Iran Nuclear Deal Reached, Netanyahu Calls it an ‘Historic Mistake’

(JNS.org) Iran and the P5+1 nations on Tuesday reached a final nuclear deal whose details are still emerging. According to reports, in exchange for the lifting international oil and financial sanctions on Iran, the deal restricts the amount of nuclear fuel that Iran can keep in its stockpile for 15 years, requires Iran to reduce its stockpile of low-enriched uranium by 98 percent, and reduces the number of centrifuges spinning at Iran’s enrichment center at Natanz by two-thirds. But American officials “acknowledged that after the first decade [of the deal], the breakout time [for an Iranian nuclear weapon] would begin to shrink,” the New York Times reported. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said “all sanctions will be lifted,” according to Press TV. “This is a pitiful chapter in Western diplomacy that I think will rank right up with poor Mr. [Neville] Chamberlain stopping at the top of the stairs at that plane and waiving a sheet of paper, and thinking that somehow ink on paper would stop the ravenous appetite of a madman like Hitler,” Gary Bauer, head of Christians United for Israel’s (CUFI) new Action Fund and an official in former president Ronald Reagan’s administration, told reporters at CUFI’s Washington Summit before the deal was reached. “We’re facing the same kind of hatred, the same kind of ideology that is not only anti-Israel, it’s anti-Semitic, and the idea that the mullahs of Iran would sign anything that the West could rely on is I think outlandish.” President Barack Obama said the U.S. and the international community “have achieved something that decades of animosity has not.” But the Iran deal is expected to receive a stiff challenge from Congress, where it can now be reviewed for 60 days because negotiations went past July 9. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday, “I will refer later to the details of the agreement, but before that, I would like to say here and now—when you are willing to make an agreement at any cost, this is the result.” “From the initial reports we can already conclude that this agreement is an historic mistake for the world,” he said. “Far-reaching concessions have been made in all areas that were supposed to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons capability. In addition, Iran will receive hundreds of billions of dollars with which it can fuel its terror machine and its expansion and aggression throughout the Middle East and across the globe. One cannot prevent an agreement when the negotiators are willing to make more and more concessions to those who, even during the talks, keep chanting, ‘Death to America.'” “I say to all the leaders in Israel, it is time to put petty politics aside and unite behind this most fateful issue to the future and security of the State of Israel,” added Netanyahu.