Hatch: The president’s Iran deal is a bad gamble
By Senator Orrin Hatch
http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/2948228-155/hatch-the-presidents-iran-deal-is
President Obama is a gambler, it seems.
He has placed an enormous bet, wagering the national security of the United States, the survival of Israel and the stability of the entire Middle East on his nuclear deal with Iran. The essence of his bet is this: If the fanatical Iranian regime agrees to some temporary limits on its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief, then Iran's radical leaders will put aside their anti-American policies and adopt a more benevolent path. Such thinking is not only naïve, it's dangerous.
Unlike President Obama, I'm a not a gambler, especially not on the mullahs in Iran. The Iranian regime is both radical and dangerous — declaring the United States "the Great Satan," proclaiming its intent to "wipe Israel off the map," perpetrating violence against American servicemen and civilians alike, sowing conflict across the most volatile region of the world and oppressing its long-suffering people by some of the most ghastly methods imaginable. Given the threat posed by this rogue regime, preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon is critical.
Far from blocking the Iranian regime's path to a nuclear bomb, President Obama's deal instead secures what one expert calls a "patient pathway" to a nuclear weapon. The Iranian regime must simply abide by the terms of the agreement and it will ultimately achieve a threshold nuclear weapons capability. Even President Obama admits that after only 10 years operating under the agreement, the time it would take Iran to build a nuclear weapon drops "almost down to zero."
Moreover, the deal's means of ensuring and verifying the Iranian regime's compliance with these temporary limits on its nuclear program are, to be blunt, pathetic. Under the deal, our only peaceful means of recourse, the so-called snapback mechanism, involves a hopelessly cumbersome process. It allows the Iranian regime to delay international inspections for up to 24 days without recourse, a critical gap that experts recognize would allow Iran to hide evidence of illicit nuclear activities. And the deal only makes the snapback mechanism available for instances of "significant non-performance," leaving no means to respond to the kind of incremental cheating that has characterized the Iranian nuclear program thus far.
Perhaps most troubling, it remains unclear whether weapons inspectors will even have access to all Iranian nuclear facilities in the first place. Senior officials of the Iranian regime have repeatedly claimed that the deal does not allow access to military sites. The deal's language appears to have been left deliberately vague on this point — hardly an encouraging development. Moreover, press accounts of a side deal between the United Nations' IAEA weapons inspectors and Iran indicate that the international watchdog has already agreed to rely on the Iranian regime to inspect its own activities at the Parchin weapons testing site, providing international inspectors with only photographs, videos and environmental samples. Hardly a meaningful or effective way to verify compliance.
In exchange for these minimal, temporary concessions, the Iranian regime stands to reap enormous, permanent rewards in sanctions relief. According to figures cited by President Obama, the Iranian regime will regain control of approximately $150 billion currently frozen in the world's financial institutions. Sanctions relief will also allow an influx of international businesses into Iran, providing ever-greater revenue for the Tehran regime.
Where should we expect this money to be spent? Not on the long-suffering Iranian people, unfortunately. If history is any guide, we should expect the regime to use sanctions relief to pursue its dangerous aims, like supporting terrorist proxies, purchasing sophisticated weapons systems to ward off a future military strike, and shoring up the political and financial standing of the most radical elements of the Iranian regime, thereby reducing the likelihood of internal reform and a more constructive Iranian foreign policy. For a deal built on the unfounded hope that the Iranian regime will change its ways, there is little reason to expect any success.
We can and should go back to the negotiating table. While reassembling the sanctions coalition that this agreement throws away will not be easy or automatic, a nation as strong as ours still has plenty of tools at its disposal. Our unparalleled economic and military might gives us significant leverage to get a better deal, and we should not be misled by overly simplistic rhetoric to conclude otherwise.
The prospect of war is never a happy matter to contemplate. It is not a cavalier attitude about war that leads me to oppose this deal. Instead, it is my unwavering judgment that this deal makes war much more likely that leads me to oppose it. We need a better deal, an alternative that reduces the risk of war, not a bad gamble based on cloudy judgment about how best to preserve peace.
Sen. Orrin G. Hatch is the senior U.S. senator for Utah.
