On Tuesday, ahead of President Trump’s expected announcement detailing the actions he will take regarding the Iran nuclear deal, Senator Marco Rubio released a statement outlining why he thinks Trump should quit the deal.
Rubio began by calling the deal a “flawed and dangerous agreement that is beyond fixing,” then pointing out that the deal agreed to by former President Barack Obama was nixed by both houses of Congress in a bipartisan vote.
Then Rubio got down to details:
The deal’s first major flaw is that it enriched Iran and empowered it to destabilize the Middle East. The agreement released roughly $100 billion in frozen assets to an Iranian government that the U.S. State Department describes as the “foremost state sponsor of terrorism.” It also required the U.S., European countries, and the United Nations to relieve key national and multilateral sanctions measures that had economically isolated Iran.
Rubio pointed out that the mullahs who run Iran used the funds garnered from the deal not to benefit the Iranian people, but to aggressively build up their ballistic missile program. Additionally, the mullahs used the funds to support Hezbollah in Lebanon, which now has over 150,000 missiles and rockets aimed at Israel and was responsible for murdering 241 American servicemen in Beirut in 1983; the funds have been used to support militant groups in Iraq and Yemen as well as Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad, who has used chemical weapons against civilians, including women and children.
Rubio dismissed claims from some quarters that what the Iran nuclear deal needs is “fixing,” writing, “Proposed ‘fixes’ would do little to nothing to stop Iran’s development of regional-range missiles that can deliver nuclear warheads against U.S. troops in the Middle East, as well as against Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and other U.S. partners.”
Rubio then moved on to the deal’s second major flaw: the enabling of the Iranian mullahs — who have threatened to destroy Israel — to pursue building nuclear bombs.
He quoted Obama allowing in 2015 that a “relevant fear [under the deal] would be that in year 13, 14, 15, [the Iranians] have advanced centrifuges that enriched uranium fairly rapidly, and at the point the breakout times [for building nuclear bombs] would have shrunk to almost zero.”
Rubio noted that the Iranian government has never allowed “unfettered inspections at its military sites — including the Parchin military complex, where inspectors previously found man-made uranium particles.”
The third flaw with the deal Rubio delineated was that it enables the corrupt mullahs to continue oppressing their own people. He wrote:
The massive protests that erupted throughout Iran in December 2017 and January 2018 may have surprised the Iranian regime and its allies. But the protests did not surprise everyday Iranians who, despite the government’s ongoing crackdowns, still find ways to show dissatisfaction, including the widespread movement of brave Iranian women who risk violent reprisals for publicly refusing to wear hijabs.
Rubio concluded:
President Trump should nix the flawed Iran deal and impose crippling economic and financial sanctions against the Iranian regime. The American people deserve better than a bad deal that paves the Iranian terror regime’s path to nuclear weapons. And the Iranian people deserve better as they continue to suffer under the regime’s criminal corruption, economic mismanagement, support for terrorists and the Assad regime, ballistic missile aggression, and systemic human rights abuses.