Warnings, charges fly at Iran hearing

WASHINGTON – Amid warnings of war and charges of diplomatic failure, a historic debate over the Obama administration’s nuclear agreement with Iran erupted in the Senate on Thursday, highlighting deep disagreements over the deal’s implications and the potential consequences of rejecting it.

The setting was the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which for decades has been the venue for high-profile hearings on arms control agreements and war and peace controversies, from Korea and Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan. As with many of those debates, the central question Thursday was how much risk the U.S. was being asked to assume and for what benefit.

Leading the charge for the White House, Secretary of State John F. Kerry repeated the administration’s assessment that the deal would “cut off all pathways” for Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon for at least a decade and probably longer.

If Congress rejects the deal, he warned, international sanctions against Iran would rapidly unravel, the U.S. would be isolated and blamed for the failure, and Iran would refuse to engage in new negotiations.

“If you think the ayatollah is going to come back to negotiate again with an American” if the U.S. renounced the current deal, “that’s fantasy,” he said.

A vote to kill the deal would give a “great big green light for Iran to double the pace of its uranium enrichment, proceed full speed ahead with a heavy-water reactor, install new and more efficient centrifuges, and do it all without the unprecedented inspection and transparency measures that we have secured,” he said.

Kerry also agreed with Sen. Christopher S. Murphy, D-Conn., that a collapse of the deal, which was sealed in Vienna this month after nearly two years of negotiations between Iran and a diplomatic bloc consisting of the U.S. and five other world powers, would strengthen Iranian hard-liners at the expense of relative moderates.

All that would greatly increase the risks of a military confrontation, he said.

Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., said bluntly, “I don’t think the American people want another war. … That’s really the other option, which everyone tiptoes around.”

But critics, led by committee chairman Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., argued that the Obama administration and its allies have exaggerated the risks of rejecting it.

If Congress says no, America’s allies will still want to prevent Iran from getting the bomb, the critics say. U.S. sanctions will continue to exert powerful financial pressure on the Iranian economy even if restrictions levied by the United Nations and the European Union go away, they contend.

In a disagreement that echoed Cold War arguments over arms control talks with the Soviet Union, the administration sought to keep the focus on how the deal would affect Iran’s nuclear efforts and its extensive provisions for verifying compliance.

Opponents emphasized Iran’s hostility to the U.S. on a wide range of other issues, including terrorism and Israel.

Corker stressed the theme of Iranian villainy in the hearing’s opening moments, denouncing Tehran’s support for Iraq’s Shiite Muslim militias, which repeatedly attacked U.S. troops during the American occupation there, and graphically describing repression carried out by Syria’s Iranian-backed government.

Those problems, Kerry said, are important but separate.

“This plan was designed to address the nuclear issue, the nuclear issue alone,” he said. Iran’s ability to destabilize the region and challenge the U.S. will be far more dangerous if it has a nuclear weapon, he said.

The structure of the congressional review process gives the administration the upper hand in protecting the deal.

Congress can pass a resolution disapproving the deal, but President Barack Obama has said he would issue a veto. Overriding his veto would require a two-thirds vote in both houses. At this point, opponents don’t have the votes for an override. They may not even have 60 votes needed to get a disapproval resolution through the Senate.

But opponents have mounted an energetic campaign.

Their goal is to sink the deal or at least badly weaken it before the Sept. 17 deadline for Congress to act. If the agreement emerges from this summer’s debate badly tarnished, it would lay the groundwork for repudiation by the next president, they say.

Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, made that point explicitly.

“This is a deal whose survival is not guaranteed” beyond this president’s term, he told Kerry and the administration’s two other witnesses, Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew and Energy Secretary Ernest J. Moniz.

“Even if this deal narrowly avoids congressional defeat, this deal is your deal with Iran,” Rubio said. “The next president is under no legal or moral obligation to live up to it.”