It seems President Obama has sent his vice president and secretary of state out to sell his Iran nuclear deal to a skeptical public dismayed by early reports of its provisions.
Key concerns are over the ten-year term of the arrangement, leaving Iran free at some point to legally pursue nuclear weaponry; the lifting of sanctions against Iran prior to its demonstrated compliance with the terms of the deal; and the lack of a foolproof inspection program that would feature unannounced and unrestricted access across Iran.
Iran’s very public disputes with the administration concerning these issues have heightened those concerns and ignited broad, bipartisan criticism in the U.S. Senate.
Last week Vice President Biden told an audience at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, in so many words, that any deal with Iran is better than no deal and everyone should get out of the president’s way.
“Let’s get something straight so we don’t kid each other…[the Iranians] already have paved a path to a bomb’s worth of material,” said Mr. Biden. “Iran could get there now if they walked away in two to three months without a deal.”
Of course, when negotiations with Iran first started a year ago, President Obama dismissed as alarmism the warning from Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu that Iran was a year away from a bomb. Moreover, the president insisted at the time that the goal of the negotiations was to foreclose the possibility that Iran would get the bomb, ever.
On Sunday, Secretary of State Kerry, in an interview on Israel’s Channel 10 television, dismissed concerns about the impending deal as the result of “hysteria”:
I say to every Israeli that today we have the ability to stop them if they decided to move quickly to a bomb and I absolutely guarantee that in the future we will have the ability to know what they are doing so that we can still stop them if they decided to move to a bomb…. We will have inspectors in there every single day; that is not a 10-year deal that is forever. There is a lot of hysteria about this deal.
But President Obama himself recently admitted that Iran would be able to build a bomb once the deal expires. And the Iranians have publicly insisted that they will control any inspection regime and that they view any notion of unrestricted inspections as an infringement on Iranian sovereignty.
Is there no one in this administration who can talk straight with the American people?