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Dick Cheney Denounces Nuclear Deal With Iran as ‘Madness’ Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton’s Competing Versions of U.S.-Iran History
(about 4 hours later)
WASHINGTON — Former Vice President Dick Cheney on Tuesday rallied Republican opposition to President Obama’s agreement with Iran, denouncing it as a “shameful deal” that would risk a new Holocaust and possibly lead to the first nuclear attack since Nagasaki. WASHINGTON — To hear Dick Cheney tell the tale, he and President George W. Bush were slowly but surely squeezing Iran into submission until President Obama and his team came along and recklessly let up the pressure.
In a full-throated speech to supporters at the American Enterprise Institute here, Mr. Cheney argued that Mr. Obama and his team had abandoned their own criteria for a meaningful agreement and acquiesced to “an intricately crafted capitulation” that makes “concession after concession after concession” that will empower the world’s top state sponsor of terrorism. To listen to Hillary Rodham Clinton, she and Mr. Obama succeeded where the Bush-Cheney administration failed by escalating pressure and forcing Tehran to the bargaining table — and on Wednesday she will outline a tougher stance to enforce the resulting deal.
“They have presented us with a deal that strengthens our adversaries, threatens our allies and puts our own security at risk,” he told the audience. “And they have placed on the table for congressional review a deal that provides weapons and funds to a regime that has pledged to destroy Israel and maintains death to America as a pillar of its policies.” The sharply contrasting narratives reflect not just the ideological poles of a divisive debate that formally got underway in Congress on Tuesday. They also illustrate the divergent goals of two political leaders with keen interests in writing, or rewriting, the history of one of the most consequential foreign policy initiatives of recent years.
He added that the deal was “not an act of peace,” as Mr. Obama asserts. “It is madness.” For Mr. Cheney, the former vice president now in retirement, the debate represents a chance to defend his team’s approach even if that means overlooking some of the background. During a speech to supporters on Tuesday, Mr. Cheney denounced what he called a “shameful deal” that would risk a new Holocaust and possibly lead to a nuclear attack on the United States. “It is madness,” he said.
Mr. Cheney’s speech came amid a flurry of news media appearances promoting a new book, “Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America,” that he wrote with his daughter, Liz Cheney, who was a principal deputy assistant secretary of state under President George W. Bush. For Mrs. Clinton, the former secretary of state now running for president, the challenge is to walk a careful line between claiming credit for a much-criticized deal while positioning herself as tougher than her former boss. In a speech set for Wednesday, aides said, she will go beyond Mr. Obama by vowing to make it official policy to take military action if Iran races for the capacity to build a bomb, not just keep the option on the table, as he would.
Mr. Cheney added his voice to a debate that takes on fresh urgency this week as Congress returns to town to consider a resolution rejecting the Iran agreement. Mr. Obama had already secured enough Democratic votes to sustain a veto, and on Tuesday he gained three more to guarantee that Democrats can block a vote in the Senate altogether through a filibuster. Both are selectively presenting the history of the Iran issue. Mr. Cheney left out the fact that Iran went from a few hundred centrifuges spinning early in the Bush years to more than 5,000 when the two of them left office — a total the Obama deal would return Iran to. Nor did Mr. Cheney mention that the Bush administration ignored a diplomatic offer that would have limited Iran to just a few hundred centrifuges in a pilot plant.
The White House did not wait for Mr. Cheney’s speech to fire back on social media. It posted a two-and-a-half minute video on Twitter mocking the former vice president for his support of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 with the hashtag #WrongThenWrongNow. Mrs. Clinton has her own spin on history. In the speech set for Wednesday, she will argue that she was a central player in escalating pressure on Iran through sanctions far tougher than anything the Bush administration put in place. Those included drastically limiting the country’s ability to sell oil and access international financing. She plans no reference to the other form of pressure: American and Israeli sabotage of the Iranian nuclear complex, a covert program that began under Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney.
The video showed Mr. Cheney making various assertions about the Iraq war that later proved unfounded or problematic and then included a clip from last week in which he said, “I was right about Iraq.” On probably just one thing do Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Cheney agree. “For every member of Congress, no matter how many years they serve or how many votes they cast, this will be a vote that will be remembered,” Mr. Cheney said at the American Enterprise Institute. “So much is in the balance for our own security and that of our allies.”
Outside the Washington headquarters of the institute, a handful of protesters held signs like “Arrest Dick Cheney for War Crimes.” And inside the hall where he spoke, a protester interrupted by shouting: “Why should we be listening to him? He was wrong in Iraq. He’s wrong in Iran.” The back-to-back Cheney and Clinton speeches come as Congress returned to town to take up a resolution rejecting the agreement. While Mr. Obama had already secured enough votes to sustain a veto, four more Senate Democrats announced their support for the deal on Tuesday and one came out against.
Some in the audience shouted back, “Get out.” One person exclaimed, “Damn liberals.” As security guards escorted out the protester, she cried, “Try diplomacy, not war.” The announcements brought the total of Senate Democrats backing the agreement to 42, enough to block an up-or-down vote with a filibuster and thus relieve the president of the need to use his veto. But it left Mr. Obama dependent entirely on his own party, with no support across the aisle, for one of the most important actions of his presidency.
Mr. Cheney, long accustomed to such disruptions, reacted calmly. “Thank you very much,” he said, before returning to his speech. The two speeches are playing out in the early days of a presidential election that is still 14 months away but also hark back to what amounts to an ideological grudge match over how to deal with an incipient nuclear power like Iran.
Among those in the audience were Ms. Cheney, Senator Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican who has led opposition to the agreement, and former colleagues from the George W. Bush administration, including Paul D. Wolfowitz and Eric S. Edelman. During the Bush administration, Mr. Cheney and his wing inside the administration argued for choking Iran until the government collapsed and insisting that “not one centrifuge spins.” That view was challenged in the second term by R. Nicholas Burns, the under secretary of state, and to a lesser extent by his boss, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who pressed to open negotiations.
Mr. Cheney’s address encapsulated the case against the Iran agreement, which lifts sanctions in exchange for limits on Tehran’s nuclear program, ends a ban on conventional weapons sales after five years and ends a ban on ballistic missile activity after eight years. They were never given permission to do so as long as Iran refused to suspend uranium enrichment. Instead, Mr. Burns spent several years putting in place the initial sanctions against Iran and holding together an international coalition with Europeans, Russia and China. Those sanctions did not cut off Iran’s main source of revenue, oil, and by the time Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney left office, Iran’s production of centrifuges had swung into full gear.
He pointed out that the agreement did not, as the United States long insisted, require the end of all uranium enrichment by Iran, instead allowing it to keep some of its centrifuges. Likewise, he noted, the agreement did not require the disclosure of past nuclear activities or guarantee anytime-anywhere access for inspectors. The money Iran would gain from the end of sanctions could be used to finance terrorists across the Middle East, Mr. Cheney added. Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton came to office determined to reverse the American refusal to talk. “Both she and the president believed it would take more pressure,” said Jake Sullivan, a top foreign policy adviser to Mrs. Clinton in the State Department and now in her campaign. “But the big shift from most of the Bush administration was that we were willing to sit down at the table with Iran and make the Iranians the recalcitrant party, not the United States.”
“It’s the same weak, acquiescent and ultimately dangerous mind-set that led us so far down the road toward a deal so completely tailored to the needs of the Iranians,” he said. That effort made little progress for several years, but eventually the new administration, under pressure from both parties in Congress, built support for international sanctions sharply curbing Iran’s oil sales and access to international financial markets.
Mr. Cheney made some particularly provocative assertions about the dangers to Israel and the United States. “With the removal of restrictions in Iran’s ballistic missile program, this agreement will give Iran the means to launch a nuclear attack on the U.S. homeland,” he said. In her speech Wednesday at the Brookings Institution, Mrs. Clinton will cite that pressure without mentioning the impact of the American cyberattacks aimed at destroying part of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure — a program began under Mr. Bush and continued by Mr. Obama. Even so, despite that and the sanctions, Iran has increased its collection of centrifuges necessary to enrich uranium from 5,000 to as many as 19,000.
He quoted Charles Krauthammer, a columnist at The Washington Post, who noted that it took the Nazis years to kill six million Jews during the Holocaust. “It would take a nuclear Iran one day,” Mr. Krauthammer wrote. Mr. Cheney on Tuesday accused the Obama administration of making “concession after concession after concession” to achieve an “intricately crafted capitulation.” He noted that it does not end all enrichment, and he said Mr. Obama did not live up to his own conditions of requiring inspectors access to any facilities at any time, nor, Mr. Cheney said, did he force Iran to disclose its past nuclear activities as promised.
Mr. Cheney also took a jab at Secretary of State John Kerry by quoting him saying in the spring that any deal would have to include Iranian disclosure of past nuclear activity, then when the final agreement was announced saying it did not matter because the United States already has full knowledge of Tehran’s activities. By lifting restrictions on ballistic missiles in eight years, the agreement “will give Iran the means to launch a nuclear attack on the U.S. homeland” and eventually a nuclear capacity to duplicate the Holocaust. “It would take a nuclear Iran one day,” he said.
“You could say he was for it before he was against it,” Mr. Cheney said, alluding to a gaffe that hurt Mr. Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign. Mrs. Clinton will try to address some of that criticism on Wednesday, aides said, focusing on three issues: How to deal with an Iran that cheats, what to do if Iran tries to wait out the 10-to-15-year life of the deal and how to contain its behavior.
The Obama administration has acknowledged that it made concessions in some areas, but has said they were worthwhile to seal an agreement that the administration contends will block any pathway toward a nuclear bomb for Iran for at least a decade. The inspection system, while not anytime-anywhere, will be the most robust ever imposed on another country, administration officials maintain. Her call for a “declaratory policy” committed to military strikes in case of major violations of the deal is an effort to reassure skeptics. But she will also have to deal with what intelligence agencies view as a more likely situation, an Iran that cheats around the edges and tests world powers.
Under the terms of the agreement, they have said, Iran would not be able to enrich enough uranium at levels that could produce enough fuel for a bomb in any time shorter than a year. And they say that the only real alternative at this point would be military action. Aides said she would argue that inspections made it far likelier that the United States would detect violations, and she will call for rebuilding the relationship with Israel, whose government strongly opposes the agreement.
Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, who has struggled over the issue, on Tuesday became the fourth Senate Democrat to announce that he would vote against the Iran deal. But Senators Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Gary Peters of Michigan and Ron Wyden of Oregon all announced they would vote for it, bringing the total of Senate Democratic supporters to 41. With elections looming and history waiting beyond that, both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Cheney have not yet had their last say.