Finding That the President Has Not Complied With Section 2 of the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015
Floor Speech
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Mr. SCHIFF. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Mr. Speaker, after several years of difficult negotiations with a dangerous and malevolent regime, the administration and representatives of the other P5+1 nations reached an agreement with Iran over its nuclear program.
The primary objective of the United States in the negotiations was to prevent Iran from ever obtaining a nuclear weapon. Given the unthinkable consequences of Iran, the world's foremost sponsor of terrorism, obtaining the bomb, this has been an overriding national security imperative of the United States for decades.
As an American and as a Jew who is deeply concerned about the security of Israel, it is also intensely personal.
I believe our vital interests have been advanced under the agreement, since it would be extremely difficult for Iran to amass enough fissionable material to make a nuclear weapon without giving the United States ample notice and time to stop it.
We will still need to guard against any Iranian effort to obtain nuclear material or technology from proliferators abroad, a reality even if Iran had given up all enrichment.
But the agreement likely gives the world at least a decade and a half without the prospect of an Iranian nuclear weapon and without going to war to make that so. That is a major achievement.
The United States realized this objective by securing a number of important provisions in the agreement, including the power to snap back sanctions, in whole or in part, and not subject to a veto in the United Nations.
The United States and its allies also procured an extensive and intrusive inspections regime that lasts for 25 years or more. By applying to the whole chain of the enrichment process, from the ground to the centrifuge, it realistically precludes Iran from developing a hidden and parallel enrichment process.
With respect to those inspections, I think it is very important to clarify something which I often hear the opponents obscure, and that is there are inspections with respect to Iran's prior military work, inspections of known nuclear sites and inspections of other sites which we may suspect Iran may conduct work in the future. And the mechanisms with respect to each are different.
With respect to the known nuclear sites, there are 24/7 eyes on Iran's enrichment activities that would be the most extensive and intrusive inspections any nation has seen of its nuclear program.
With respect to its potential sites--that is sites we don't know, where we suspect in the future they may do work--we will have a mechanism to obtain inspections in a timely way and certainly in a timely enough way that, if they were to ever utilize radioactive material, they would be detected.
Finally, we have the inspections into their prior military work. I will say this with respect to the prior military work, those of us that have reviewed the intelligence know that we have an extensive bank of information about what Iran had been doing in the past. To the degree that we need a baseline for what Iran's work has been, we have that baseline, and I think that is a pivotal consideration going forward.
As recently as yesterday, the Director of National Intelligence stated that he has great confidence that we can determine if Iran fails to comply with the agreement.
For me, it is the size and sophistication of Iran's nuclear enrichment capability after 15 years that is the key challenge. At that point, it is the work necessary to produce the mechanism for the bomb that becomes the real obstacle to a breakout, and that work is the most challenging to detect. Nevertheless, I have searched for a better, credible alternative and concluded that there is none.
When it comes to predicting the future, we are all looking through the glass darkly, but if Congress rejects the deal agreed to by the administration and much of the world, the sanctions regime will, if not collapse, almost certainly erode.
This does not mean that Iran necessarily dashes madly for a bomb, but it will almost certainly move forward with its enrichment program, unconstrained by inspections, limits on research, and development of new centrifuges, metallurgy, or other protections in the deal.
In short, Iran will have many of the advantages of the deal in access to money and trade with none of its disadvantages. Instead of rejecting the deal, therefore, Congress should focus on making it stronger.
First, we should make it clear that, if Iran cheats, the repercussions will be severe.
Second, we should continue to strengthen our intelligence capabilities to detect any form of Iranian noncompliance.
Third, we should establish the expectation that, while Iran will be permitted to have an enrichment capability for civilian use, it will never, never be permitted to produce highly enriched uranium, and if it attempts to do so, it will be stopped with force.
Fourth, we will share with Israel all the technologies necessary to maintain its regional military superiority and, if necessary, to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities no matter how deep the bunker.
Finally, we are prepared to work with Israel and our Gulf allies to make sure that every action Iran takes to use its newfound wealth for destructive activities in the region will prompt an equal and opposite reaction, and we will combat Iran's malignant influence.
The Iranian people will one day throw off the shackles of their repressive regime, and I hope that this deal will empower those who wish to reform Iranian governance and behavior. The 15 years or more this agreement provides will give us the time to test that proposition.
Then, as now, if Iran is determined to develop the bomb, there is only one way to stop it, and that is by the use of force; but the American people and others around the world will recognize that we did everything possible to avoid war.
Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
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Mr. SCHIFF. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 2 minutes.
First, I want to address briefly the very strained interpretation I think my friends are giving the Corker legislation. To accept the arguments of the opposition to the deal, you would have to accept the proposition that the Corker legislation requires the administration to provide an agreement between the IAEA and Iran to which the United States is not a party, to which the United States has no obligation, and of which the IAEA is precluded from providing to the administration. That seems to me a very farfetched interpretation of the Corker legislation.
What's more, if you accept the argument that we can't have a vote on the agreement until we have this document between the IAEA and Iran, then why has the majority scheduled a vote on the agreement for tomorrow? So it is inconsistent with what their own majority has scheduled.
But finally, I don't think anyone is fooled by the nature of this procedural motion or bill. No one expects, in the least, that anyone who has voiced their opposition to the agreement is somehow going to change their opinion if they have access to this private document between the IAEA and Iran. What's more, as we know, the IAEA enters into these agreements with individual nations around the world, so this is not at all unique to the situation with Iran.
One final point I would like to make: We are now well into the debate on the agreement, and for all the arguments that have been advanced as to why we should have concerns about provisions in the agreement or concerns about Iranian behavior, many of which I share, there is one thing we have heard precious little about from the opposition to the deal, and that is, what is the credible alternative?
So, I ask the question: What is the credible alternative?
And the answer, from what I am able to divine from the scarce attention that the opposition pays to this----
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Mr. SCHIFF. I yield myself an additional minute.
The answer, as far as I can discern from the opposition to the deal, is this: This is how the alternative would work.
Congress rejects the deal. Congress, the administration, then, somehow goes out and persuades the rest of the world to maintain sanctions, even when we rejected an agreement adopted by the other major powers, and even when those other powers tell us explicitly that there will be no new negotiations. But somehow we maintain the sanctions regime under this theoretical alternative.
And what? Iran gives up all enrichment and comes back to the table prepared to capitulate everything?
That seems so fanciful, so far removed from the reality of the situation, that it is no surprise that the opposition devotes very little, if any, time to discussing a credible alternative, because, indeed, there is no credible alternative.
So, again, this is why I think it is so important for us to focus on how we can strengthen the constraints in the agreement, mitigate the risks that we will face, and that is a much more constructive path forward than rejection of this, seeing Iran going back to spinning up its centrifuges, picking up where they left off at 20 percent enrichment and going beyond, picking up where they left off with 19,000 more centrifuges and thousands of kilos of uranium.
Is that really the path we want to go down? I think not.
Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
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Mr. SCHIFF. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume just to take a brief moment to respond to my colleague from California.
I wish it were so simple that a credible alternative was the passage of a bill in Congress that had not passed before that we could pass now and, through the mere act of our legislation, compel the rest of the world to join us in a new negotiation and a stronger round of sanctions. We simply don't have that power to coerce the rest of the world with a bill we pass here in Congress.
What is more, to imagine that a new sanctions bill will somehow force Iran to come back to the table ready to concede its entire enrichment program is simply not credible. If that is what we are left with, we are really left with no really good alternative.
Again, I think that is precisely why we need to move forward with the agreement that has been reached between the world powers and Iran.
At this point, I am pleased to yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from Minnesota (Ms. McCollum).
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