Deal on Iran nuclear program likely

Press TV has conducted an interview with Kaveh Afrasiabi, author and political scientist from Boston, to get his take on a new vote that will give the Senate of the United States a say in a potential nuclear agreement with Iran.

This is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: How do you feel about this vote, and how do you think the House of Representatives will vote?

Afrasiabi: Of course it is not a big surprise and everyone has been expecting this today. And most likely it will also pass through the House and go for its signature at the Oval Office very soon. And President Obama has indicated that he will go for it and he will not veto it, and that is, in my opinion, very unfortunate because initially Obama had put up a resistance. And now we see that basically he is allowing the Congress to become a stakeholder in the nuclear negotiations.

And in my opinion, the US Congress is digging itself a big hole that may very well backfire against the US government and the US Congress itself as an institution, because it subjects the nuclear talks to intense factional politics and we know of all the various factions that exist in the US Congress today. And the most likely are coming, in my opinion, would be a deadlock, I do not see a consensus emerging in the near future on the Iran nuclear deal, out of the existing Congress. So, there are different scenarios that are ramified by the move today in the US Senate, one of which is that it is really a knife that cuts both ways, because if Congress wants to have a final say on the nuclear deal, then Iran might as well insist that the sanction legislations will be also candidates for removal, because we know per the Lausanne statement that Iran has agreed that the US will simply stop implementing the sanctions without necessarily calling for their legal removal.

So, now that the Congress has tried to insert itself in the process, I think it changes the calculations particularly on the Iranian side as well.

Press TV: I want to talk about the Iranian side, and how they would view this, because the negotiators have made it clear that they want political will be proven on the other side as well. Does this put a nuclear deal on to doubt?

Afrasiabi: I think this is a complicating factor and again it depends on political will on the part of the White House and the Democratic Party. I do not believe that if there is a negative vote in the Congress vis-à-vis a final deal, there is enough vote to overwrite a presidential veto. So there is a lot of different issues that deal with a very complicated issue that there is a state of flux and difficult to predict. But my guess is that a nuclear deal, because it is multilateral and international in nature, will pass through the Congress and will be adopted by the US government as a whole.