WASHINGTON: US lawmakers urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday to correct his “unrealistic” vision as he reiterated his call for abandoning a nuclear deal with Iran.

In an interview to CNN, Mr Netanyahu advised the six world powers who signed a framework agreement with Iran on Thursday to look for an option other than “this bad deal or war”.

“I think there’s a third alternative, and that is standing firm, ratcheting up the pressure until you get a better deal,” he said.

Also read: Israeli PM warns US against Iran nuclear deal

But two key Democrats – Senator Dianne Feinstein and Senator Chris Murphy — asked him to abandon his ‘unrealistic’ expectations and ‘contain’ himself.

Also on Thursday, top Democrats and Republicans took to the airwaves to defend or criticise the deal, which seeks to curb Iran’s nuclear programme in return for ending international sanctions.

President Barack Obama has endorsed the deal, saying it was better than the alternatives. But Republican contenders for the 2016 presidential election claimed the agreement gave Iran too much flexibility.

Mr Netanyahu echoed similar views, saying that the deal would allow Iran to keep a vast nuclear infrastructure in place.

“Not a single centrifuge is destroyed. Not a single nuclear facility is shut down … thousands of centrifuges will keep spinning, enriching uranium,” he said. “That’s a very bad deal.”

But Senator Feinstein, vice chairperson of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said she wished Mr Netanyahu “would contain himself”.

“This can backfire on him,” she said. “I wish that he would contain himself, because he has put out no real alternative,” she told CNN.

Senator Murphy, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said that while pushing for “a better deal,” Mr Netanyahu was ignoring the reality of the situation.

“The idea that we should just go back to the negotiating table and put back sanctions into place, I think, doesn’t understand the reality,” Senator Murphy told NBC News.

“With this deal on the table, it would’ve been hard to get our partners, especially Russia and China, to go back to sanctions when most of our objectives had been met at the negotiating table,” he said.In an interview to CBS, US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz noted that the deal would extend the time Iran would need to make a nuclear bomb from two months to one year.

The agreement also allowed for the “almost instantaneous recognition of any attempt to evade the deal, he said. “We have blocked all of these pathways to a bomb.”

But such assurances did not satisfy the deal’s Republican critics.

Senator Lindsey Graham, a top Republican, said on CBS “Face the Nation” that nearly anyone leader could negotiate a better deal than the one President Obama did.

He said the best option for Congress was to keep current sanctions in place for two more years and then have a “new crack at it with a new president that doesn’t have the baggage of Obama”.

Published in Dawn, April 6th, 2015

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