Warner, Kaine decry Senate's letter to Iran

U.S. Sens. Timothy M. Kaine and Mark R. Warner, D-Va., on Wednesday sharply criticized a letter earlier this week signed by 47 Republican senators warning Iran’s leaders that an accord with President Barack Obama’s team could expire the day he leaves office.

Kaine called the letter, posted Monday by freshman Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., “foolish, disrespectful and extremely counterproductive.” He said it attempted to “scuttle a negotiation” in the midst of an attempt by U.S. diplomats to make a deal with Iran that would lift sanctions against the state in exchange for Iran’s assurance to stop its nuclear program.

The “ridiculous” letter, Kaine said in an interview Wednesday, played right into Iran’s hands.

“If there is no deal, Iran wants to blame the absence of a deal on the United States. And this letter gives them exactly what they would want in case a negotiation fails,” he said.

Warner said it was “inappropriate and unprecedented” for a partisan group of senators “to try to blow up” an ongoing diplomatic negotiation.

“We have a tradition in this country that politics stop at the water’s edge,” Warner said in an email. “Can you imagine what the reaction would have been if congressional Democrats had written directly to Saddam Hussein under President George W. Bush?”

Kaine, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he disagreed with Secretary of State John Kerry, Washington’s senior representative in talks with Tehran, who told the panel in a hearing on War Powers on Wednesday that U.S. lawmakers won’t be able to change the terms of any nuclear agreement with Iran because it won’t be legally binding.

Regarding Kerry’s assertion that Congress does not have a role here, Kaine called his analysis “superficial and wrong,” saying that the whole negotiation is about Iran seeking relief from a sanctions regime that Congress had enacted.

“The negotiators have no ability to wave a magic wand and make congressional statute disappear. The president can’t make it disappear. Only Congress can make it disappear,” he said. “Trying to scuttle negotiations while they are happening? Horrible idea.”

Cotton sent the letter one week after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech before Congress, in which he warned the U.S. of a deal with Iran.

Kaine said the letter and Netanyahu’s speech have created an argument that the U.S. was never serious about negotiations.

“When you have the leader of another nation standing up and saying this is a bad deal before there even is a deal, the whole discussion was about a straw man,” he said.

Kaine, however, praised the “overwhelming bipartisan consensus” that the U.S. should be taking military action against the Islamic State.

Kaine has pushed for a congressional authorization since last summer and played a leading role in drafting legislation that was debated by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday, setting up the first war vote in Congress in 13 years.

The proposal favored by the president would allow the use of military force against Islamic State militants for three years, unbounded by national borders, and rules out large-scale U.S. ground combat operations reminiscent of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Kaine said there is still disagreement over the use of more U.S. ground troops which some Republicans support but that he opposes.

“ISIL wants to make this a kind of holy war against the West and use this as a recruiting bonanza,” he said.

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