"Anybody running around right now, jumping in to say, ‘Well, we don’t like the deal,’ or this or that, doesn’t know what the deal is,” Kerry said. "There is no deal yet. And I caution people to wait and see what these negotiations produce.”
At another point, Kerry asserted that Netanyahu had been wrong about the Obama administration’s policy toward Iran in the past. The Zionist PM, Kerry said, had denounced a 2013 interim accord to freeze much of Iran’s nuclear program, only to acknowledge belatedly that it was in the occupying regime’s interest.
"I don’t know anybody who looks at the interim agreement and doesn’t say, ‘Wow, this has really worked’ — including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who would like to see it extended, having opposed it vehemently in the beginning, calling it the deal of the century for Iran,” Kerry said.
Netanyahu, however, reiterated his criticism of the nuclear agreement that the Obama administration is now trying to negotiate, charging that it would do too little to constrain Iran’s nuclear program.
The State Department has already made it clear that Kerry does not plan to meet with Netanyahu when the Zionist leader visits Washington. And on Tuesday, Kerry told lawmakers that he planned to be in Switzerland next week negotiating the very agreement with the Iranians that Netanyahu intends to denounce in his March 3 address to Congress.
President Obama has also said he will not meet with Netanyahu, and the Israeli prime minister, who was invited to Washington by the House speaker, John A. Boehner, has turned down Democratic senators’ request for a private meeting, Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, said Tuesday.
Officially, the purpose of Kerry’s testimony on Tuesday, which he delivered to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, was to explain the State Department’s $50 billion budget request. That sum, he said, includes $3.1 billion in support of the occupying regime of Israel; $1.5 billion in assistance for the new Afghan government; $639 million to help Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova stand up to Moscow; and $355 million to support "governance and security reforms” in Iraq.
The hearings were held a day after Kerry returned from high-level talks with the Iranians in Geneva.
But Iran and the United States have been at odds over how many years the agreement should last. And the United States, its negotiating partners and Iran have been considering an approach that would ease the restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program during the later years of the accord.
In a briefing for reporters on Monday, a senior Obama administration official said that the United States would insist that Iran be constrained from having the ability to quickly break out of an accord for "at least a double-digit number of years”. The official, who could not be identified under the Obama administration’s protocol for briefing reporters, declined to be more specific.
In his testimony to the Foreign Relations Committee, Kerry insisted that reports that the United States would settle for an agreement that maintained the provision constraining breakout time for only 10 years were not accurate. But, he added, "I’m not going to go into the details of where we are and what we’re doing.”
"We’re looking for a deal that will prove over the long term that each pathway to a bomb is closed off,” Kerry said.