Given my belief that there are almost always two strong sides to every issue, I’ve waited a couple of weeks, hoping to hear convincing arguments against the Iran nuclear deal. But all I’ve heard is a drumbeat of half-truths. Among them:
• The deal itself. The simple truth is that major production limits, significant stockpile reductions, and increased international oversight — even if not everything we want— are better than none at all.
My question to all who oppose the nuclear agreement is, have you ever made a deal for a business, or a car, or a house, or anything else? Did you get everything you wanted and leave the other side with nothing? Not likely, because that’s not how it works.
I regret if I appear to lend an ounce of credibility to his name, but even Donald Trump, in his book “The Art Of The Deal,” said, “I always go into a deal anticipating the worst.” That’s what the United States did. “The worst” meant a totally unshackled Iran, ready to build a bomb tomorrow. Now they can’t.
• The sanctions. Yes, sanctions took their toll on Iran and brought them to the table, and yes, Iran will be thrilled to be rid of them. But the truth is, its economy has been on life support, with inflation soaring to 40 percent.
Iran needs those tens of billions of dollars that will fill its coffers to get healthy again, not just to add to its support of terrorists outside its borders.
And anyway, according to respected analyst Tony Cordesman at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the groups that Iran supports are in no position to absorb, let alone spend, a lot more money than they’ve already been getting.
• The verification. The half-truth here is that the 24-day window for U.N. inspectors leaves the Iranians with plenty of opportunities to mask their movements. The greater truth is, traces of the materials they would be secretively working with don’t disappear in 24 days — or 24 months, or 24 years.
They have a multimillion-year half-life, which means if the Iranians try to cheat, as Fred Kaplan wrote in , “it’s very likely to be detected.”
• The politics. Begin with this alarming fact: Virtually everyone who is against the deal was against it before they’d actually confirmed a single element about it.
Members of Congress were sending out denunciatory news releases before the first briefing on Capitol Hill. House Speaker John Boehner promised to “do everything possible to stop” it, even before he’d heard the first word about it from Secretary of State John Kerry.
Sen. Angus King, an independent from Maine, said, “If these people who announced (their opposition) an hour after the deal was announced were in a jury pool, they’d be disqualified.” They already were saying that they wanted to vote the deal down and maintain our sanctions.
But the truth is, if Congress gets away with that — or a future Republican president just scraps the whole thing — then the United States, as Kerry warned last week, will be on its own, because the other Western powers, for their own selfish reasons, want the sanctions to end, which would render American sanctions next to moot.
• The “options” to the deal. Well, we’re really only talking about one: war. On the face of it, that’s pretty unappealing these days, because in the wars we’ve fought the past decade-and-a-half, we’ve already spent a treasure in human lives and financial resources.
And it’s especially unappealing if you face the truth that as smart and powerful as we are, we don’t always achieve all our aims when we go to war. Not to mention the inevitability that any such war would spread.
And that’s the truth.
Greg Dobbs of Evergreen was a correspondent for ABC News for 23 years, then for HDNet television’s “World Report.”
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