Congress must perform a thorough review of any nuclear deal with Iran that is submitted by the administration, Jeffrey Robbins, who served as a staff attorney in the Senate and as a U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council, wrote in an op-ed published today in The Boston Herald. Robbins cites three weaknesses in the ongoing negotiations that necessitate the Congressional review.
The first is that under the deal, Iran, described by President Obama’s director of national intelligence as the planet’s “foremost state sponsor of terrorism,” will be cleared to have nuclear weapons in about 10 short years, as restrictions on its nuclear program terminate. It will therefore be positioned to intimidate not only the entire Mideast, but also the West, including the U.S. Our children, and their children in turn, will live under Iranian nuclear blackmail, or worse, from then on.
That Iran will acquire nuclear weapons follows from the second fact: the administration has left the U.S. with nothing it can or will do to stop Iran from acquiring such weapons. Under the deal it has cut, $150 billion in funds and relief from trade restrictions will benefit Iran in short order, wiping out the leverage the West had created, it said, to permanently eliminate Iran’s nuclear threat. The White House’s incantation of the phrase “snap-backs” to suggest that the sanctions could be re-imposed on Iran is a soothing fiction; once lifted, sanctions are effectively gone. …
The third fact is that Iran will use its $150 billion cash infusion to expand yet further its already lethal support of terrorist groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas, and to cement its growing domination of the Middle East. As Karim Sadjadpour, Iran analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has said, “If they have more money, they’ll continue to spend it the same way.”
With diminished leverage on one hand and an empowered enemy on the other, Congress will have only a limited amount of time “in which to review and debate a deal of monumental importance.”
Nearly two-thirds of Americans support a Congressional review of the Iranian nuclear deal, a position which has a strong constitutional basis.
The Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015, otherwise known as the Corker-Menendez bill, passed the Senate in May by an overwhelming 98 – 1 margin, with parallel legislation passing in the House of Representatives a week later by a 400 – 25 margin, reflecting strong bipartisan support for Congressional review.
[Photo: Martin Kramer / Flickr ]