Some Democrats Skeptical Of Biden Effort To Revive Iran Nuclear Deal
Some Democrats in Congress express concern that renewing the 2015 Iran nuclear deal would be of less value as the United States has lost time and leverage, The Hill reported.
Some Democrats in Congress express concern that renewing the 2015 Iran nuclear deal would be of less value as the United States has lost time and leverage, The Hill reported.
In the report published on Monday, The Hill also noted a complaint from Congresspeople that they were unaware of details in the Vienna nuclear talks.
Former president Donald Trump pulled the US from the agreement, the JCPOA in 2018, imposing ‘maximum pressure’ sanctions and prompting Tehran from 2019 to boost its nuclear program beyond JCPOA limits.
The Hill added that JCPOA opponents were also arguing that Russian involvement in re-implementing the deal, including removing enriched uranium, would see Tehran paying fees to Russia when the US is sanctioning Moscow over Ukraine.
“There’s been a little bit of insight as to how things are going but there’s no bigger picture insight,” said Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Menendez – one of four Democrats who in 2015 backed an unsuccessful anti-JCPOA Republican resolution. “It’s hard to judge.”
Menendez said that “if Iran is going to roll back its nuclear program, if it’s finally going to come clean on its efforts to achieve nuclear weapons and give access to the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] …if Iran is going to constrain its missile program…those are good things.” But Menendez argued that “if what we may have…is just a rolling back of time, you can’t roll back knowledge.”
Tehran has refused calls for limiting its ballistic missile program and ending its aggressive regional interventions.
“The Revolutionary Guards are a terrorist organization that has murdered thousands of people, including Americans,” Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid said in a statement. “We have a hard time believing that the United States will remove it from the definition of a terrorist organization.”
During negotiations since April 2021 to revive the 2015 nuclear deal, Tehran has made clear it expects the United States to lift a raft of ‘maximum pressure’ sanctions introduced after the Trump administration in 2018 withdrew the US from the deal, the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action).
There has been speculation that one of the disagreements in not concluding a nuclear deal is over delisting the IRGC. Opponents of the JCPOA in the US and Israel are aware than not delisting the IRGC would make it harder to gain acceptance in Tehran for reimplementing the agreement, which limited Iran’s atomic program.
Shared global mission
The statement from Bennett and Lapid portrayed IRGC designation as part of a “global fight against terrorism…a shared mission of the entire world.” To remove the designation, they said, would mean the US abandoning “its closest allies in exchange for empty promises from terrorists.”
Former United States president Donald Trump added the IRGC to the list in 2019, the first time part of a state’s armed forces was included. Trump’s designation referred specifically to the 1983 bombing of a marine barracks in Lebanon, carried out by a Lebanese Shia group when the US intervened in the Lebanon war after the 1982 Israeli invasion, and the 1996 Khobar Tower bombing in Saudi Arabia, culpability for which has never been conclusively established.
The Israeli statement portrayed the IRGC as controlling a range of groups across the Middle East. “The Iranian Revolutionary Guards are Hezbollah in Lebanon, they are Islamic Jihad in Gaza, they are the Houthis in Yemen, they are the militias in Iraq,” it said.
Promise not to harm Americans
Bennett and Lapid argued against the US listing groups as terrorists only on the grounds of a perceived threat to Americans: “The Revolutionary Guards took part in the murder of hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians, they destroyed Lebanon, they are engaged in the murderous repression of Iranian civilians. They kill Jews because they are Jews, Christians because they are Christians, and Muslims because they do not surrender to them. We find it hard to believe that the definition of the Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization will be abolished in exchange for a ‘promise not to harm the Americans.'”
Not only that, the IRGC, for the Israeli leaders, is an “integral part of the murderous repression machine in Iran” whose “hands are stained with the blood of thousands of Iranians and the trampling of the soul of Iranian society.” Hence, argued Bennett and Lapid, removing the IRGC from the list would be “an insult to the victims and the erasure of a documented reality, with unequivocal evidence.”
Collision course
Reports say the Biden Administration is considering removing the IRGC from its ‘foreign terrorist’ list a part of agreement to revive the JCPOA limiting Iran’s nuclear program. But JCPOA opponents in Israel, the US and elsewhere have highlighted the IRGC recently firing a dozen ballistic missiles at Erbil in northern Iraq after an Israeli airstrike killed two Iranian soldiers in Syria. Iran claimed that it targeted an Israeli intelligence base, but Iraq and the US dismissed the claim.
Following a House Armed Services Committee hearing Thursday, Democrat congresswoman Elaine Luria, a naval veteran, tweeted that reviving the JCPOA would “put Iran and Israel on a collision course,” echoing remarks by Israel’s ambassador to the United States Michael Herzog.