Israel Matzav

Kerry: US policy on Iran about 'proving this is a peaceful program'

US Secretary of State John FN Kerry's 'poof speech' got most of the headlines here in reports about his Senate Foreign Relations Committee appearance earlier this week. But what he had to say about Iran was no less disturbing.

[Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert] Menendez [D-NJ] also panned a recent Wall Street Journal headline: “Obama Administration Shows Optimism on Iran Nuclear Talks.”

“I’m trying to glean where that’s from,” he said. “…With no sanctions regime in place, and understanding that every sanctions that we have pursued have needed at least a six-month lead time to become enforceable, and then a greater amount of time to actually enforce, that the only option left to the United States to this or any other president, and to the West, would be either to accept a nuclear-armed Iran or to have a military option.”

Kerry dismissed breakout as “just having one bomb’s worth, conceivably, of material, but without any necessary capacity to put it in anything, to deliver it, to have any mechanism to do so, and otherwise.”

He then admitted that “our goal” is not eliminating nuclear capability as much as “proving that this is a peaceful program.”

Senator John McCain (R-Az), who could have done something about this in '08, but didn't, came up with a classic line.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) told Kerry he was “about to hit the trifecta.”

“Geneva II was a total collapse as I predicted to you that it would be. The only tangible result is that people who went to Geneva for the Free Syrian National Council, their relatives were kidnapped,” he said of the administration’s attempts to hold talks between Bashar Assad’s regime and the opposition. “The Israeli-Palestinian talks, even though you may drag them out for a while, are finished. And I predict to you, even though we gave the Iranians the right to enrich, which is unbelievable, that those talks will collapse too.”

“…On the issue of Ukraine, my hero, Teddy Roosevelt, used to say talk softly, but carry a big stick. What you’re doing is talking strongly and carrying a very small stick — in fact, a twig.”

 There are many more lowlights. Read the whole thing. 

Labels: Iranian nuclear threat, John Kerry, John McCain, Middle East peace process, Robert Menendez, Ukraine

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 3:04 PM