US President Barak Obama wasted no time Tuesday evening in defending the agreement announced earlier in the day regarding Iran’s renegade nuclear program. In an interview with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman Obama dismissed objections to the deal and predicted the failure of efforts to block its implementation in the US Congress. “Prime Minister Netanyahu would prefer, and many of the critics would prefer, that [Iran] doesn’t even have any nuclear capacity,” Obama said. “But really, what that involves is eliminating the presence of knowledge inside of Iran. Nuclear technology is not that complicated today, and so the notion that the yardstick for success was now whether they ever had the capacity possibly to obtain nuclear weapons – that can’t be the yardstick. The question is, do we have the kind of inspection regime and safeguards and international consensus whereby it’s not worth it for them to do it? We have accomplished that.” Read More
