The Congressional jingoists continue to denigrate the Iranian nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama administration along with China, France, Russia, England and Germany.
The disparaging remarks are nothing more than knee-jerk pot shots by a group of critics who have no real answers in solving the political morass in Iran.
Please, someone in the media — pundits, cable-TV reporters and mainstream press — ask any of them to provide a viable alternative to the negotiated agreement. Ask them. Please. Get an answer with specificity. Please. Be journalists and dig and scratch and go for the truth.
“The alternative to this deal was never war; it was greater pressure on Iran and insistence on a better agreement,” senators John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said in a joint statement.
“I hope he’ll avoid tired, obviously untrue talking points about this being some choice between a bad deal and war,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said.
They bash but they don’t say what they would do. Sanctions didn’t stop nuclear progression in Iran. As Obama pointed out, the Iranians are just months away from having the ability to create a nuclear weapon. The agreement takes that opportunity away. More sanctions will not. So the only logical conclusion is war.
Then last weekend, 29 of the nation’s top scientists, including Nobel laureates, veteran makers of nuclear arms and former White House science advisers, wrote to Obama to praise the deal, calling it innovative and stringent.
The first signature on the letter is from Richard L. Garwin, a physicist who helped design the world’s first hydrogen bomb and has long advised Washington on nuclear weapons and arms control. He is among the last living physicists who helped usher in the nuclear age.
Representative Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) said in a Huffington Post interview that when the critics first came out they said the U.S. should strike at Iran. Now, he said, they’re saying more sanctions can do the job.
Obama, after his recent speech at American University, explained, “I do not say that a military option is inevitable just to be provocative, just to win the argument. Those are the dictates of cold, hard logic.
“If in fact we do not implement this negotiated agreement and if, as I think I can show, that doubling down on unilateral sanctions will not produce the results that the critics are looking at, and if, as I’m quite certain, it is not possible for us to force our P5+1 or other countries like India or South Korea or even Japan to abide by our views of what — or at least Congress’s views on what is required to give Iran relief — then they would sort of run out of options at that point. No one has described to me what remaining leverage that we have.”
Iran then could decide to pull out of the comprehensive deal, put the entire blame on the United States and proceed with their research and development, Obama said.
“So I just want to be very clear for those who suggest that my presentation isn’t fair,” he added. “I would simply ask them to explain the weakness in my logic.”
Obama has been leaning on members of Congress to get behind his agreement to curb Iran’s nuclear program and support it in the fall when lawmakers return from their summer break.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) reflects the insular quality of those trying to legislate for a narrow group of people. Schumer is looking at his Israel ties. Should he not be more inclined to look at what is good for the United States?
A GOP lawmaker, Illinois Representative Pete Roskam has announced that he has enough supporters to guarantee passing a resolution that disapproves of the deal. But Obama intends to veto any such disapproval, and his focus is on keeping enough Democrats on board to stop Congress from overriding him.
Blumenauer said he understood his colleagues’ concerns about the deal, but argued that the agreement offered the best chance of restraining Iran on the nuclear front, and that ditching it played into the hands of people who were all too happy to go to war in Iraq.
He said, “There is no better solution. Nobody’s got a plan B. They talk about maybe a better deal. How are we going to get a better deal without all this international support?”
He noted that the United States would likely lose the support of many nations that would like to do more business with Iran. Without international backing, the main option to stop Iran from building nuclear weapons would be force, he said.
“There is no good alternative, unless you’re prepared to go to war with Iran, a country that is more than twice the land mass — it’s bigger than Iraq and Afghanistan combined — and the population is more than those,” he said. “You’re talking 70 million people. And they are much more sophisticated, wealthy and advanced, than either of those other two countries.
“The American public has no stomach for another military campaign. If we were to launch in that direction, I think that you’ve heard from respected military leaders who think that all hell would break loose, that we have no idea where that would lead, and it would be catastrophic.
“Some of the same people who were so resolutely against this agreement are the same people who were so excited about our invasion of Iraq, including Bibi Netanyahu, who was spectacularly wrong then. Netanyahu famously was talking about Iran [being] just months away from a bomb.”
In recent newspaper interviews, Israel’s President Reuven Rivlin suggested that Netanyahu had been overzealous in opposing the Iran nuclear deal, opening a “battlefront” with Washington and isolating his country.
Rivlin, who holds the largely ceremonial head of state post, argued that Netanyahu’s vigorous campaign against last month’s nuclear deal between world powers and Iran could ultimately hurt Israel. A former right-wing politician with a history of strained ties to the prime minister, Rivlin has voiced his own reservations about the deal but put it in a wider diplomatic context in the interviews.
He said he was worried about the battlefront that had opened up between Obama and Netanyahu and the state of relations between the United States and Israel.
