Hire More Heroes Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. COATS. Mr. President, I intend to speak at much greater length on this issue perhaps tomorrow. I am pleased to have the opportunity to participate in this colloquy. I will be brief. I know my colleagues are waiting to speak also.

First, I want to commend Senator Corker, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Together with his work with Senator Cardin, we have a bipartisan agreement supported by some of the most knowledgeable foreign policy experts on the Democratic side and on the Republican side before us. Had Senator Corker not been able to make that arrangement, it would have been a done deal before the Congress even saw what was agreed to in this negotiation with Iran.

I think my colleagues here have been amazed at the difference between what we were told the agreement did and didn't do and what we actually learned it does and doesn't do as we pored over it, word by word, annex through annex, looking at every piece of information here that is relevant to our decision. I am thankful for the work of Senator Corker, who has taken some heat for not doing more. He saved us and saved the American people from not having the ability for us to examine this in detail. That is what this debate here is all about. The American people deserve to know what is in this agreement. The consequences of this for the future of America, for the future of the world are significant and almost mind-boggling. We have to get it right. To get it right, we need to read every word.

Here I am, shortly after the delivery of the 157 pages, together with the annexes, over a weekend poring through each sentence, trying to understand exactly what we have here and what we are dealing with, and I am amazed at what I have come up with. Instead of going through the various items--I will talk about more about this tomorrow, and it has been well presented by my colleague from New Hampshire and others this afternoon, including the majority leader--I would like to discuss something that I don't think has been raised yet. That something is the ambiguity that exists throughout this agreement and particularly in the annexes to the agreement. We know that there are two secret agreements which we don't have access to. How anyone can go forward and support an arrangement when you have side secret agreements and you are not allowed to know what they are--that in and of itself should be reason not to support an agreement. But having said that, let me spend a little bit of time regarding these ambiguities and the vagueness of some of the language here that I think have major implications.

The annex uses familiar forms of mushy language. I am going to quote here: ``as determined,'' ``where appropriate,'' ``among others,'' ``as mutually determined,'' and ``when beneficial.'' What are the actual obligations that we are undertaking if we vote for this agreement that is full of words like that? This is not clear to me, nor would I think it is clear to anyone in the administration.

We questioned the administration on this issue. They have essentially said: Well, this is to be determined at a later date or if this issue comes up, we will try to get some consensus on how to go forward. My own conclusion is that this language is not a mistake. These people who negotiated on our benefit have had a lifetime of negotiating engagement. I assume many of them were attorneys, lawyers that know and understand that a definition of a word or a phrase is everything. You have to understand exactly what it is or you are going to end up with confusion.

These ambiguous obligations, I think, were purposefully designed to placate the Iranians, offering them a vision of a robust military nuclear infrastructure, developed not only with the acquiescence of the West but with our material assistance. Further, if we examine the agreement text--let alone the annex text--this same pattern with misleading ambiguity holds. In many of the detailed commitments that are specified in the agreement and the annexes available to us, these conditional ambiguous terms dominate.

I couldn't help but notice that this wasn't an occasional occurrence. I asked my staff to go through and look at some of these ambiguous definitions and count the number of them. The phrase ``as appropriate'' or ``where appropriate''--``achieving this as appropriate'' or ``obligated to this as appropriate'' or ``where appropriate''--was sprinkled throughout the text 34 times. ``As mutually determined'' or ``by consensus to be concluded'' occurred 28 times, implying that future agreements or conditional commitments are there as against current commitments. At the same time, the phrase ``Iran intends to'' occurs more frequently than it should in place of affirmative obligations.

To any lawyer representing a client, whether you are buying a house, leasing a car, leasing an apartment or entering into a business contract, you can go to that lawyer and basically say: Look, I want an out. Or if you are on the other end of the negotiating process, you can say: Put some ambiguous vague language in there--``to be determined,'' ``as appropriate,'' ``by consensus''--so that if something goes wrong here, I have an excuse to opt out.

I think that is exactly what Iran was trying to do. If we come up with what we think is a breach of the agreement, it is easy for Iran to say: That needs to be by consensus; and without consensus, we see that as saying such and such, and you see it wrong. If we press the case with Iran, that, of course, gives them the option of withdrawing from the agreement. At an important time, now having over $100 billion in their hands, now having signed up contracts with many nations around the world--long-term contracts for delivery of oil, minerals or whatever--now having put themselves in a much different position with the sanctions lifted, they may use that exact language as a means of escaping. Or if you turn it on its head and turn it the other way around, Iran says: Well, wait a minute; our intentions are such and such. You didn't understand what we were trying to say to you.

Then how are we going to respond? This puts us in a very tenuous position.

I can recall a number of times when I told my wife: I thought you were going to stop and pick up milk on the way home.

Well, I intended to do that, but I got a phone call.

Wait a minute. I thought you were going to clean the garage on Saturday.

I intended to do that, but Joe called and said: Let's go play golf.

I intended. It was a good intention. That is fine in any kind of a marital relationship or any other kind of relationship. Many of those are just meaningless things. But when you are talking about an agreement that binds the United States on the basis of how its negotiating adversary interprets and uses these words, it can put you in real trouble.

I don't think anybody has talked about that yet. I wanted to bring that up. As I said, I am going to be talking about my position and how I came to the decision not to support this tomorrow. This is a sloppily written agreement that can bind the United States to obligations that we are not even yet aware of and that can give Iran an out if it so chooses. It comes to that point in time when, with a 3-month or so breakout toward having nuclear weapon capability, they simply say: Sanctions are gone, we have our money, we have done the research, even some with assistance of U.S. scientists and the members of the negotiating team, we are in a great position to go forward, and we are just going to do it.

We can use this language to opt-out of the agreement. That is just one more reason why each of us should carefully try to understand what is and what isn't in this agreement and weigh this as we try to make a judgment in terms of whether we should go forward or whether we have signed on to a very bad deal here and should vote against it.

With that, I yield to my colleagues who have been patiently waiting to speak.

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