In many ways, no one is more publicly tied to the Iran nuclear deal than Secretary of State Kerry. To be sure, it is undoubtedly the brainchild of his boss, President Obama. But the frenetic pace of the negotiations and Mr. Kerry’s very public perseverance – marked by far too many unilateral concessions – have indelibly marked it as his work product. And the new revelations about the failure to build in any restrictions on Iran’s ballistic missile program cry out for a congressional investigation.
As we noted last week, it now appears, notwithstanding claims that the agreement restricts nuclear weapons production, Iran is completely free to develop a state of the art delivery system to be available when the terms of the agreement expire. As is now being reported, Secretary Kerry was so fearful of Iran pulling out of the negotiations that he agreed to omit any reference to the critical nuclear delivery issue from the agreement and also acquiesced in an emasculation of an existing Security Council resolution that prohibited Iran – on pain of sanctions –from engaging in ballistic missile testing.
Further, he did not acknowledge any of this until after the deal was implemented and the bulk of the sanctions were lifted, thereby frittering away any leverage he might have had. When Senator Marco Rubio started asking questions last November, Mr. Kerry responded to him in a letter:
The issue of ballistic missiles is addressed by the provisions of the new United Nations Security Council Resolution, which do not constitute provisions of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)…. [However] since the Security Council has called upon Iran not to undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons…any such activity would be inconsistent with the UNSCR and a serious matter for the Security Council.
This is arrant sophistry. The “new” resolution “calls upon” Iran not to engage in ballistic missile activity while the earlier one declared “that Iran shall not engage in such activity. And Iran’s allies Russia and China are running trucks through the distinction.
It will be recalled that virtually all the congressional supporters of the agreement said they were doing so with reservations because of the loopholes involving monitoring and verification. We have yet to see any criticism of this by now blatant deception from any of those lawmakers. It’s time for the Republican majority to at least try to call the Obama administration to account.