Obama: Choice on Iran deal is between diplomacy and war

He’ll argue in that the looming congressional vote on the Iran nuclear deal is the nation’s most consequential foreign analysis debate ’cause the authorization of the Iraq war.

The statement came out the same day Obama made his case for the deal in a major policy speech at American University in Washington. He said Wednesday that opponents of his agreement with Iran were deploying similar arguments ahead of the September vote in Congress. Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina accused him of relying on “endless strawmen to divert attention from his failed policies”.

Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, announced his support on Wednesday, saying there is “no credible path to a better deal if the sanctions get weaker and Iran’s nuclear program gets stronger”.

The GOP in the House and Senate are nearly uniformly against the Iran deal, which lifts sanctions on Iran in exchange for concessions on that country’s nuclear program.

Obama also called on Congress not to block the agreement as American lawmakers are set to vote on it next month.

Unlike those “hardliners”, Obama said that the “majority of the Iranian people have powerful incentives to urge their government to move in a different, less provocative direction – incentives that are strengthened by this deal”.

“We will have lost something more precious: America’s credibility as a leader of diplomacy”, he said. “America’s credibility as the anchor of the global system”.

The president’s address, which lasted almost an hour, was part of an intense summer lobbying campaign by both supporters and opponents of the nuclear deal.

“I’ve gotten some reassurance about how hard it is for them to effectively hide what we know to have been their illicit nuclear weapons developments there”, he said.

“We must deal with the world that we have”, said the Op-Ed signed by Gelman, Peter Joseph and Charles Bronfman, which appeared in three Jewish papers, including the Washington Jewish Week.

The White House considered Obama’s speech important enough that it skipped the daily press briefing, ensuring he would be the administration’s sole public voice for the day. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), remain on the fence.

A blockbuster report by Josh Rogin and Eli Lake reveals the U.S. intelligence community has shared satellite imagery with top lawmakers which shows Iran doing heavy construction at Parchin, a military site where the IAEA has reason to believe Iran conducted nuclear weapons testing in the past. Walking through components of the lengthy agreement, he said all of Iran’s pathways to a bomb would be cut off.

He did not explicitly refer to the significant number of Democrats who also oppose the deal, but he made a rare appeal to the American people to call their members of Congress to support it. He said the nuclear deal did not resolve all the United States’ problems with the Islamic republic, “but it achieves one of our most critical security objectives”.

He said the rest of the world supports the Iran accord, with the notable exception of Israel.