On Tuesday afternoon, the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent reported that Democratic and liberal groups are planning to spend millions of dollars lobbying Congress and the left-wing grassroots to encourage support of the Iranian nuclear deal that had just been announced hours earlier.
Let’s just say they have their work cut out for them.
Not that Congress is likely to reject the deal. Because the Obama administration is pushing the deal as an “executive agreement,” that would require two-thirds opposition in Congress — which turns the Constitution and its requirement for two-thirds approval of treaties on its head.
Even so, there will be no warm embrace of this deal, neither by lawmakers nor by the public. It is now clear that what many had long feared has come to pass — Obama negotiated a lousy deal, and Americans are going to be stuck with the consequences long after he leaves office.
All along, Obama’s strongest argument for a deal has been that without one, Iran would simply make the bomb. It was a fair point. But his negotiators have unexpectedly and inexplicably agreed to lift the arms embargo against Iran, paving the way toward Iran’s acquisition of the ballistic missiles it would need to deliver a nuclear payload within eight years. If the goal here was to preserve peace, then the negotiations have undermined it.
Those are already sufficient grounds for Congress to reject this deal, but unfortunately, it gets much worse than that.
One major flaw in Obama’s negotiating becomes apparent based on what isn’t in this deal. Obama committed in public to keeping the talks limited strictly to nuclear issues. He avoided making demands based on human rights, Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism or even the release of Americans being held by Iran, on the grounds that he didn’t want the Iranians making their own extraneous demands. But the Iranians did make such demands, and they got pretty much what they wanted. Obama did not ask for anything more and he did not get it.
As part of the deal, the Iranian regime will almost immediately be given back between $100 billion and $150 billion dollars that have been frozen due to sanctions. At least some of this money will almost certainly go toward funding the paramilitary terrorist groups that the Iranians have used to destabilize Lebanon and Yemen and to prop up the Assad regime in Syria.
What’s more, this deal isn’t very tough on nuclear issues, either. Its terms make Iranian compliance nearly unverifiable. Based on its terms, Iran can delay any site inspection for at least 24 days, long enough to cover up wrongdoing.
And even in the unlikely event that noncompliance is actually detected under such circumstances, despite Obama’s reassurances, the U.S. cannot just simply “snap back” the sanctions that Obama is now helping lift. Under a complex mechanism in the deal, the only way that sanctions can be re-imposed is if the majority of an international panel agrees to it. The panel would include China, Russia and Iran itself. So effectively, if the U.S. wanted to re-impose sanctions, the administration would have to get Britain, France, Germany and the E.U. on board.
Moreover, restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program begin to ease up after 10 years, instead of the 20 years the administration originally sought — by which time Iran will have been able to stockpile ballistic missiles. The next president or his (or her) successor will therefore likely have to deal with Iran as a nuclear power.
When Obama announced the deal, he reiterated what he had been saying for months: “No deal,” he said, “means a greater chance of more war in the Middle East.”
Another way of putting that is to say that Obama’s poor negotiating has resulted in a deal whose terms are so bad that the only reason to embrace it would be a certainty that there will be war otherwise.
Even then, Obama evidently does not think this threat great enough that he can afford to put this deal before Congress. Instead, he will hide the ball as long as he can and take it first to the United Nations. Rather than establishing first that there is at least some support for this deal at home, Obama will thus use the world body’s approval as further leverage against the people’s elected representatives when they cast their votes.
This, along with a multi-million dollar marketing campaign, are his tools for keeping nervous Democrats on board. The fact that either is necessary speaks volumes.
