Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali said Khamenei said on Sept.3 that he favored a parliamentary vote on the nuclear deal.
While the Republican-led House is all but certain to vote down the deal, Obama has already secured enough Senate votes to prevent a veto override.
Khamenei said he was acting off recent comments by US officials, but he may have been referring to the administration’s assertion that sanctions will “snap back” if Iran violates the deal – something critics like Sen.
Both the country’s Parliament and the Supreme National Security Council, a body over which Mr. Khamenei has control, must sign off the nuclear deal, before it falls to Mr. Khamenei to ultimately decide on whether it moves ahead.
“It is logical to assume that Iran’s intentions have been, and are, to develop a nuclear weapons capability at some point in the future, and any claims that its intentions are exclusively peaceful should not be regarded as credible”, the former Cabinet minister said. “I have no advice regarding the method of review, approval or rejection”, he said.
“We have no illusion that that behavior will change following the implementation of the JCPOA”. It is virtually impossible for Iran to “cheat” without us knowing immediately, and it would be a disaster for Iran if they tried.
As contentious as the issue is in the United States, Speaker of the Iranian Parliament Ali Larijani recently speculated that the discussion in the Iranian legislative body will be even more contentious. While I believe there are several areas of concern with the agreement, the choice I ultimately had to make was between accepting an imperfect deal, or facing the serious ramifications if Congress rejected a deal that has the support of the rest of the world.
Larijani, in New York for a United Nations gathering of parliamentary speakers, said a committee had been established in the Majlis, Iran’s parliament, to assess the deal. He first coordinated increased sanctions on Iran with the support of five other world powers: Russian Federation, China, France, Germany and England.
Heitkamp emphasized in her statement that Iran is a sponsor of terrorism and abuses human rights, and the deal does not change that. It is not clear what alternative to snapback Larijani and other Iranian legislators have in mind, as the provision deals specifically with Iranian violation of the agreement, and merely strives to return the overall situation to the status quo that was in place before the agreement.
He noted that some “American officials speak very badly” of the agreement, without identifying anyone by name.
Netanyahu and the Israeli lobby AIPAC, far from experiencing defeat in their campaign to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran, are well fired up for the next round: the fight for sanctions.
“We insisted (since the beginning of the negotiations) that sanctions ought to be lifted, not suspended”, Iran’s dictator added, before threatening to triple uranium enrichment if the United States did not succumb to his demands.