Thursday on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports,” NBC News chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel said he has the unique perspective of bouncing between the Arab and Israel world and is stunned how they are united in opposition to a nuclear agreement with Iran.
Engel said the deal is “not going to go over well at all.”
“We had a unique perspective because we’ve been bouncing between the Muslim world and going over to Israel,” Engel said. “We’re seeing an alliance—both the Sunni and Arab states—and traditional big U.S. allies and Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, all saying this is a bad deal, that the process rewards Iran. And Israel saying the exact same thing. And it is not very often in the Middle East where you have Israel and the Arab world singing off the same song sheet, but this time when it comes to Iran, they most certainly are.”
He added, “What they are most concerned about is that this allows Iran to develop—further develop—its nuclear capacity. Although there will be controls which the Arabs and Israel don’t believe will be verified, and it rewards Iran while Iran is being aggressive on the ground. It is taking territory through a proxy in Yemen, and the Yemeni government has all but been pushed out of Yemen, holding just a tiny little piece of Aden, and the fighting there even today has intensified. While there is Iranian backed militias advancing into Tikrit with U.S. Air power, the Arab world sees this as a moment that Iran is trying to spread its influence and spread its power across the Middle East, and don’t want to see the U.S. make some sort of deal with Iran that allows it to have any kind of sanctions relief at this moment.”