Israel gears up for battle in US against Iran accord

Despite US Secretary of State John Kerry’s warning Friday that Israel would be more isolated than ever if Congress were to reject the Iran deal, the Prime Minister’s Office on Sunday drew up a document with answers to half a dozen questions to be circulated among those in the US arguing against the July 14 agreement, the Jerusalem Post newspaper reported.

To the question of whether this deal makes it less likely that Iran will get a nuclear weapon, the talking points say the opposite is true and that the deal provides Iran with two paths to the bomb.

Either the Iranians will violate the deal, as they have done in the past, and develop a bomb by cheating on the accord, or they will abide by the accord and then, in about a decade, when the central restrictions on its program are automatically removed, will be able to “carry out unlimited enrichment of uranium with full international legitimacy,” the document says.

“Iran’s breakout time at that point will be close to zero, as the US president himself has said,” it goes on.

While in the immediate future Iran might have more difficulty developing a bomb, the talking points add that the deal “all but guarantees that Iran will be able to make an entire nuclear arsenal in a decade or so.”

As to the argument heard often from President Barack Obama and other senior officials in the US administration, that the only alternative to the deal is war, the paper notes that Israel had consistently promoted two different alternatives.

“First, Israel supported the policy of ‘dismantle for dismantle,’ whereby the sanctions regime would be dismantled only when Iran’s military nuclear program is dismantled,” it says. “This policy was based on successive UN Security Council resolutions and was US policy until 2013. Its implementation would have genuinely closed the Iranian nuclear file.”

Israel’s second alternative, according to the document, was that in the absence of a complete roll-back of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, there should at least be a significant roll-back with severe restrictions on Iran lifted only when it stopped its regional aggression, support of global terrorism and efforts to destroy Israel.