WASHINGTON: Forty-seven Republican senators wrote an open letter to Iran’s leaders on Monday, urging them not to sign a nuclear deal with the United States.

President Barack Obama condemned on Tuesday the Congressional move that has no precedence in international diplomatic history.

The senators argued that even if the deal were signed, the Republican-dominated Congress would repeal it when President Obama completes his second and final tenure in two years.

week, Republican lawmakers also invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address a joint session of the US Congress. Mr Netanyahu used his address to urge the lawmakers not to allow President Obama to sign the controversial nuclear deal with Iran.

The letter to Iran, however, stirred a political firestorm in the United States, as Democrats and independents accused Republican lawmakers of violating sanctity of the country’s highest office, the White House.

Obama called it an attempt to undermine the administration’s foreign policy. “I think it’s somewhat ironic that some members of Congress want to make common cause with the hardliners in Iran. It’s an unusual coalition,” he said.

President Joe Biden said what the Republicans had done was “beneath the dignity of (the) institution” they represent.

In thirty-six years in the US Senate, I cannot recall another instance in which senators wrote directly to advise another country — much less a longtime foreign adversary,” said Mr Biden.

He argued that the Republicans had also undermined the authority of the White House. By sending the letter, the Senators had sent a message to the world that “the president does not have the constitutional authority to reach a meaningful understanding with them.”

Mr Biden reminded the authors of this letter that the vast majority of America’s international commitments took effect without Congressional approval.

“Diplomatic recognition of the People’s Republic of China, the resolution of the Iran hostage crisis, and the conclusion of the Vietnam War” were three such commitments, he said.

the letter to Iran’s leaders, 47 Senate Republicans said that any deal would only be an “executive agreement” that might not last beyond the Obama presidency, which ends on Jan 20, 2017.

The next president could revoke such an executive agreement with the stroke of a pen and future Congresses could modify the terms of the agreement at any time,” said the letter initiated by Sen. Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican.

letter reminded Iranian leaders that any nuclear deal without congressional approval would just be a “mere executive agreement” between Mr Obama and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

We hope this letter enriches your knowledge of our constitutional system and promotes mutual understanding and clarity as nuclear negotiations progress,” they wrote.

Foreign Minister Javad Zarif dismissed the Republican letter as “mostly a propaganda ploy.”

a response posted on his ministry’s website, Mr Zarif wrote: “It is very interesting that while negotiations are still in progress and while no agreement has been reached, some political pressure groups are so afraid even of the prospect of an agreement that they resort to unconventional methods, unprecedented in diplomatic history.”

key Republican senator, Bob Corker, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, refused to sign the letter, although he is the co-sponsor of a bill that calls for Congress to have a say on any nuclear deal.

House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said the letter showed that those Republican lawmakers did not believe in a diplomatic option and were craving for military strikes on Iranian nuclear installations

The rush to war, or at least the rush to the military option, that many Republicans are advocating is not at all in the best interest of the United States,” he warned.

Minority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, said Republicans were driven by animosity toward President Obama and were unwilling to recognize that American voters had twice elected him president.

Reid recalled that even at the height of Democrats’ disagreement about the war in Iraq with former President George W. Bush, they would not have sent a letter to former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

Republicans don’t know how to do anything other than juvenile political attacks against the president,” he said.

Another Democratic, Congressman Jared Polis, of Colorado, tweeted the initiator of this letter was a “Tehran Tom.”

former Republican presidential candidate John McCain compared the reaction to “a tempest in a teapot.”

Congress obviously will want a voice in any deal with Iran, he told reporters, suggesting the Democrats’ protests might be “a diversion from a lousy deal.”

United States and five other world powers – Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia, are negotiating the deal with Iran and they hope to reach final agreement by the end of this month.

Published in Dawn, March 11th, 2015

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