JINSA CEO Quoted in the Washington Post on Kerry’s Iran Statement
Kerry sounds sensible on Iran?!
By Jennifer Rubin – 10/31/2014
In an interview on Thursday, Secretary of State John F. Kerry said, for the first time, something reassuring about the Iran “P5+1” talks:
Kerry sounds sensible on Iran?!
By Jennifer Rubin – 10/31/2014
In an interview on Thursday, Secretary of State John F. Kerry said, for the first time, something reassuring about the Iran “P5+1” talks:
I will say this to everybody: We’ve set a very clear standard. There are four present pathways to a bomb for Iran – the hidden so-called secret facility in a mountain called Fordow, the open Natanz enrichment facility, the plutonium heavy-water reactor called Arak, and then, of course, covert activities. We’ve pledged that our goal is to shut off each pathway sufficient that we know we have a breakout time of a minimum of a year that gives us the opportunity to respond if they were to try to do that.
We’re – we believe there are ways to achieve that. Whether Iran can make the tough decisions that it needs to make will be determined in the next weeks, but I have said consistently that no deal is better than a bad deal. And we’re going to be very careful, very much based on expert advice, fact, science as to the choices we make. This must not be a common ideological or a political decision. And if we can do what we’ve said, what the President set out in his policy – the President said they will not get a bomb. If we could take this moment of history and change this dynamic, the world would be a lot safer and we’d avoid a huge arms race in the region where Saudis, Emiratis, Egyptians, others may decide that if they’re moving towards a bomb, they got to move there too, and obviously it’s a much more dangerous world. And that is not a part of the world where you want massive uninspected, unverified, nontransparent nuclear activities. So that’s what we’re trying to do.
Hmm, that sounds like, for one thing, the time frame for breakout is a year in contrast to some prior statements suggesting it was 6 to 12 months. The term “shut off the pathway” sounds more reassuring than “make them unplug some pipes.” But as with everything concerning this administration, what officials say and what they do are often at odds. This is especially true when Kerry is concerned. You will recall he made stirring statements about the need to punish Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for use of chemical weapons, only to see the president erase the red line and scramble for an excuse not to use force.
“I would note that he and the Administration remain consistent in focusing on ‘the bomb’ versus ‘nuclear weapons capability’ and one must wonder how good our intelligence can be to detect things so precisely,” warns Michael Makovsky of JINSA. “This is especially true about covert activities, which by definition we can’t determine clearly, and which have always gone that we discover later on.” This is why a concession that allows some enrichment is inevitably a slippery-slope that simply allows Iran to determine the time of its breakout.