Obama showing he’ll take any nuke deal

President Obama plainly wants it so much he can almost taste it, so sooner or later he’ll sign a deal with Iran.

A bad deal.

The reason for Iran to sign any deal is to get an end to US sanctions — but Congress, if it feels the deal doesn’t do enough to end Tehran’s rush to become a nuclear- weapons power, might refuse to repeal the sanctions.

But this week, in a White House leak to a favorite news outlet, The New York Times, we learned that the Treasury Department now claims Obama can make the sanctions disappear without Congress.
Huh?

Ed Royce, the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee: “It’s tough to see a solid agreement [with Iran] when Congress — which was critical to putting in the strong sanctions that got negotiations to this point — is so clearly sidelined.”

Democrats like Reps. Eliot Engel (D-Bronx-Westchester), the committee’s top Democrat, and Steve Israel (D-LI) are just as critical.

Yet this is far from the first trick the administration has pulled to dodge congressional accountability here.

Consider the timetable set by the world’s six top powers to conclude a deal on Iran’s nuclear program by Nov. 24.

Neatly nestled after Nov. 4 (the midterm elections) and before January (when the new, almost certainly more Republican, Congress is sworn in), it couldn’t be more perfectly timed to sneak a fast one by unruly Capitol Hill.

As a diplomat from one of the six parties involved in the talks told me recently, “It’d certainly seem” that the deadline was designed with the US political calendar in mind, that is to give Obama more flexibility in making a deal.

But now, with Democrats almost as resistant as Republicans to any Iran deal that seems likely, it’s hey, let’s just bypass Congress altogether.

Meanwhile, the intellectual push is on to justify even a bad deal as somehow smart.

Vali Nasr of Johns Hopkins, a former Obama adviser on Iran, recently argued in the Times that it’s “now or never” for a deal with Iran.

Why’s that? Because, Nasr notes, next year Iran will vote on a board of mullahs that’ll one day select a new Supreme Leader. If we want that body to be dominated by “moderates,” we must remove sanctions now, so Iranians feel some economic improvement.

Thus Nasr argues, any deal is better than none because it would change the “dynamics” in US-Iran relations.

Whatever that means.

Once he’s past the November elections, Obama can embrace such hopeful scenarios and ignore his own past mantra: “No deal is better than a bad deal.”

So damn the congressional torpedoes, full speed ahead. That is, keep shedding more and more of our past demands of Iran.

Like the number of active uranium-enriching centrifuges that Iran would be allowed to keep. It has 9,400 now.

In the past, the six powers demanded to cut that number to 1,300. (That’s itself a huge concession: Under the letter of several UN Security Council resolutions, still on the books, it should have zero.)

But Iran’s “moderate” negotiators balked. So now we offer to let them keep 4,000 instead. Never mind that Iran still has 10,000 more centrifuges, which it’s yet to activate.

Never mind that negotiators haven’t even begun to address Iran’s Arak facility, where it’s pursuing the plutonium path to a bomb. And never mind that Iran refuses to even discuss (let alone allow international inspection of) its missile program — the delivery system for its nukes.

Oh, and never mind that the inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (the folks we rely on to guarantee that Tehran sticks by its signed agreements) say they still can’t even verify Iran’s claim that its nuclear program is peaceful, because Tehran limits their access to facilities.

It’s painfully obvious that we’re more eager for a deal than Tehran — so much so that Iran may next angle for another extension, past the Nov. 24 deadline, to win even more concessions.

In short, we’re headed for a deal that will, at best, leave Tehran just one turn of a screwdriver away from a bomb — “nuclear-capable,” but not actually a nuclear power until it chooses to be one.

Obama may believe that a grateful Tehran won’t be so crass as to turn that fatal screw on his watch.

If so, mission accomplished: Iran, technically, won’t obtain the bomb on Obama’s watch, while the risk of wider war thanks to a military attack on Tehran’s nuclear facilities will be averted during his presidency.

Except that allowing Iran to become even a threshold nuclear state is bad for the Mideast (others will race to get the bomb), bad for our allies (the Israelis, Saudis, et al, consider it fatal), bad for his successor and, above all else, bad for America.

New York Post