10:00 AM
Obama Channels Kennedy, Reagan in Iran Deal Defense
Supporting the pact is 'not even close' to a tough call, the president told an audience at American University.
Evoking attempts by his predecessors John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan to pre-empt nuclear war against the Soviets, President Barack Obama on Wednesday urged members of Congress and those influencing them – including an outraged Israel – to support his administration's agreement limiting Iran's nuclear program.
"This deal is not just the best choice among alternatives. This is the strongest non-proliferation agreement ever negotiated," Obama said at American University in Washington, the same venue where Kennedy spoke about preventing nuclear war with Russia 52 years earlier. "And because this is such a strong deal, every nation in the world that has commented publicly, with the exception of the Israeli government, has expressed support."
"I've had to make a lot of tough calls as president," he added. "But whether or not this deal is good for American security is not one of those calls. It's not even close."
Obama referenced Reagan's assertion that peace is not the absence of conflict, but the ability to handle conflict by peaceful means, as well as Kennedy's caution that the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war.
He also stressed that while the deal contains provisions that will last only 15 years, the Reagan-spurred START treaty limiting the weapons capabilities of the U.S. and Soviet Union covered the same amount of time.
"That's how arms control agreements work," Obama said.
The room of roughly 250 people occasionally applauded Obama following his repeated contrasting of the deal, announced in Vienna last month, against the logic that brought America into war with Iraq in 2003. The president emphasized that the most vocal domestic critics of the deal are many of those who supported that war. But, he said, they have not learned from the subsequent decade.
Walking away from the deal now, Obama said, would only further embolden Iran and damage America's reputation abroad.
"How can we in good conscience justify war before we've tested a diplomatic agreement that achieves our objectives?" Obama said.
"That should be a lesson we've learned from over a decade of war," he added. We should "worry less about being labeled weak, [and] worry more about getting it right."
In the lengthy address, Obama rejected some of the most prominent arguments against the deal – voiced by critics like Republican Sens. John McCain of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Ted Cruz of Texas, as well as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – including that Iran may delay inspectors' ability to follow through on suspicions of cheating and that billions of dollars in sanctions relief would aid Iran in sponsoring terrorism.
After the remarks, Graham and McCain released a joint statement calling Obama's speech "just another example of his reliance on endless straw men to divert attention from his failed policies."
“It is particularly galling to hear the president try to defend his nuclear agreement with Iran by claiming that its critics also supported the war in Iraq. Having presided over the collapse of our hard-won gains in Iraq, the rise of the most threatening terrorist army in the world, the most devastating civil war and humanitarian catastrophe in generations in Syria, the spread of conflict and radicalism across the Middle East and much of Africa, a failed reset with Russia, and escalating cyberattacks and other acts of aggression for which our adversaries pay no price, the president should not throw stones from his glass house," the senators said.
Obama's speech came as members of his administration testified Wednesday on Capitol Hill before a Senate committee, aiming to convince lawmakers to support the deal but admitting that Iran is unlikely to curtail its support of terrorists.
"I expect we’ll continue to see that," Adam Szubin, acting undersecretary of the Treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence, told members of the Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs. "The alternative that’s put out there, though, doesn’t make sense to me strategically. … We’ve decided that we need to address the nuclear threat and then turn to the terrorism.”
Congress is expected to vote on whether to support the agreement after returning from August recess, and Obama has said he would veto any measure that attempts to sink the deal. As support for the deal continues to trickle in from key senators, it remains unclear whether the two-thirds majority opposition in Congress exists to override the veto.
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