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Mr. TILLIS. Mr. President, we have reached a tipping point in President Obama's quest for a ``legacy''. Ukraine is on fire; Senior Chinese generals openly boast of their desire to settle millennial scores with their neighbors; Al Qaeda is stronger than ever; ISIS is massacring Christians with a genocidal savagery the likes of which we have not seen since World War II; and Israel feels abandoned. American foreign policy is rudderless, bringing to mind Lewis Carroll's comment from Alice Through the Looking Glass, ``If you don't know where you are going any road can take you there.''
Now the President has staked his name on reaching a deal with the Ayatollahs no matter how dangerous or destabilizing the final accord is. If the Iranians agree to this, and from their own hegemonic interest they would be foolish not to, the Israeli hand will be forced as it was with the Iraqi Osirik reactor in 1981; or at the least, a Middle East nuclear arms race, that pulls in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the Gulf States, will begin.
Mr. Obama has turned his back on decades of assurances from Presidents of both parties that Iran would not acquire nuclear weapons. He has willfully ignored 40 years of hostility from Tehran. If the President does not recognize that we are at war, the mullahs certainly do. They are the chief sponsor of global terror. They have never stepped back from their desire to obliterate Israel and to destroy the United States. Our Arab friends see Iran creating a satellite ``Shia Crescent'' stretching to the Mediterranean and consisting of Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. To their south and west, they see Iran gaining control of Yemen. Shia Iran is so obsessed with its race to dominate the Middle East that it is funneling millions of dollars to the Sunni terrorist group Hamas, to fund their war against Israel, even though the Sunnis are religious enemies.
Tehran has a 9-figure line item in its budget to support terrorism, sending hundreds of millions of dollars to various groups each year; the payments to Hezbollah alone are as much as $200 million annually. According to Canadian intelligence, ``[I]n February 1999, it was reported that Palestinian police discovered documents that attest to the transfer of $35 million to Hamas from the Iranian Intelligence Service (MOIS), money reportedly meant to finance terrorist activities against Israeli targets.'' Illustrating how such support is part of official government policy, from 2001 to 2006, Iran transferred $50 million to Hezbollah fronts in Lebanon by sending funds from its central bank through Bank Saderat's London office.
Mr. President, 40 years ago, Richard Nixon confronted Soviet incursions into the Middle East. The so called Nixon Doctrine laid the foundation for a peaceful pro-Western resolution of the various crises in the region. Nixon made it clear to everyone that the United States would not abandon Israel. Israel would be backed by the power of the United States in any conflict with its Soviet backed Arab neighbors and against the Soviet Union itself. One by one, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the Emirates, recognized the futility of armed hostility to Israel and backed away from Moscow and made peace, an imperfect peace but peace nonetheless. Golda Meir called President Nixon ``the best friend Israel ever had.''
In the region's west, Nixon promoted a secular pro-Western Iran, albeit under the imperfect leadership of the Shah. Nevertheless, the Shah bottled the Soviet Navy from entering the Persian Gulf and Iran's economy took off--until Jimmy Carter decided to aid the transfer of the Ayatollah Khomeini from his Paris exile back to Iran--in the name of human rights. We have reaped the whirlwind.
Now we have the Obama Doctrine. America is the problem. Israel is viewed as an obstacle to peace and Iran is treated as another oppressed constituency with legitimate grievances against the West, so much so that when millions of Iranians took to the streets against the mullahs, President Obama did nothing and said nothing--strengthening the hand of the clerics. When the Egyptian generals overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood, who were waging war against Coptic Christians and openly spoke of renewing the fight against Israel--the State Department condemned them as ``undemocratic.'' The old American alliances are collapsing in confusion and fear and the only answer from the administration seems to be to clear Iran's path toward a nuclear weapon.
The greatest concession in the current negotiations has been the abandonment of the original U.S. position of preventing Iran from having a nuclear-weapons capability. This was the stance of the Bush administration. It was also the position of the Obama administration until November 2013. This is a disaster. Here is what we know as acknowledged by the Obama administration negotiators including the Secretaries of State and Energy:
There will be no limits on Iran's ballistic-missile force, the means for delivering its nuclear weapons. The U.S. position of seeking limits on the missile force was abandoned when the Supreme Leader objected and Obama conceded.
There will be no resolution of Iran's weaponization activities. Iran will promise once again to cooperate with the IAEA, but no one expects anything other than more Iranian obstacles. A resolution of weaponization activities was also a precondition for an agreement.
Inspections will be based on managed access but only on Iran's terms. At one point, the U.S. insisted that effective verification required full access to facilities and people. Under the Obama plan there will be no inspections of military sites much less suspected covert facilities such as the Lavizan-3 site or the Fordow weapons complex buried deep in the Iranian mountains.
Obama will allow the Arak heavy-water reactor to be modified but not in any way that prevents Iran from using it to produce plutonium for weapons. Again, the initial Obama position was that the reactor must be dismantled.
The economic sanctions, particularly the banking freeze that wrecked the Iranian economy will be lifted. In fact, Tehran has already received billions of dollars just for continuing the negotiations. It has already freed the Russians to sell the advanced S-300 air defense system. As agitation against the mullahs was growing we have given them a lifeline. Squeezing Iran economically, aided by the fall in worldwide oil prices, was the surest way to force concessions. Once the sanctions are lifted it will be nearly impossible to go back.
The restrictions on Iran's nuclear program will reportedly be phased out after 10 years, a period shorter than the time it has taken to negotiate the agreement. The original U.S. position was that restrictions would be permanent. As Henry Kissinger said, far from enabling the President's goal of disengaging from the Middle East, the framework will necessitate a deepening involvement in the region under a complex ``new order'' dictated by a nuclear Iran.
Iran will be allowed to operate thousands of centrifuges to enrich uranium and to pursue research and development of more advanced systems. The original U.S. position--backed by multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions demanding complete suspension of all enrichment activities--was zero enrichment and zero centrifuges. Under President Obama, zero was abandoned as unrealistic, and the number of permitted centrifuges moved up, according to the Secretary of Energy from 1,000 to 4,000 to 6,000. Iran has rejected each offer as insufficient, only to be rewarded with a better one. That is how the administration negotiates--from behind.
In his 1987 State of the Union Address, Ronald Regan warned us:
Our approach is not to seek agreement for agreement's sake but to settle only for agreements that truly enhance our national security and that of our allies. We will never put our security at risk or that of our allies just to reach an agreement ..... No agreement is better than a bad agreement.
There you have it. Our allies--Israel, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Jordan, and Egypt--are worried. Tehran is on the march and moving closer to nuclear status. As Charles Krauthammer noted, ``the one great hope for Middle East peace, the strategic anchor for forty years'', is giving the green light to both. That is not a legacy of which to be proud.
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