The Obama administration party line on the Iran deal couldn’t be any clearer. Everyone from President Obama to Secretary of State John Kerry to the actors reading from a simplistic script in an agitprop advertisement extolling the agreement’s virtues have all been consistent on one thing: The only alternative to the deal is war. Any hope of getting a better agreement that would provide genuine scrutiny of their nuclear program or eliminate its infrastructure and ability to do research that will make a bomb a simple thing once this pact expires is, as Kerry keeps telling us, a “unicorn.” According to the president, 99 percent of the world (with the one percent being limited to Israel and pro-Israel members of Congress) agrees with this, especially America’s European allies who were crucial to the implementation of sanctions on Iran. But, as Bloomberg’s Josh Rogin reports, the French government may actually believe that a better deal is still possible even in the event that Congress votes the agreement down.
This crack in the supposedly solid wall of support for the notion that there is no alternative to the deal comes at an unfortunate moment for the administration. The polls are showing that voters aren’t happy with the deal and Congressional Republicans seem certain to vote it down, leaving the outcome in the hands of a few Democrats whose support will be necessary for an override of an expected Obama veto. The best argument for the deal isn’t on its merits since even most Democrats know it falls far short of what the administration had set as its goals when this process began. But the notion that there is no alternative and that all of our allies will immediately abandon the U.S. position if Congress votes the deal down is persuasive to many. But what if that isn’t so?
That’s the upshot of Rogin’s piece, which reports that Jacques Audibert, the senior diplomatic advisor to French President Francois Hollande told two members of Congress that Kerry’s predictions were false. As Rogin writes:
According to both lawmakers, Audibert expressed support for the deal overall, but also directly disputed Kerry’s claim that a Congressional rejection of the Iran deal would result in the worst of all worlds, the collapse of sanctions and Iran racing to the bomb without restrictions.
“He basically said, if Congress votes this down, there will be some saber-rattling and some chaos for a year or two, but in the end nothing will change and Iran will come back to the table to negotiate again and that would be to our advantage,” [Democratic Rep. Loretta] Sanchez told me in an interview. “He thought if the Congress voted it down, that we could get a better deal.”
The French embassy denied the report, but Sanchez and Rogin are obviously telling the truth about a moment of refreshing candor from Audibert.
Kerry told Congress there’s no way he could go back to Iran for a better deal and that Europe, which is eager to start doing business with the Islamist regime, would not support any effort to strengthen its terms. But the French, who reportedly took a tougher stand at some points during the negotiations than the Americans, know that this isn’t true.
This is an important admission that proves a better deal is no unicorn. In fact, it goes to the heart of everything that was wrong about the administration’s approach to the negotiations. Every time the Iranians said “no” during the last two and a half years — whether it concerned their right to enrich uranium, the extent of their nuclear infrastructure, inspections, an agreement that expired rather than was permanent, past military research and a host of other issues — Obama and Kerry simply backed down. They did so because they told themselves that there was no alternative short of war. But what was really animating their decision was, contrary to their promises, a belief that any deal at any price was better than none at all.
This means that, if they are capable of resisting partisan pressures, Congressional Democrats should be able to vote “no” on the deal with an easy conscience. The talk about war being the only other option has always been a big lie. It was Obama who fecklessly threw away the West’s enormous economic and political leverage over Iran when he signed the interim agreement that began the process of dismantling sanctions and giving approval to Iran’s nuclear ambitions. But a return to the negotiating table would provide the Islamist regime with a wake-up call because it would force them to realize that a pushover president isn’t calling all the shots and able to ram through an agreement based on appeasement, rather than a defense of U.S. interests.
There were already a lot of good reasons for Congress to vote down the deal. But with this embarrassing French dissent from Obama’s talking points, it just received one more that ought, if Democrats are being honest about making their decisions on the basis of what is good for U.S. security, persuade fair-minded members to tell the president that this weak deal isn’t good enough.
