Israel has long opposed any deal with its arch-foe Iran, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lambasted the landmark agreement as a “historic mistake”.
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“From everything we’ve seen and heard to date, this is a perilous deal for America and a perilous deal for Israel and our other allies in the Middle East”, Comstock said.
The meeting, requested by King Salman, comes after Saudi diplomats privately expressed grave misgivings that the nuclear agreement may legitimize their arch-foe Iran.
“Congress will now have 60 days to review this deal, and it is the job of Congress to evaluate and disclose the facts about this risky policy”, Comstock said. 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.
But rather than end the photo-opportunity as scheduled Netanyahu chose to reply and said a campaign against antisemitism should have included condemnation of calls by Iran to “annihilate the Jewish state”.
The president also said that some of the loudest criticisms of the deal coming from opponents in Washington who claim that he failed to curb Iranian funding and support for terrorism, wrongly conflate those issues with the potential nuclear threat. There was a time we doubted there could be a deal.
“Wide-ranging concessions were made in all of the areas which should have prevented Iran from getting the ability to arm itself with a nuclear weapon” but “the desire to sign an agreement was stronger than everything else,” he said. Republicans have majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate but they would need the support of dozens of Obama’s fellow Democrats to sustain a “resolution of disapproval” that could cripple a deal.
“I expect the debate to be robust, and that’s how it should be”, Obama said, imploring lawmakers who are skeptical of the deal to “remember the alternative”. Inspections are supposed to keep its nuclear program in check, but there seem to be a million loopholes, and nobody trusts Iran not to use them. The president has said he will veto any attempt to block the deal.
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The PM told Iranian president Hassan Rouhani that agreement to allow in United Nations inspectors in return for the lifting of some sanctions could pave the way to closer co-operation on issues like countering the threat from the Islamic State (IS) terror group and reopening the UK’s embassy in Tehran.
