The Foundation for Defense of Democracies hosted a panel discussion with the Iran Task Force on Monday, detailing the concerns about a nuclear deal based on the so-called frameworks. Former senators Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) as well as former CIA chief Gen. (Ret.) Michael Hayden were largely in sync, opining that a deal was likely and would be awful. As Lieberman said at the onset, “Everything that I have heard about what’s happened in the negotiations tells me that this will be a bad deal for the United States of America and for our allies. If it comes out otherwise, I’ll be pleasantly surprised, but I think the odds of that happening are remote.” In response to a question as to whether a good deal was possible once we allowed Iran enrichment, he said candidly, “Quite simply and clearly no, I don’t. I mean, I thought the original purpose of these negotiations was to stop the Iranian nuclear enrichment program, in return for the sequential elimination of all the economic sanctions, which is quite significant for Iran and quite significant when you think about it, that it has unfortunately nothing to do with its terrible human rights record, with its expansionism in the region, with its support of terrorism.” He added: “to let that enrichment go on, to me just shows that. . . . the Americans obviously want this agreement much more than [the Iranians] do  [and] that’s never where you want to be in a negotiation.”
The panelists agreed that the fundamental purpose of the agreement has changed. Lieberman explained that “what started out I thought as a negotiation that intended to remove step by step the very difficult economic sanctions on Iran, in return for Iran essentially terminating its nuclear weapons development program, has now become something quite different. Notwithstanding the fact that we went into the negotiations with the advantage that the Iranians were suffering from these sanctions, these economic sanctions and what we seem to be talking about now is a serial suspension of most of the economic sanctions in return for — not the elimination or end of the Iranian Nuclear Weapons Program, but a kind of dialing down temporarily [of it].”
The two former senators were in agreement that there would be 60 votes in the Senate to reject a bad deal, but it would be dicey getting to 67 to override a veto. “My guess is there would be 60 votes to break a filibuster. To get to 67 to actually overwrite a presidential veto, that would be a very difficult matter, particularly when you get up to 65, 66, 67 votes,” said Bayh. “But regardless, you can have an agreement going into effect where two-thirds of the American Congress about, roughly, a little less than two-thirds, a clear majority would have expressed significant reservations about the agreement.”
Why is the deal going to be a disaster? In essence, once we decided to “dial down” Iran’s program the administration had to adopt a false premise, namely that the regime is a normal one. Hayden explained:
And I actually suggest to you that the problem is Iran. And the nuclear weapons question is an important, but a subset of the broader question of Iran. And we need to be very careful that an apparent resolution of the nuclear question is then, allows us to mislead ourselves that we have suddenly solved the Iran question, which I think lingers for a very, very long time. . . .
Some obvious faults in the framework, aside from a lack of common understanding among the parties, are the problems of verification and disclosure. As Hayden put it, “We have really got to hammer unarguable verification procedures into any agreement, because I’m here to tell you that unilateral American intelligence will be insufficient to build up enough confidence, in my view, that an agreement is being honored.
In essence, the panelist warned against a deal that only increases the chances Iran will get a bomb (by among other things giving it sanctions relief and many more resources to do so) and funds its other behavior. Bayh argued that “we are really empowering them with the potential to do a lot of things. And, you know, this is outside the subject of this conference and these negotiations, but, you know, clearly they are a state sponsor of terrorism. And giving someone like that tens of billions of additional dollars will lead to adverse consequences.”
 
 
Jennifer Rubin writes the Right Turn blog for The Post, offering reported opinion from a conservative perspective.