Jim Rosica
In his first interview after the Iran-U.S. prisoner swap, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Monday again defended the current nuclear technology deal with that country, one that has been assailed by Florida Chief Financial Officer Jeff Atwater.
“The world is safer today,” Kerry said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program. “… Iran had a completely invisible, unaccountable, unverified nuclear program. They had enough nuclear material to make 10 to 12 bombs, and they were hurtling towards a program that was going to create inevitability of confrontation.
“Today that is not true; that is entirely reversed,” Kerry said. “Not only do we now have verification that is unprecedented, but they have rolled back their program, sent their nuclear material out of the country, destroyed their plutonium reactor.”
The deal, worked out between Iran and a group of world powers including the United States, will limit Iran’s ability to use nuclear technology in return for lifting financial and other sanctions against the country.
More recently, the U.S. government dropped charges against a group of Iranians accused of violating sanctions in return for the release of four Americans, including Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian. Also, 10 U.S. sailors from two Navy speedboats in the Persian Gulf were temporarily detained this month after entering into Iranian waters.
Reports of the deal have economic benefits to Iran of anywhere from $50 billion to $150 billion. On Monday, Kerry said it was $55 billion.
But that same agreement roiled Atwater, who has slammed the deal as bad, even dangerous policy.
Florida passed its own law requiring divestment of public funds from companies doing business with Iran; Atwater, a former bank executive, co-sponsored the measure in 2007 while he was in the Florida Senate.
He has called the Iran deal a “direct assault” on the state’s own position not to support “sponsors of terror.”
“A state can invest funds – or not invest funds – where it chooses,” he said in a lengthy statement in September. “The federal government cannot force states to do business, either directly or indirectly, with regimes that fund terrorism and systematically abuse human rights.”
Kerry said Monday the deal “was not calculated to solve all the problems with Iran.”
“This agreement was calculated to address a threat that the United States of America felt to ourselves and to the world about their production, potentially, of a nuclear weapon,” he said. “And I think we saw it with the sailors, who by the way inadvertently went into Iranian waters …
“There were people in Iran who made the argument they should have been held as hostages, that they should have been made into more of a trade,” Kerry said.
“And it is to the enormous credit of the supreme leader, President Rouhani, Foreign Minister Zarif that they understood that this was better resolved rapidly in the way that is was, and that could not have happened had we not made the agreement with respect to the nuclear program.”
The link to the video is here: http://on.msnbc.com/1n6ENEf
