US Says Substantial Progress Made In Iran Talks, Ignores Critics

While Washington reiterated Friday that “substantial progress” is being made in nuclear talks with Iran, critics continued to express concern over a "bad deal."

“We feel substantial progress has been made in the last week and is continuing to be made,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters on Friday. She repeated the administration’s position that “If Iran shows seriousness, we can and should reach an understanding on mutual return to full implementation of the JCPOA within days.”

Asked about a letter sent to President Joe Biden by 170 Republican members of Congress questioning the administration’s effort to revive the 2015 agreement, Psaki claimed she does not “have any information on the letter.”

One critic of the policy said, “Biden better start marshaling a strategy because merely being on defense over a mutual JCPOA return is not going to cut it.”

Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Bob Menendez (D-NJ), on Friday repeated his serious concerns about the handling of the talks with Iran he had first voiced on the Senate floor earlier this month.

In a meeting with supporters of AIPAC, a powerful advocacy group for Israel, Menendez said he made his Senate speech because he felt “his colleagues had been focused on other issues in recent weeks … and we are not paying attention to the direction the [JCPOA] talks were taking.”

“The challenges of Iran are clear and present. And so, I wanted to revert the attention of my colleagues … and also send a message to the administration and our allies abroad, for which I’ve had discussions, about what is and is not going to ultimately pass muster here. What can get support and what cannot get support,” he said.

Menendez who opposed the original nuclear deal called, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, JCPOA, told the AIPAC meeting that “no deal is better than a bad deal,” a refrain that the opponents of the Biden strategy have often declared.

If a new agreement leaves Iran with most of its capability in enriching uranium and its ballistic missiles in place, while lifting economic sanctions, critics say, Tehran would be able to resume its activities in the future and quickly reach a nuclear weapons capability. In the meantime, it will use the financial resources at its disposal to continue its interventionist policies in the region, hinged on supporting militant groups and undermining Western allies.

Israel strongly lobbied the Biden Administration against reviving the JCPOA, which it considers a weak agreement, but has now concluded that “a bad deal” might be inevitable.

The Israeli Channel 13 television quoted an unnamed security officialon Friday that if Israel considered the original deal as a bad one, the revived version taking shape is “spectacularly bad.”

The main reason behind this judgement is that Iran has made a lot of progress in the last few years and has deployed advanced enrichment machines that it can resurrect even if the new agreement puts some sort of limitation on them. Reuters reported on some of the details of the draft agreement under consideration in Vienna, which makes no mention of destroying Iran’s advanced centrifuge machines.

The Biden Administration insists that stopping Iran’s fast advancing uranium enrichment efforts is a priority and the JCPOA is better that having no agreement, which would leave Iran free to pursue nuclear weapons. Critics say the deal from the beginning had sunset clauses that would expire and not restrain Tehran.

“In essence, it is an agreement that leaves Iran as a nuclear threshold state,” Channel 13 said, citing the security source.