U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, at the House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on the administration’s agreement with Iran, July 28, 2015. (Pic credit, M.Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO).
Mike Huckabee is almost right. The Iran agreement will not “take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven.” The deal all but guarantees that Iran will try to drop a burning oven on the Israelis. The purchase of the oven will be facilitated, as Huckabee points out, by the Obama administration.
Yet, Israel is not alone in opposing the Iran agreement. The Saudis, for example, did not hide theirs.
Prince Bandar bin Sultan, former ambassador to Washington and who later served as director general of the Saudi Intelligence Agency and was King Abdullah’s special envoy, opined in the Elaph newspaper, “President Obama made his decision to go ahead with the Iran nuclear deal fully aware that …It will wreak havoc in the Middle East which is already living in a disastrous environment, in which Iran is a major player in the destabilization of the region.” The reason for the agreement, according to Bandar, is because Obama “ideologically believes what he is doing is right.”
And a well known Saudi commentator Jamal Khashoggi has written, “It is a nonproliferation deal. It’s not a ‘Let’s change Iran’ deal. The Iranians have showed no commitment to change their behavior in the region.”
He is right. But, then, the Iranians were not asked to change their behavior. Instead, they were rewarded for their aggression. In fact, the Obama administration insists that allowing Iran to develop nuclear weapons and lifting the sanctions will do little, if anything, to increase the regime’s oppression and support of terrorism.
To get this very bad and secret deal approved by Congress, the administration took to bullying both Democrats and Republican opponents of the Iran agreement. In addition, Obama and his minions have adopted the time-tested Arab propaganda line of blaming Israel for everything.
Faced with possible veto by Congress, which Israel publicly advocates, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, not for the first time, warned Israel to stop speaking out against the Iran agreement: “If Congress were to overturn it, our friends in Israel could actually wind up being more isolated and more blamed,” he declared at the Council of Foreign Relations in New York.
The effort to further muddy the diplomatic relations with Israel, the “blame Israel” line was repeated today by Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) at the House Foreign Affairs Committee when questioning Secretary Kerry about the Iran agreement. Could the Secretary explain why “the current Israeli government opposes the deal? ” he asked. Similar comments were made by Gerald Connolly (D-VA).
Strangely, these and other Congressmen question Israel’s opposition to the deal but not the administration’s commitment to the agreement that includes a secret verification agreement between the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Iran, which the administration was merely briefed about and promises to brief Congress.
Amb. Marc Ginsburg, who served in the Carter and Clinton administrations and as U.S.ambassador to Morocco and who warned that “secret annexes can torpedo this deal,” criticized the administration on MSNBC, saying “Secretary Kerry is beginning to sound like a used car salesman, who’s not revealing when’s beneath the chassis of the car.”
In Addis Abba, Ethiopia, President Obama criticized Mr. Huckabee’s and other critics of the Iran agreement, saying they are not contributing “good policy or good politics.” He also noted, “I want to make sure I’m turning over the keys to somebody who is serious about the serious problems that the country and the world face.” What will happen if he doesn’t like his successor?
If the deal goes through and the Iran-IAEA agreement remains secret, it will not only threaten Israel and the Middle East. It will also threaten the U.S. and Obama will have violated the law requiring that all details of agreements signed by the U.S. should be known to Congress. Furthermore, he will have violated the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which, because it was ratified by Congress, cannot be skirted by an executive order.
Congress should squash Obama’s efforts to buy an explosive Iranian oven, which would threaten the U.S. and the Middle East, and as Huckabee warned could be dropped on Israel.