If an agreement is signed between the United States, five other world powers and Iran, the not-yet-online research and development reactor near Arak shown above will have to be hugely modified.
There's a widespread take in the media that President Obama lost the fight over congressional review of the Iran nuclear agreement. For example, Reuters called it a
setback. But as
I noted here shortly after the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 19-0 to send the review bill to the full Senate, the changes made in the bill before that vote make the results a clear victory for the White House. It doesn't mean the administration is happy the bill passed or that the bill was a good idea in the first place, but, as Politico
concedes after interviews with leading Democrats, the chances that Congress will overturn any final agreement with Iran is slim:
“In the aftermath of an agreement, it is highly unlikely that Congress could put together a veto-proof majority to override a deal. I cannot see more than a handful of Democrats voting against the deal,” said Ilan Goldenberg, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a centrist think tank. “And I wouldn’t be surprised if some moderate Republicans such as Bob Corker evaluated the agreement on the merits and considered voting for it.”
But the potential for embarrassment on an international stage remains even if Congress can’t muster a veto-proof majority. If Obama is forced to use his veto pen, that would mean the motion of disapproval had survived a filibuster in the Senate and that at least a half-dozen Democrats opposed the deal. That level of disapproval in Congress could undermine the perception of the agreement on the world stage.
Not everyone agrees with Goldenberg, of course. But the naysayers have yet to make a good case.
If an agreement is approved by the negotiators—who aren't just from Iran and United States, a factor that keeps being missed by too many analysts—the "perception of the agreement" is not going to matter much in the face of the functioning of the agreement. All Congress will ultimately have to hurt an agreement is the ability to maintain the sanctions it has imposed on Iran, not the executive branch sanctions and not the U.N. resolutions. And that's something it had without passing the bill.
Head below the fold for more on this story.
Given that Russia has chosen to sell S-300 air-defense missiles to Iran and China has announced plans to build five nuclear power plants in Iran, it's pretty obvious that they think a deal will happen. Which means they think the framework will be transformed into a permanent agreement. Which means the U.N. sanctions are already the walking dead.
We need to remember where things stood three months ago. Then there was a bill filled with disaster—a true negotiations killer with a number of poison pills. Not the least of which was the requirement that President Obama certify that Iran has not been engaged in or supportive of terrorist actions that harm Americans, an impossible task and a mandate that would have ended the talks.
Assuming the amended bill passes the Senate and House in its current form, it's true that negotiations with Iran might be made slightly more difficult. But only slightly.
Because the Iranians can count. And the particular math involved here is weighted against the survival of a presidential veto of any congressional disapproval of the agreement. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi must only keep 145 Democratic representatives from going along with any such disapproval, one third of the House membership plus one. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid only needs 34 Democrats in the Senate to do the same.
Despite this, several analysts have said, after first saying the committee vote was a defeat for the White House, that it was win-win. In fact, given what the bill was like three weeks ago, the current version is a good deal for the White House, close to the next best thing to having had no vote at all. The only real win for Sen. Corker (R-TN) and the other backers of the original bill came from saving face because the vote on the diluted bill was 19-0.
None of this means that a finished deal will definitely be signed at the end of June. Much can happen. Given some big differences expressed by high-level U.S. and Iranian officials about the contents of the framework deal, there is plenty to be worked out in the next two-and-a-half months. Not just in political matters but the arcane technical details as well. But that would be the case anyway whether or not the review bill clears the Senate and House.