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U.S. Administration Played Catch-22 on Iran Deal

(Times of Israel) Eric Cortellessa interviews Emily Landau - Emily Landau, head of the arms control and regional security program at the Institute for National Security Studies based at Tel Aviv University, said in an interview: People have short memories. Since the beginning of the negotiations, the Obama administration said to Congress, "Hold your fire." They actually used that term. The argument being, "You can't criticize the deal until you see what's in it." Then, once the deal is finalized, you can't criticize it, because then we will lose everything and the consequences will be catastrophic. It's a Catch-22. The U.S. Congress is the only responsible body in the world that is really doing a very serious review of the deal. In European capitals, nobody is conducting any kind of review. It's convenient for proponents of the deal to say that if only U.S. sanctions are in place, that won't mean anything without the coalition. But at the end of the day, U.S. financial sanctions are the most important. It would be better if the rest of the sanctions stayed in place, but the U.S. sanctions were what really made the changes. That's what started causing hardships. Another option is that, because of this review in Congress, because of all the serious and dangerous flaws that do exist in this deal that were exposed, there might be internal pressure to close those holes and improve the deal. Maybe Congress will be motivated to legislate new laws or mechanisms to deal with the problems that there are with verifications, and the sanctions, which it's pretty clear will not snap back. The loopholes are a result of miscalculations and the way these negotiations unfolded. We saw how this played out. The administration made it very clear that it wanted a deal. It effectively let Iran know that the military option was off the table. All Iran had to do was not budge and the other side would continue to make concessions. That's how we got all these loopholes.
2015-08-24 00:00:00
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