Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, who is mulling a run for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, on Thursday evening stated in the strongest terms yet his trepidation about the deal Secretary of State John Kerry is close to reaching with the terrorist sponsor state Iran on its nuclear program.
"We're coming up to a very, very dangerous time," Bolton said in a telephone conference call interview with talk radio host Tim Constantine. "I'm very worried the president's rushing to sign this deal. I think he's worried that if more time goes by and Congress has a chance to vote on more economic sanctions on Iran that he's gonna lose the deal. And anything we can do to make this deal crash before he signs it, we should do."
The Associated Press on Thursday reported that the agreement the U.S. and other major powers are crafting with Iranian negotiators would contain "a 40 percent cut in the number of machines it could use to make an atomic bomb," giving Iran in return "quick relief from some crippling economic sanctions and a partial lift of a U.N. embargo on conventional arms."
With a deadline of March 31 looming, an announcement of a broad agreement is expected soon, then a finalized pact signed within three months thereafter. Tehran would agree to a limit of 6,000 uranium centrifuges, compared with the estimated 10,000 it currently operates. But that 6,000 is far more than the 500-to-1,500 ceiling U.S diplomats originally sought, or the limit of 4,000 they spoke of a year ago.
Last month, a new report from the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog arm, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), stated that Iran continues not to cooperate with IAEA investigators.
"Iran has not provided any explanations that enable the agency to clarify the outstanding practical measures," the U.N. agency said. Those outstanding concerns include apparent Iranian experiments with nuclear detonators, and studies of atomic explosive yields.
"There is very little time left," Bolton warned. "I'm afraid that Obama is so determined to sign this deal with Iran over their nuclear weapons program that it could come almost any day."
He worried that the recent string of conflicting media reports on whether a deal is close to being reached, quoting unnamed diplomats, could be "another pressure tactic by the expert Iranian negotiators to convince Obama to make more concessions, which I'm afraid he's perfectly willing to do."
Bolton, the American voice at the U.N. under President George W. Bush, also offered some conjecture on why President Obama is not seeking a treaty, which would be subject to Senate approval under the U.S. Constitution. "You know, he doesn't want any congressional involvement because he knows how bad this deal is," he contended. "And if it's exposed, it's just not sustainable politically. I think even the Democrats will desert him in droves."
As in his Wall Street Journal column on Monday, the former ambassador had no fears about the reports of President Obama seeking to go over the heads of Congress to the U.N.
"I can say one thing: Fortunately, he may go to the U.N. Security Council to get the Council to lift the sanctions that the Council itself put in place," he said, but "nothing the Security Council can do is going to affect our sovereignty on this. We have an inherent right to self defense, and a subsequent president and subsequent Congress can exercise it."
But Bolton reiterated that "I think the real issue now is to do whatever we can to try and stop the deal. You know, Obama is so afraid of arguments about how bad this deal is; that's why he objected to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu speaking to Congress. That's why he objected to Tom Cotton," the freshman GOP senator from Arkansas, "and the other 46 senators who wrote to the ayatollah saying they didn't like the deal. He's trying to distract our attention on these political issues from the merits of the deal itself, because he knows, as I say, that if it gets scrutiny it can't be sustained."
According to Bolton, "if the deal is so fragile that dissent in the United States scares the ayatollahs away, that shows you there's no deal at all."
One in Constantine's Capital Hill Town Hall Series of interviews, the conference call with Ambassador Bolton was sponsored by the Washington Times.
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