| Los Angeles Times | - |
Obama
administration allies warned of the risk of war and skeptical
Republican senators charged that U.S. negotiators had been "fleeced" by
Iran as the first prominent face-off in the debate over the proposed
nuclear agreement began Thursday.
Warnings of war, charges of diplomatic failure fly at Iran hearing
Obama
administration allies warned of the risk of war and skeptical
Republican senators charged that U.S. negotiators had been "fleeced" by
Iran as the first prominent face-off in the debate over the proposed
nuclear agreement began Thursday.
From the opening moments of the hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a key difference emerged, with administration officials and their allies seeking to keep the focus on the specific impact the deal would have on Iran's nuclear program while Republican opponents emphasized Iran's hostility to the U.S. on a wide range of other issues.
Committee Chairman Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, for example, denounced Iran's support for Shiite militias in Iraq, which repeatedly attacked American troops during the U.S. occupation there, and graphically described Iran's support for repression carried out by Syria's government.
“People’s genitals, right now, being amputated. People being electrocuted — right now, this is happening” in Syria's prisons, he said.
Those issues, Secretary of State John F. Kerry said, are important, but separate.
"This plan was designed to address the nuclear issue, the nuclear issue alone," he said. The other problems Iran contributes to will all get worse if Iran has a nuclear weapon, he said.
Describing the agreement as a "good deal" for the U.S., Kerry said, "the alternative to the deal we’ve reached isn’t what we’re seeing ads for on TV. It isn’t a better deal, some sort of unicorn arrangement involving Iran’s complete capitulation. That’s a fantasy, plain and simple."
The deal provides a "stronger, more lasting" way of preventing an Iranian nuclear weapon than either a military strike or continued sanctions, he said.
As the hearing progressed, the administration's allies on the committee reinforced one of President Obama's central arguments in favor of the agreement -- that the alternative to a diplomatic deal is a military confrontation.
"I don't think the American people want another war," said Sen. Barbara Boxer. "That's really the other option," she said, "which everyone tiptoes around."
Corker denied that. Administration officials have tried to frame the debate as "it's this deal or war," he said.
"I think that's hyperbole."
But, he said, the administration had wrongly put Congress in the position of appearing to be the party guilty of scuttling diplomacy if it rejects the deal.
"I believe you've been fleeced" in the negotiations, he said. "You've turned Iran from being a pariah to now Congress being a pariah."
The administration is racing to win the support of enough lawmakers to defeat any resolution of disapproval at the end of the 60-day deliberation period Congress has given itself. At a minimum, it wants the support of 34 senators or 146 House members to prevent foes from overriding a promised veto by President Obama.
Most Republican senators are hostile to the deal, although Sen. Jeff Flake, a committee member, indicated during the hearing that he might support it. Several key Democrats, facing pressure from constituents and contributors, are uncommitted.
Critics of the deal, with strong backing of Israel whose ambassador met with congressional opponents of the agreement on Wednesday, have mounted an energetic lobbying campaign. Their goal is to sink the deal or at least badly weaken it before the Sept. 17 congressional deadline. If the agreement emerges from this summer's debate badly tarnished, it would lay the groundwork for repudiation by the next president, critics say.
"They'd like to see it on crutches" if not defeated entirely, said Cliff Kupchan, an Iran specialist and chairman of Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy.
Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, made that point explicitly.
“This is a deal whose survival is not guaranteed” beyond this president’s term, he told Kerry and the administration's two other witnesses, Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew and Energy Secretary Ernest J. Moniz.
“Even if this deal narrowly avoids congressional defeat," he said, "this deal is your deal with Iran," he said.
"The next president is under no legal or moral obligation to live up to it," he said, adding that the agreement "could go away on the day President Obama leaves office."
Kerry responded that if the U.S. repudiated the deal now or under a new president, it would mean the end of diplomacy with Iran.
"If you think the Ayatollah is going to come back to negotiate again with an American," if the U.S. renounced the current deal, "that’s fantasy," he said.
In advance of the hearing, the three Cabinet secretaries briefed members of Congress on Wednesday evening, a session that Sen. Angus King, an independent from Maine who caucuses with the Democrats and is an important undecided vote, called "reassuring."
"The important question starting to set in on people is: What are the alternatives?" King said. "The question is not, 'Is this a perfect agreement?' but 'How does this agreement stack up against the alternatives?' That was rather sobering to people in the room."
The nuclear agreement would lift U.S., European Union and United Nations sanctions against Iran once the Iranians come into compliance with a series of requirements to reduce its nuclear stockpile and mothball centrifuges used to enrich uranium.
That would probably happen in about six months, although Kerry suggested during the hearing that it might take as much as a year for Iran to comply.
Several questions about the deal's terms are dominating the debate.
One major dispute involves years 10 through 15 of the 15-year deal. Several critics concede that the agreement might prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon over the next decade, but say it would allow Tehran to greatly expand its enrichment of nuclear fuel in the subsequent five years.
Administration officials acknowledge that during the latter years of the pact, Iran's "breakout" period — the amount of time needed to obtain enough fuel for a bomb — would gradually diminish from a full year because the country would be able to start using more advanced centrifuges. But other parts of the agreement would prevent the breakout time from falling precipitously, they say.
The deal "puts us in a far stronger position" in those later years, Moniz said at the hearing. "The risks on their part would be enormous" if Iran sought a nuclear weapon at that point, he said, in part because of the "tremendous knowledge" of Iran's nuclear program and facilities that the U.S. would have acquired by then.
Critics
also say the deal's procedures to verify Iran's compliance are too
weak. In particular, they have focused on the fact that Iran could delay
up to 24 days before allowing international inspectors access to sites
where they believe cheating may be taking place.From the opening moments of the hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a key difference emerged, with administration officials and their allies seeking to keep the focus on the specific impact the deal would have on Iran's nuclear program while Republican opponents emphasized Iran's hostility to the U.S. on a wide range of other issues.
Committee Chairman Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, for example, denounced Iran's support for Shiite militias in Iraq, which repeatedly attacked American troops during the U.S. occupation there, and graphically described Iran's support for repression carried out by Syria's government.
“People’s genitals, right now, being amputated. People being electrocuted — right now, this is happening” in Syria's prisons, he said.
Those issues, Secretary of State John F. Kerry said, are important, but separate.
"This plan was designed to address the nuclear issue, the nuclear issue alone," he said. The other problems Iran contributes to will all get worse if Iran has a nuclear weapon, he said.
Describing the agreement as a "good deal" for the U.S., Kerry said, "the alternative to the deal we’ve reached isn’t what we’re seeing ads for on TV. It isn’t a better deal, some sort of unicorn arrangement involving Iran’s complete capitulation. That’s a fantasy, plain and simple."
The deal provides a "stronger, more lasting" way of preventing an Iranian nuclear weapon than either a military strike or continued sanctions, he said.
As the hearing progressed, the administration's allies on the committee reinforced one of President Obama's central arguments in favor of the agreement -- that the alternative to a diplomatic deal is a military confrontation.
"I don't think the American people want another war," said Sen. Barbara Boxer. "That's really the other option," she said, "which everyone tiptoes around."
Corker denied that. Administration officials have tried to frame the debate as "it's this deal or war," he said.
"I think that's hyperbole."
But, he said, the administration had wrongly put Congress in the position of appearing to be the party guilty of scuttling diplomacy if it rejects the deal.
"I believe you've been fleeced" in the negotiations, he said. "You've turned Iran from being a pariah to now Congress being a pariah."
The administration is racing to win the support of enough lawmakers to defeat any resolution of disapproval at the end of the 60-day deliberation period Congress has given itself. At a minimum, it wants the support of 34 senators or 146 House members to prevent foes from overriding a promised veto by President Obama.
Most Republican senators are hostile to the deal, although Sen. Jeff Flake, a committee member, indicated during the hearing that he might support it. Several key Democrats, facing pressure from constituents and contributors, are uncommitted.
Critics of the deal, with strong backing of Israel whose ambassador met with congressional opponents of the agreement on Wednesday, have mounted an energetic lobbying campaign. Their goal is to sink the deal or at least badly weaken it before the Sept. 17 congressional deadline. If the agreement emerges from this summer's debate badly tarnished, it would lay the groundwork for repudiation by the next president, critics say.
"They'd like to see it on crutches" if not defeated entirely, said Cliff Kupchan, an Iran specialist and chairman of Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy.
Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, made that point explicitly.
“This is a deal whose survival is not guaranteed” beyond this president’s term, he told Kerry and the administration's two other witnesses, Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew and Energy Secretary Ernest J. Moniz.
“Even if this deal narrowly avoids congressional defeat," he said, "this deal is your deal with Iran," he said.
"The next president is under no legal or moral obligation to live up to it," he said, adding that the agreement "could go away on the day President Obama leaves office."
Kerry responded that if the U.S. repudiated the deal now or under a new president, it would mean the end of diplomacy with Iran.
"If you think the Ayatollah is going to come back to negotiate again with an American," if the U.S. renounced the current deal, "that’s fantasy," he said.
In advance of the hearing, the three Cabinet secretaries briefed members of Congress on Wednesday evening, a session that Sen. Angus King, an independent from Maine who caucuses with the Democrats and is an important undecided vote, called "reassuring."
"The important question starting to set in on people is: What are the alternatives?" King said. "The question is not, 'Is this a perfect agreement?' but 'How does this agreement stack up against the alternatives?' That was rather sobering to people in the room."
The nuclear agreement would lift U.S., European Union and United Nations sanctions against Iran once the Iranians come into compliance with a series of requirements to reduce its nuclear stockpile and mothball centrifuges used to enrich uranium.
That would probably happen in about six months, although Kerry suggested during the hearing that it might take as much as a year for Iran to comply.
Several questions about the deal's terms are dominating the debate.
One major dispute involves years 10 through 15 of the 15-year deal. Several critics concede that the agreement might prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon over the next decade, but say it would allow Tehran to greatly expand its enrichment of nuclear fuel in the subsequent five years.
Administration officials acknowledge that during the latter years of the pact, Iran's "breakout" period — the amount of time needed to obtain enough fuel for a bomb — would gradually diminish from a full year because the country would be able to start using more advanced centrifuges. But other parts of the agreement would prevent the breakout time from falling precipitously, they say.
The deal "puts us in a far stronger position" in those later years, Moniz said at the hearing. "The risks on their part would be enormous" if Iran sought a nuclear weapon at that point, he said, in part because of the "tremendous knowledge" of Iran's nuclear program and facilities that the U.S. would have acquired by then.
Some experts, including Olli Heinonen, former deputy director of the International Atomic Energy Agency — the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog — contend that in that period, Iran could conceal evidence of important nuclear research, though it couldn't conceal traces of major projects such as construction of uranium enrichment plants.
Obama has defended that provision, noting that the facilities Iran would need to create a clandestine nuclear program would have to be extensive and hard to move.
"This is not something you hide in a closet. This is not something you put on a dolly and kind of wheel off somewhere," he said in a news conference last week.
Questioned about that issue, Moniz noted that the U.S. has developed sensitive technologies for detecting even small traces of uranium or other radioactive materials. Even if the Iranians tried to use the 24 day delay to clean up a suspect site, international inspectors would be able to use those advanced technologies to discover what had taken place, he said.
Another question is whether the deal's mechanism to reimpose sanctions if Iran breaks its commitments is too cumbersome.
Skeptics contend that the world powers involved in the deal — France, Britain, Germany, Russia and China, in addition to the U.S. — will be reluctant to reimpose sanctions because doing so would threaten their carefully assembled deal and disrupt their countries' growing trade with Iran.
"While we've got sanctions snap-back, they've got nuclear snap-back," Corker said Wednesday night. "In nine months, they'll have their cash and all the sanctions will be relieved. Then all the leverage sort of shifts to them."
Kerry, however, stressed that under the deal's terms, the U.S. by itself could force a reimposition of all the current sanctions if Iran violates the deal. The agreement also gives the U.S. the flexibility to reimpose only a portion of the sanctions if Iran makes a minor violation that would not justify a full snapback, he noted.
A fourth big issue involves Iran's conventional weapons. Critics say that the deal's lifting of U.N. restrictions on Iran's purchase of arms after five years and missiles after seven and its freeing up of $100 billion to $150 billion in frozen Iranian assets will greatly strengthen the Tehran government.
The end of the arms embargoes coupled with additional money will allow Iran to step up purchases of arms that will strengthen itself and its proxies, such as Hezbollah, the Shiite Muslim militia in Lebanon, further inflaming violence in a region in upheaval, the deal’s critics charge.
But the administration and its allies say those embargoes were in force only because Iran had broken the nuclear rules and were always likely to end when it reached an agreement on nuclear issues.
During the negotiations, "we had three countries out of seven which were ready to lift [the embargoes] after day one," Kerry said, referring to China and Russia, in addition to Iran.
The five- and seven-year extensions of the embargoes "we see as a bonus," said Kelsey Davenport of the Arms Control Assn., which supports the deal.
Administration officials also argue that most of the money resulting from the end of sanctions will be spent to bolster Iran's teetering economy. Officials contend that Iran's support for its proxies has been relatively cheap and hasn't been held back by a lack of cash.
"There's at least $500 billion of domestic demand" in Iran for unmet needs, Lew told senators at Thursday's hearing. While Iran will use some of the new money it will receive "for malign purposes," the impact of that, he said, "will be on the margin."
Staff Writer Lisa Mascaro contributed to this story.
For more on the Iran debate, follow @richtpau
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