AP: "Iran Nuke Talks Lurch Toward Deadline" As Iranians Make Ever Greater Demands

What Does the Obama Administration expect when
Iran still considers the U.S. as the Great Satan?

Today in Washington, D.C. - July 9, 2015
The House reconvened at 10 AM.  Bills which may be considered today:
H.R. 6 - "To accelerate the discovery, development, and delivery of 21st century cures, and for other purposes."
H.R. 2647 — "To expedite under the National Environmental Policy Act and improve forest management activities in units of the National Forest System derived from the public domain, on public lands under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Land Management, and on tribal lands to return resilience to overgrown, fire-prone forested lands, and for other purposes."

Numerous amendments were offered and debated yesterday with no final vote on H.R. 2822 — "Making appropriations for the Department of the Interior, environment, and related agencies for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2016, and for other purposes."

Yesterday, after many amendments debate the House passed H.R. 2822 (218-213) — "Making appropriations for the Department of the Interior, environment, and related agencies for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2016, and for other purposes."

The Senate reconvened at 9:30 AM today and resumed consideration of S. 1177, the Every Child Achieves Act of 2015.

At 11:30, the Senate voted on a series of amendments to S. 1177: an amendment from Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT), rejected by a vote of 44-54, an amendment from Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) agreed to by a vote of 98-0, and an amendment from Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) agreed to by a vote of 98-0.

Around 1:45 PM, the Senate will vote on cloture on the motion to go to conference with the House on H.R. 1735, the Fiscal Year 2016 Defense Authorization bill (NDAA), on adoption of the motion to go to conference, and on a motion to instruct conferees regarding Overseas Contingency Operations funding offered by Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI).

Yesterday, the Senate voted 47-50 to reject an amendment to the bill offered by Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI), 56-41 to agree to an amendment offered by Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT), and 45-52 to reject an amendment offered by Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN).

In The News:
The AP’s Matt Lee writes today from Vienna, Austria, “Negotiations over Iran's nuclear program lurched toward another deadline on Thursday with diplomats reconvening amid persistent uncertainty and vague but seemingly hopeful pronouncements from participants. . . .

“The current round of talks has blown through two deadlines already and has been extended until Friday, but the Obama administration must submit an agreement to Congress before Thursday turns to Friday in Washington if it wants to avoid an extended legislative review. If the administration misses that target, the congressional review period will double from 30 to 60 days, possibly delaying the sanctions relief that the U.S. would have to give to Iran under the terms of an agreement. . . .


“When the talks missed their second deadline it raised new questions about the ability of world powers to cut off all Iranian pathways to nuclear weapons through diplomacy. Federica Mogherini, the European Union's foreign policy chief, spoke of ‘tense’ moments, and the State Department extended the current interim nuclear arrangement with Tehran through Friday. And new difficulties also have surfaced over the past few days. Iran is pushing for an end to a U.N. arms embargo on the country but Washington opposes that demand.”

The Wall Street Journal reports, “Tensions in the nuclear talks between Iran and six powers have boiled over in recent days, producing heated exchanges among foreign ministers as Washington and Tehran struggled to overcome remaining hurdles to a final agreement, according to people involved in the talks. . . . U.S. officials have insisted this week they don’t feel under pressure to get a deal by the congressional deadline, which arrives at midnight Thursday (6 a.m. Friday in Vienna.) . . .

“Western officials and Iranian media have outlined tense exchanges between the negotiating teams that took place Monday evening, at a point where the talks appeared close to stalling. At the time, negotiators were working toward a Tuesday deadline for a deal. . . .

“Western officials said that Monday evening’s meeting between the foreign ministers was a crucial point in the talks, a moment where it seemed that an agreement would be impossible without a major shift by one or both sides. . . . That night, the foreign ministers of the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Russia, China and Iran held two meetings, each between one and two hours long, and the second lasting into the early morning hours of Tuesday.

“Later on Tuesday, President Barack Obama told Senate Democrats in Washington that he now believed there was less than a 50-50 chance of a final deal with Iran, according to a person familiar with discussions.”

And yet the Obama administration appears ready to keep ignoring and extending deadlines on the negotiations. According to a Wall Street Journal story earlier this week, “International powers negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran failed to meet another deadline on Tuesday, the second missed target in a week, raising the prospect of an open-ended diplomatic process over an issue on which President Barack Obama has staked his foreign-policy record. . . .

“[W]ith negotiations making little headway, the White House on Tuesday laid the groundwork for a third outcome: continuing talks while keeping in place a November 2013 interim agreement that provided Iran with limited sanctions relief in exchange for rolling back parts of its nuclear program.

Such an outcome would allow Mr. Obama to avoid alternatives to diplomacy to confront Iran’s nuclear program, such as military force.”

Meanwhile, the Iranians keep making greater and greater demands. On Monday, Reuters reported, “A dispute over U.N. sanctions on Iran's ballistic missile program and a broader arms embargo were among issues holding up a nuclear deal between Tehran and six world powers on Monday, the day before their latest self-imposed deadline.

“‘The Iranians want the ballistic missile sanctions lifted. They say there is no reason to connect it with the nuclear issue, a view that is difficult to accept," one Western official told Reuters. "There's no appetite for that on our part.’ . . .

“Separately, a senior Iranian official told reporters in Vienna on condition of anonymity that Tehran wanted a United Nations arms embargo terminated as well. A senior Western diplomat said a removal was ‘out of the question’.”

Even The Washington Post editors are seriously troubled by the direction these negotiations are taking. They wrote Monday, “If it is reached in the coming days, a nuclear deal with Iran will be, at best, an unsatisfying and risky compromise. Iran’s emergence as a threshold nuclear power, with the ability to produce a weapon quickly, will not be prevented. It will be postponed, by 10 to 15 years. In exchange, Tehran will reap hundreds of billions of dollars in sanctions relief it can use to revive its economy and fund the wars it is waging around the Middle East.

“Whether this flawed deal is sustainable will depend on a complex set of verification arrangements and provisions for restoring sanctions in the event of cheating. The schemes may or may not work; the history of the comparable nuclear accord with North Korea in the 1990s is not encouraging.”

The editors are further alarmed by “a recent controversy over Iran’s compliance with the interim accord now governing its nuclear work is troubling. The deal allowed Iran to continue enriching uranium, but required that amounts over a specified ceiling be converted into an oxide powder that cannot easily be further enriched. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran met the requirement for the total size of its stockpile on June 30, but it did so by converting some of its enriched uranium into a different oxide form, apparently because of problems with a plant set up to carry out the powder conversion.

“Rather than publicly report this departure from the accord, the Obama administration chose to quietly accept it. When a respected independent think tank, the Institute for Science and International Security, began pointing out the problem, the administration’s response was to rush to Iran’s defense — and heatedly attack the institute as well as a report in the New York Times.

“This points to two dangers in the implementation of any longterm deal. One is ‘a U.S. willingness to legally reinterpret the deal when Iran cannot do what it said it would do, in order to justify that non-performance,’ institute President David Albright and his colleague Andrea Stricker wrote. In other words, overlooking Iranian cheating is easier than confronting it.”

They add, “This weakness is matched by a White House proclivity to respond to questions about Iran’s performance by attacking those who raise them. Mr. Albright, a physicist with a long record of providing non-partisan expert analysis of nuclear proliferation issues, said on the Foreign Policy Web site that he had been unfairly labeled as an adversary of the Iran deal and that campaign-style ‘war room’ tactics are being used by the White House to fend off legitimate questions.

“In the case of the oxide conversion, the discrepancy may be less important than the administration’s warped reaction. A final accord will require Iran to ship most of its uranium stockpile out of the country, or reverse its enrichment. But there surely will be other instances of Iranian non-compliance. If the deal is to serve U.S. interests, the Obama administration and its successors will have to respond to them more firmly and less defensively.”

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