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Dick Cheney Criticizes Iran Nuclear Deal

Former Vice President Dick Cheney criticized the nuclear deal with Iran as being “historically and dangerously unique,” and said it would make the Unites States less safe; a protester responded.

By REUTERS on Publish Date September 8, 2015. Photo by Jim Lo Scalzo/European Pressphoto Agency. Watch in Times Video »

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WASHINGTON — To hear Dick Cheney tell the tale, he and President George W. Bush were slowly but surely squeezing Iran into submission until President Obama and his team came along and recklessly let up the pressure.

To listen to Hillary Rodham Clinton, she and Mr. Obama succeeded where the Bush-Cheney administration failed by escalating pressure and forcing Tehran to the bargaining table — and on Wednesday she will outline a tougher stance to enforce the resulting deal.

The sharply contrasting narratives reflect not just the ideological poles of a divisive debate that formally got underway in Congress on Tuesday. They also illustrate the divergent goals of two political leaders with keen interests in writing, or rewriting, the history of one of the most consequential foreign policy initiatives of recent years.

For Mr. Cheney, the former vice president now in retirement, the debate represents a chance to defend his team’s approach even if that means overlooking some of the background. During a speech to supporters on Tuesday, Mr. Cheney denounced what he called a “shameful deal” that would risk a new Holocaust and possibly lead to a nuclear attack on the United States. “It is madness,” he said.

Continue reading the main story The Iran Deal in 200 Words A short overview of highlights from the Iran nuclear pact.

For Mrs. Clinton, the former secretary of state now running for president, the challenge is to walk a careful line between claiming credit for a much-criticized deal while positioning herself as tougher than her former boss. In a speech set for Wednesday, aides said, she will go beyond Mr. Obama by vowing to make it official policy to take military action if Iran races for the capacity to build a bomb, not just keep the option on the table, as he would.

Both are selectively presenting the history of the Iran issue. Mr. Cheney left out the fact that Iran went from a few hundred centrifuges spinning early in the Bush years to more than 5,000 when the two of them left office — a total the Obama deal would return Iran to. Nor did Mr. Cheney mention that the Bush administration ignored a diplomatic offer that would have limited Iran to just a few hundred centrifuges in a pilot plant.

Mrs. Clinton has her own spin on history. In the speech set for Wednesday, she will argue that she was a central player in escalating pressure on Iran through sanctions far tougher than anything the Bush administration put in place. Those included drastically limiting the country’s ability to sell oil and access international financing. She plans no reference to the other form of pressure: American and Israeli sabotage of the Iranian nuclear complex, a covert program that began under Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney.

On probably just one thing do Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Cheney agree. “For every member of Congress, no matter how many years they serve or how many votes they cast, this will be a vote that will be remembered,” Mr. Cheney said at the American Enterprise Institute. “So much is in the balance for our own security and that of our allies.”

The back-to-back Cheney and Clinton speeches come as Congress returned to town to take up a resolution rejecting the agreement. While Mr. Obama had already secured enough votes to sustain a veto, four more Senate Democrats announced their support for the deal on Tuesday and one came out against.

The announcements brought the total of Senate Democrats backing the agreement to 42, enough to block an up-or-down vote with a filibuster and thus relieve the president of the need to use his veto. But it left Mr. Obama dependent entirely on his own party, with no support across the aisle, for one of the most important actions of his presidency.

The two speeches are playing out in the early days of a presidential election that is still 14 months away but also hark back to what amounts to an ideological grudge match over how to deal with an incipient nuclear power like Iran.

During the Bush administration, Mr. Cheney and his wing inside the administration argued for choking Iran until the government collapsed and insisting that “not one centrifuge spins.” That view was challenged in the second term by R. Nicholas Burns, the under secretary of state, and to a lesser extent by his boss, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who pressed to open negotiations.

They were never given permission to do so as long as Iran refused to suspend uranium enrichment. Instead, Mr. Burns spent several years putting in place the initial sanctions against Iran and holding together an international coalition with Europeans, Russia and China. Those sanctions did not cut off Iran’s main source of revenue, oil, and by the time Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney left office, Iran’s production of centrifuges had swung into full gear.

Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton came to office determined to reverse the American refusal to talk. “Both she and the president believed it would take more pressure,” said Jake Sullivan, a top foreign policy adviser to Mrs. Clinton in the State Department and now in her campaign. “But the big shift from most of the Bush administration was that we were willing to sit down at the table with Iran and make the Iranians the recalcitrant party, not the United States.”

That effort made little progress for several years, but eventually the new administration, under pressure from both parties in Congress, built support for international sanctions sharply curbing Iran’s oil sales and access to international financial markets.

In her speech Wednesday at the Brookings Institution, Mrs. Clinton will cite that pressure without mentioning the impact of the American cyberattacks aimed at destroying part of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure — a program began under Mr. Bush and continued by Mr. Obama. Even so, despite that and the sanctions, Iran has increased its collection of centrifuges necessary to enrich uranium from 5,000 to as many as 19,000.

Mr. Cheney on Tuesday accused the Obama administration of making “concession after concession after concession” to achieve an “intricately crafted capitulation.” He noted that it does not end all enrichment, and he said Mr. Obama did not live up to his own conditions of requiring inspectors access to any facilities at any time, nor, Mr. Cheney said, did he force Iran to disclose its past nuclear activities as promised.

By lifting restrictions on ballistic missiles in eight years, the agreement “will give Iran the means to launch a nuclear attack on the U.S. homeland” and eventually a nuclear capacity to duplicate the Holocaust. “It would take a nuclear Iran one day,” he said.

Mrs. Clinton will try to address some of that criticism on Wednesday, aides said, focusing on three issues: How to deal with an Iran that cheats, what to do if Iran tries to wait out the 10-to-15-year life of the deal and how to contain its behavior.

Her call for a “declaratory policy” committed to military strikes in case of major violations of the deal is an effort to reassure skeptics. But she will also have to deal with what intelligence agencies view as a more likely situation, an Iran that cheats around the edges and tests world powers.

Aides said she would argue that inspections made it far likelier that the United States would detect violations, and she will call for rebuilding the relationship with Israel, whose government strongly opposes the agreement.

With elections looming and history waiting beyond that, both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Cheney have not yet had their last say.

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