President Barack Obama left little doubt at his news conference Wednesday that he will take full command of the coming fight to secure congressional approval of the controversial nuclear agreement with Iran.
Obama, in effect, was placing himself in the same position as Woodrow Wilson fighting for congressional ratification of the League of Nations Treaty in 1919, which was eventually unsuccessful, or Jimmy Carter in the battle for ratification of the Panama Canal Treaty in 1978 — eventually successful.
"The president is betting the house on this one," CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta told his audience, adding that "legacy" is heard increasingly around the Obama White House these days.
Throughout his hourlong session with reporters at the White House, Obama demonstrated a mastery of the points he feels he needs to make to opponents of the Iran agreement in and outside of Congress, which has to take action on the deal within 60 days.
A day before the president met the press, former CIA Director R. James Woolsey told Newsmax that freeing up as much as $100 billion in frozen Iranian assets worldwide "could substantially increase Tehran’s support of the world’s terrorists and [lead to] more Iranian aggression in the Middle East.
"There has already been a very, very heavy responsibility on countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey and it will become heavier," said Woolsey, who was Bill Clinton’s CIA chief from 1993 to 1995.
As if responding directly to Woolsey, Obama freely acknowledged to reporters that Iran is "currently supporting Hezbollah, and there is a ceiling — a pace at which they could support Hezbollah even more, particularly in the chaos that's taking place in Syria. So can they potentially try to get more assistance there? Yes. Should we put more resources into blocking them from getting that assistance to Hezbollah? Yes."
But he quickly asked, rhetorically, "Is the incremental additional money that they’ve got to try to destabilize the region or send to their proxies, is that more important than preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon? No. So I think, again, this is a matter of us making a determination of what is our priority."
The argument that "because this deal does not solve all those other problems, that’s an argument for rejecting this deal, defies logic," Obama said. "And it loses sight of what was our original No. 1 priority, which is making sure they don’t have a bomb."
Another criticism was raised to Newsmax on Tuesday by former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Pete Hoekstra, a Michigan Republican — that the Iran agreement opens around-the-clock inspection by the IAEA (the international agency that monitors nuclear activities in countries) to "declared facilities," but provides no access to "undeclared facilities" where the Tehran regime could craft a covert nuclear program.
"So then the issue is, what if they try to develop a covert program?" Obama told reporters, responding to this criticism. "One of the advantages of having inspections across the entire production chain is that it makes it very difficult to set up a covert program."
Assuming "that Iran is so determined that it now wants to operate covertly, the IAEA will have the ability to say, that undeclared site we’re concerned about, and we see something suspicious. And they will be able to say to Iran, we want to go inspect that.
"Now if Iran objects, we can override it. In the agreement, we’ve set it up so we can override Iran’s objection. We don’t need Russia or China in order for us to get that override. And if they continue to object, we’re in a position to snap back sanctions and declare that Iran is in violation and is cheating."
Obama concluded by emphasizing that in his view "the only argument you can make against the verification and inspection mechanism that we’ve put forward is that Iran is so intent on obtaining a nuclear weapon that no inspection regime and no verification mechanism would be sufficient, because they’d find some way to get around it because they're untrustworthy."
John Gizzi is chief political columnist and White House correspondent for Newsmax.
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