Menendez and Kirk leading Iran sanctions again
Two days after the White House meeting, Vice President Joseph Biden, Secretary of State John Kerry and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew made their plea to Congress in a classified meeting on Capitol Hill. Enthusiasm over the prospects of a deal was underwhelming, multiple senators said.
"Senior administration officials made the same claims and asked us to withdraw the amendment" before the last several rounds of sanctions, Senator Mark Kirk, a leading Republican on the issue, commented over e-mail. "They were wrong, and today the Menendez-Kirk amendment is credited with bringing Iran back to the negotiating table."
The time to act is now, Kirk said, not after giving Iran several more chances to forge a hallow interim agreement.
Senator Robert Menendez is also unconvinced. As chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, he is the highest-ranking Democrat in Congress on issues of foreign policy. And yet it is he — not his Republican colleagues — who is leading an effort to push this bill through committee by the end of the year.
In a phone interview, Menendez said he had not heard “sufficient, substantive reasons to delay” the new bill beyond Friday’s talks in Geneva.
“At the end of the day, you've got to know what is your bottom line — at least we have to know, even if that knowledge is in a secured fashion,” Menendez said. “What's our position on a final set of negotiation? What's our end game?”
Menendez said that, barring any dramatic developments in Geneva this week, he will move forward with the bill in committee in short order.
“I would really want to see something significant by the end of [this] week,” he said.Read the whole thing.
But that 'something significant' - Iran's total suspension of uranium enrichment and dismantling of the Qom and Arak facilities - is unlikely to ever happen.
It seems that the deal to which Iran would be willing to agree would not be good enough for Israel.
Prof. David Menashri, an Iran expert and the president of the College of Law and Business in Ramat Gan, Israel, told The Jerusalem Post in an interview that “Iran is a country that responds to pressure, and currently it is under pressure.”
The supreme leader decided to support the nuclear negotiations in order to remove the sanctions, as “for Iran to agree to the suspension of its nuclear program is easier than changing its attitudes toward the US,” said Menashri, adding that one reason is that any freeze in their program might be reversible.
Asked if he thinks that Iran would possibly agree to Israel’s demand for a full stop of its program, he responded that Iran is not even “entertaining this idea.”What could go wrong?
Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Iran sanctions regime, Iranian nuclear threat, Mark Kirk, Robert Menendez
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 9:58 PM
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