Obama's Iran Strategy is Deceit. The GOP's? Retreat

 

IBDEditorials.com

Iran Deal: President Obama has been deceiving the public on Iran's nuclear breakout time for political purposes. Meanwhile, GOP senators surrender their constitutional ability to oppose a bad deal. Can't we do better?

'If you like your health care plan, you'll be able to keep your health care plan" is engraved in history as a great deception.

But a year and a half ago, President Obama was telling the Associated Press another whopper, as Bloomberg foreign policy reporter Eli Lake noted this week. Asked by the AP, "What's the U.S. intelligence assessment at this point" on how long it would take Iran to build an atomic weapon, the president claimed: "Our assessment continues to be a year or more away ... and so we now have the time" to negotiate with Tehran and "measure how serious the Iranians are."

The claim turns out to be as much baloney as the ObamaCare claim.

Obama knew "that his intelligence community believed it was only two to three months away from making enough fuel" for an atomic bomb, Lake pointed out.

"Today Obama emphasizes that Iran is only two to three months away from acquiring enough fuel for a bomb," Lake said, because now Obama is interested in "creating a sense of urgency for his Iran agreement."

Obama's approach contrasts sharply with 2013, "when Congress was weighing new sanctions on Iran, and Obama was pushing for more diplomacy, (and) his interest was in tamping down that sense of urgency."

The two-to-three month breakout time has been the U.S. intelligence community's assessment for years. But as with ObamaCare, the president's disinformation is another case of Daddy Government pulling the wool over our eyes for our own good.

The Weekly Standard points out that, as in the Benghazi deception of 2012, Obama got an assist from National Security Adviser Susan Rice. Speaking before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee a month and a half ago, Rice rolled out the new breakout time — apparently before it was declassified: "Today, experts suggest Iran's breakout window is just two to three months. We seek to extend that to at least one year," she said, no doubt flooring the AIPAC audience.

With the administration practicing such manipulative chicanery, sacrificing security upon the altar of the Obama "legacy," effective opposition from Congress is needed more than ever.

But instead, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker, R-Tenn., gives us a bill — now welcomed by Obama — that "puts the onus on Congress to muster 67 votes to block an agreement," as National Review's Andrew McCarthy pointed out.

Corker has turned the tables from where the Constitution placed the onus — "on the president to find 67 Senate votes to approve an international agreement," McCarthy said. As he notes, "Under the Constitution, Obama's Iran deal would not have a prayer. Under the Corker bill, it would sail through."

Obama uses deceit to let the world's leading terrorist state retain nuclear-weapon capability. But Senate Republicans' strategy countering this unprecedented threat is: retreat.