With less than two months to go before the deadline for a final nuclear deal with Iran, Americans aren’t letting President Obama make it a one-man show.
Lawmakers from both parties say their constituents care about the threat from Iran more than most foreign policy issues, and poll results back them up. That is what is driving a push in Congress to give lawmakers a say in any deal — and may drive them to reject a bad one.
“People brought up Iran everywhere we went,” Sen. Ben Sasse told the Washington Examiner.
The Nebraska Republican said that he has seen a sharp increase in concern from his constituents about Iran since his 2013-14 Senate campaign. He estimated that Iran was about 2 percent of what people talked about when he was touring the state then and is more than 50 percent now.
He was so impressed by the detailed critiques he heard that he released a video with their questions for Obama about the deal, including what the president sees as the best-case scenario after it is implemented.
“Democrats as well as Republicans on the ground are just aghast at what the Obama administration has done in the Middle East,” Sasse said.
The public perception of Iran as an enemy — or at least a rival — of the United States has been persistent since the 1979 revolution that brought a Shiite Muslim theocracy to power in Tehran and led to the takeover of the U.S. embassy there. U.S. diplomats were held hostage for 444 days.
An April 16-19 CNN poll found that 72 percent of Americans view Iran as at least a moderate threat to the United States. And though polls show that most Americans still support the effort to try to get a nuclear deal, most have said they don’t expect Iran to keep its side of the bargain. A Quinnipiac poll released April 27 found 62 percent said they were not confident any deal would prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.
“There’s strong concern that an agreement with Iran is going to be truly unenforceable,” Rep. Robert Pittenger, R-N.C., told the Examiner.
Congressional Democrats also are getting the message, which is why they overwhelmingly support legislation that would tie Obama’s power to waive U.S. sanctions against Iran to a process of congressional review of any nuclear deal.
Though Obama threatened for months to veto the legislation, he dropped the threat after the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved a bipartisan compromise version April 14 in an unusual 19-0 vote.
“The American public overwhelmingly wants Congress to approve a deal, rather than the president just to announce a deal,” said Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., a co-author of the legislation, before the vote.
Americans also are anxious about the fact that any nuclear deal will not solve most of the problems between the United States and Iran, because the Obama administration has specifically excluded them from the current talks, Pittenger said.
“They want America to stand strong,” he said. “We’ve done just the opposite with Iran.”
Iran’s theocratic regime has been the top state sponsor of terrorism around the world for decades, and its proxies such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah have killed hundreds of Americans. Tehran also has been relentlessly hostile to Israel, and its actions have contributed to the failure of efforts to seek peace between the Jewish state and Palestinian Arabs.
“People understand from reading decades of news that Iran is irrational,” said GOP foreign policy adviser Richard Grenell.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, Tehran supplied insurgents with advanced explosives they used to kill U.S. troops — a move that has rebounded against the nuclear talks in a personal way through freshman Sen. Tom Cotton, a former Army officer and combat veteran of those conflicts.
The Arkansas Republican organized a March 9 open letter that was signed by 46 other Republican senators warning Iran’s leaders that any nuclear deal not approved by Congress might not survive past the end of Obama’s term in office.
The letter drew a sharp rebuke from the White House, Secretary of State John Kerry and congressional Democrats, as well as from Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, who specifically mentioned Cotton in a speech Wednesday in New York when he warned that Iran would expect Obama to keep Congress in check after a deal is signed.
“The responsibility of bringing that into line falls on the shoulders of the president of the United States,” he said. “However he does it, that’s his problem.”
But Obama may not be able to do that. Even though the legislation being considered by lawmakers would require a veto-proof majority to reject any nuclear deal, it’s likely only a minority in Congress will accept an agreement based on the parameters announced April 2.
In that case, such a deal would be weak and Obama would have to use his executive authority to waive sanctions to keep Iran happy, in effect validating Cotton’s warning.
“Republicans have always had a difficult time trying to explain to the public why we wouldn’t want to talk to our enemies,” Grenell said, explaining why polls show public support for a deal.
But Obama has failed to understand that Americans aren’t willing to pay any price for a deal, especially if it means changing their way of life or surrendering their values, he said.
“Americans are very fearful of President Obama — because they don’t trust him,” Grenell said.
