Potential 2016 presidential candidate and former Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) has a very different view on the Iran nuclear negotiations than the Obama administration.
“I don’t believe that you can have a legally binding international commitment without the full consent of the Congress, not the oversight that they are offering in this bill, although I would say I think [Bob Corker] has made quite an accomplishment by getting this bill through the committee in the form that it is,” Webb told CNN on Sunday.
Any eventual deal needs to be treated just like a treaty: “Specific approval.”
“And I said this when the Bush administration was putting together the strategic framework agreement in Iraq in ’08. I said it when President Obama said he was going to have a binding legal arrangement with respect to climate change. You cannot do that without the specific consent of the Congress,” he added.
Webb stressed that “we don’t want to be sending signals into this region that we are acquiescing to the situation where Iran might become more dominant.”
“We don’t know what is in this, the particulars. So, it’s vitally important that Congress come forward and examine this agreement in detail and get a vote,” he said.
“We know our interpretation of the outline of the agreement. And we see that Iran has given its interpretation, which is another reason why we need to really scrub this whole idea.”
Webb warned that “the end result of this could well be our acquiescence in allowing Iran to develop a nuclear weapon.”
“We don’t want that. I don’t — I’m not — I don’t think the Iranians really want that, because, if they look in this region, they’re going to see that you’re going to have proliferation,” he said. “But we need to really be on top of this. And I think the piece that Secretary Kissinger and George Shultz wrote in The Wall Street Journal summed it up about as well as it could summed up.”
That op-ed by the pair of former secretaries of State, which eviscerated what had been revealed about the framework, was panned by the administration as unrealistic.
State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said she heard “a lot of sort of big words and big thoughts” in the piece, “but I didn’t hear a lot of alternatives about what they would do differently.”
Webb, a Vietnam veteran who was an assistant secretary of Defense and secretary of the Navy under President Reagan, stressed “the questions that Kissinger and Shultz raised about verification and what was on the other side are really important.”
“That’s why the Congress needs to scrub this and give specific approval, if — and I am saying as someone who potentially could be in — obviously in the executive branch, but I think it’s healthy for the country,” he added.
Of that potential challenge to Hillary Clinton, Webb said he’s “looking at it and looking at it hard.”
“I think the reality, obviously, I have been independent all my political career. It’s how I could work comfortably in the Reagan administration and then comfortably serve as a Democrat. But we’re never going to have this financial leviathan machine that is going to pull in $2.5 billion, as some people do,” Webb said in reference to Hillary’s expected fundraising haul.
“I’m never going to have a political consultant at my side whispering what I should say or how I should dress or whether I ought to go to Wal-Mart or not. But what we do have is long experience on the issues in and out of government, strong beliefs about where the country needs to go, and I think the kind of leadership that — where we can govern and we can pull in people who love our country and try to develop some strong positions on fairness at home and common sense and foreign policy.”
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