Florida Senator and Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio said that “any plain reading” of the Iran deal says “we are now obligated to help Iran protect itself, from anybody who tries to sabotage their program. Israel included” on Thursday’s “Special Report” on the Fox News Channel.
Rubio laid out what he believes is unacceptable about the Iran deal, stating “Iran now retains a much more sophisticated infrastructure of enrichment than what they have today. The centrifuges that they have now, are quite frankly, ancient. They’re, as Bob Corker said today, they’re antiques. They will now have less of them, but the the ones they’re going to have will be better, and they’re continue to expand that capability for years to come. The other is this down payment, this immediate signing bonus that they get, that the administration said today would be about $50 billion. And they think this money’s going be spent to rebuild the Iranian economy. But in fact, nothing in Iran’s track record suggests that. In fact, it suggests it’ll be spent on arming, training, and equipping their surrogates in Lebanon, and in Iraq, in Bahrain, the 14th of February movement, and the Houthis in Yemen, not to mention all the other things the Quds Force does around the world. And I think the third, and the one I tried to zero on today, this ambiguity. There’s a term — there’s so many things we could point to, but there’s this item in the third annex to the agreement that says that we are now obligated, we and all the partners are obligated, to help Iran protect its nuclear program from sabotage, or from attack. And so I asked Secretary Kerry today, does that mean that if Israel, for example, undertakes a campaign of sabotage against the Iranian program, are we now under that provision required to assist them? He says no, but any plain reading of that is that, yes, we are now obligated to help Iran protect itself, from anybody who tries to sabotage their program. Israel included.”
Rubio continued that he “absolutely” could and would revoke the deal on his first day in office.
Regarding ways to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, Rubio said, “you can certainly set back significantly, their ability to to enrich uranium, which is one of the things that they need. The president, and the white house, and Secretary Kerry keeps talking about they can’t unlearn what they know. Knowing how to build a weapon is not the biggest impediment. There are high school students, potentially, in America that know how to do that. The biggest impediment is do you have the infrastructure and the material that you need to build a weapon. And I think we can set back their enrichment capabilities and reprocessing capabilities. The other thing you need is a delivery system. They need a long-range rocket, for example, in order to threaten America. And we can, through sanctions and other measures, slow down their ability to acquire a long-range rocket. Ultimately, the best we can do is give them a very clear choice, and that is you can either have an economy, or you can have a nuclear program, but you cannot have both. That’s what sanctions were allowing us to do, ncreased sanctions would allow us to do more of, and getting rid of sanctions actually takes away.”
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