deal with the U.S. would lead to an economic “Stone Age” in Iran. They have mentioned in many briefing, saying that okay, we could not do anything about it, Iranians have the knowledge and it is there, we cannot do anything about it. Iran is a nuclear power, like it or not.
For many, the concern was over how the agreement will affect those in Israel.
While the current deal aims to reverse all those “injustices”, the geopolitical considerations are clearly at work again.
“With all due respect, you guys have been bamboozled and the American people are going to pay for that”, said another Republican senator, James Risch. Slowly, a number of congressional Democrats have lined up behind the deal. Congress on Monday was given a set of non-public interpretations of the Iran deal, according to House and Senate staffers who have seen the documents.
Appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Kerry was lambasted by Republicans like Chairman Bob Corker, R-Tenn., who told Kerry, “You’ve been fleeced”, charging that he had “codified a perfectly aligned pathway for Iran to get a nuclear weapon”, and Sen. To believe that these sanctions can or will “snap back” into place if Iran violates the agreement is foolish.
Congress has two months to consider the Iran agreement.
Ehud Barak, a former chief of military intelligence and prime minister, who helped Mr Netanyahu develop his strategy on Iran while serving as defence minister from 2009 to 2013, said in a TV interview: “Israel can live with whatever happens there [in Iran]”.
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If a “disapproval” resolution passes and survives Obama’s veto, he would be unable to waive most of the US sanctions imposed on Iran, which could cripple the nuclear pact.
