(CNSNews.com) – U.S. senators opposed to the Iran nuclear agreement told Secretary of State John Kerry Thursday he had been “fleeced” and “bamboozled” by the Iranians.
Several said that while Iran was once isolated as an international “pariah” now the administration asserts that should Congress reject the deal, then it is the U.S. that will be the pariah.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), author of the legislation that provides for congressional review of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), set the tone in his opening remarks.
“From my perspective, Mr. Secretary, I’m sorry, not unlike a hotel guest who leaves only with a hotel bathrobe on his back, I believe you’ve been fleeced,” he told Kerry. “In the process of being fleeced, what you’ve really done here is you have turned Iran from being a pariah to now Congress being a pariah.”
Corker was referring to a recent spate of administration warnings that if Congress votes to reject the JCPOA, that will leave the U.S. internationally isolated, and could lead to war.
Sen. Jim Risch (R-Idaho) said the administration’s “mantra” has changed from “no deal is better than a bad deal” to “you have to accept this or else it’s war.”
“We have gone from the position where we started, when we had Iran isolated, and they were viewed on the world stage as pariah,” he said. “If we don’t go along with this, we’re told, the other negotiators are going to go along with this, and the United States will be isolated on this issue, and we will be the pariah on the international stage.”
“All I can say is after reviewing this, even in a cursory fashion, anyone who believes this is a good deal really joins the ranks of the most naïve people on the face of the Earth,” Risch told Kerry.
Kerry pushed back, quoting from media articles quoting former Israeli Shin Bet intelligence agent chief Ami Ayalon as calling the JCPOA a useful measure to curb the Iranian threat.
“I don’t think he’s naïve,” declared Kerry, who appeared together with Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz and Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew.
(The Times of Israel reported that Ayalon’s evaluation “runs counter to near unanimous criticism of the deal among mainstream Israeli officials, who fear it will fail to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.” It noted that Ayalon later become a lawmaker in the opposition Labor Party, whose current leader opposes the Iran deal.)
Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) defended Kerry. If the U.S. had been “fleeced,” she said, then so too had other countries – “almost everybody in the world.”
She listed other countries involved in the negotiations – or members of the U.N. Security Council which on Monday passed a resolution endorsing the JCPOA – asking Kerry each time whether those countries supported the deal. They had, he replied.
“If you were bamboozled,” Boxer told Kerry, “the world has been bamboozled – that’s ridiculous. And it’s unfair and it’s wrong.”
“You can disagree, for sure, with aspects of this agreement,” she chided her colleagues. “but I think we need to stay away from that kind of rhetoric.”
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