The Obama administration is now promoting its nuclear accord to the public and Congress, which is expected to vote on the deal in September after the August recess. The deal would extend that time to about one year.
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The bad news, however, is that it’s even less likely that if Congress rejects the agreement Iran will continue to freeze its program and then come back to the table to accept a “better deal”. Schumer wants a more muscular deal that better serves American interests, as do many skeptics.
“The intelligence community can rarely guarantee, ‘We’re going find the secret site, ‘” said David Albright, a former weapons inspector who heads the Institute for Science and global Security.
On the same day Schumer announced his intentions, New York Rep. Eliot Engel, the ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, announced his opposition.
Now that the pact has been finalized, Kerry said such a heavy-handed approach was an option no longer. Kerry asked. “The United States is going to start sanctioning our allies and their banks and their businesses because we walked away from a deal?”
“If you do not support this deal, the consequences are uncertain”, she said.
President Barack Obama has promised to use his veto powers to override a rejection of the deal by Congress.
Sen. Charles Schumer blasted the Iran nuclear deal as “fatally flawed” Tuesday, saying he doesn’t trust European nations to conduct thorough inspections of the sensitive facilities.
“I mean, the complications that will grow out of that are enormous and there will be an increase in this notion that there ought to be a different reserve currency because the United States is misbehaving, and not in fact, you know, living by the agreements that it negotiates itself”, he said.
Kerry said Tuesday that Iran has enormous domestic needs for whatever assets it receives, including as much as $150 billion to $200 billion for its oil infrastructure “just to bring them back to where they were five years ago”.
The agreement gives Tehran some relief from economic sanctions in return for strict limits on a nuclear program that the West has suspected was aimed at creating a nuclear bomb. (Of course, those who voted for the Iraq War resolution in 2002 include Obama’s vice president and secretary of state.) … Samore, who had served as an arms control coordinator for Obama, had been a skeptic of the deal, but ultimately decided he favored it. He remains on UANI’s advisory board, although his resignation robs deal opponents of the argument that a former Obama official stood against it.
The good news is that in the short term, at least, the critics are probably right that there will not be war with Iran.
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OBAMA: And what that tells me is that there may be ideological opposition to doing any business with Iran. Dan Shapiro, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, said neither Israel nor the United States could convince the other on the issue. But to rule out, and even take offense at, the possibility of a military strike while betting that Iran will accept a significantly better deal is not realistic.
