Urge Your Member of Congress to Reject the Nuclear Agreement with Iran!
After more than 20 months of negotiations, the United States and its negotiating partners announced a nuclear agreement with Iran. Throughout the negotiations, AIPAC outlined five critical criteria for a good deal. Unfortunately, the proposed agreement is fundamentally flawed in each of these vital areas. Urge your senators and representative to oppose the agreement.
CLICK PLEASE: http://cqrcengage.com/aipac/app/write-a-letter…
If anybody is interested in reading the 159 page Iran Deal - Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action a pdf of the document can be found here:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2165388-iran-deal-text.html
In addition, a rally in Times Square is scheduled for next Wednesday, July 22 from 5:30-7:30PM per the flyer below or visit http://stopiranrally.org/ for a lot more details. "
WORSE THAN WE COULD HAVE IMAGINED!
When you write a column, as did I two weeks ago, headlined “The worst agreement in U.S. diplomatic history,” you don’t expect to revisit the issue. We had hit bottom. Or so I thought. Then on Tuesday the final terms of the Iranian nuclear deal were published. I was wrong.
Who would have imagined we would be giving up the conventional arms and ballistic missile embargoes on Iran? In nuclear negotiations?
Are
conventional weapons not a separate issue? After all, conventional, by
definition, means non-nuclear. Why are we giving up the embargoes?
Because
Iran, joined by Russia — our “reset” partner — sprung the demand at the
last minute, calculating that Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry
were so desperate for a deal that they would cave. They did.
And have convinced themselves that they scored a victory by delaying the lifting by five to eight years. (Ostensibly. The language is murky. The interval could be considerably shorter.)
And have convinced themselves that they scored a victory by delaying the lifting by five to eight years. (Ostensibly. The language is murky. The interval could be considerably shorter.)
Obama
claimed in his news conference that it really doesn’t matter, because
we can always intercept Iranian arms shipments to, say, Hezbollah.
But wait. Obama has insisted throughout that we are pursuing this Iranian diplomacy to avoid
the use of force, yet now blithely discards a previous diplomatic
achievement — the arms embargo — by suggesting, no matter, we can just
shoot our way to interdiction.
The
net effect of this capitulation will be not only to endanger our Middle
East allies now under threat from Iran and its proxies, but also to
endanger our own naval forces in the Persian Gulf. Imagine how Iran’s
acquisition of the most advanced anti-ship missiles would threaten our
control over the gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, waterways we have kept
open for international commerce for a half-century.
The other major shock in the final deal is
what happened to our insistence on “anytime, anywhere” inspections.
Under the final agreement, Iran has the right to deny international
inspectors access to any undeclared nuclear site. The denial is then
adjudicated by a committee — on which Iran sits. It then goes through
several other bodies, on all of which Iran sits. Even if the inspectors’
request prevails, the approval process can take 24 days.
And what do you think will be left to be found, left unscrubbed, after 24 days? The whole process is farcical.
The action now shifts to Congress. The debate is being hailed as momentous. It is not. It’s irrelevant.
Congress
won’t get to vote on the deal until September. But Obama is taking the
agreement to the U.N. Security Council for approval within days . Approval there will cancel all previous U.N. resolutions outlawing and sanctioning Iran’s nuclear activities.
Meaning:
Whatever Congress ultimately does, it won’t matter because the legal
underpinning for the entire international sanctions regime against Iran
will have been dismantled at the Security Council. Ten years of
painstakingly constructed international sanctions will vanish overnight,
irretrievably.
Even if Congress
rejects the agreement, do you think the Europeans, the Chinese or the
Russians will reinstate sanctions? The result: The United States is left
isolated while the rest of the world does thriving business with Iran.
Should
Congress then give up? No.
Congress needs to act in order to rob this
deal of, at least, its domestic legitimacy. Rejection will make little
difference on the ground. But it will make it easier for a successor
president to legitimately reconsider an executive agreement (Obama dare
not call it a treaty — it would be instantly rejected by the Senate)
that garnered such pathetically little backing in either house of
Congress.
It’s a future hope, but
amid dire circumstances. By then, Iran will be flush with cash,
legitimized as a normal international actor in good standing, recognized
(as Obama once said) as “a very successful regional power.” Stopping
Iran from going nuclear at that point will be infinitely more difficult
and risky.
Which
is Obama’s triumph. He has locked in his folly. He has laid down his
legacy, and we will have to live with the consequences for decades.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/worse-than-we-could-have-imagined/2015/07/16/aa320b42-2bf0-11e5-bd33-395c05608059_story.html