Clinton to Israeli TV: Iran was weeks from the bomb, but nuclear deal ‘put the lid on’
Democratic nominee dismisses Trump's claim that nuke agreement places Israel in existential danger, says it has made Jewish state safer
Iran was “weeks away” from the bomb, but the US-led nuclear agreement with Tehran “put the lid” on its weapons program and undoubtedly made Israel safer, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton told Israeli television.
In an interview to be broadcast on Thursday evening, Clinton, who served as US President Barack Obama’s first secretary of state, dismissed her Republican rival Donald Trump’s recent assertion that the year-old nuclear deal is so dangerous that it “is going to destroy Israel — unless I get elected.”
Said Clinton in her interview with Channel 2, “I believe with all my heart that putting a lid on Iran’s nuclear weapons program has made Israel safer, has made the region safer, prevented a nuclear arms race.”
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been bitterly and publicly opposed to the agreement, and Jerusalem firmly denied a recent assertion by Obama that Israeli security officials now supported it.
Saying that her approach to enforcing the deal was one of “distrust and verify,” Clinton vowed to hold the regime in Tehran “to every single element of the agreement that they have reached.”
But, she stressed: “I would rather be dealing with Iran’s continuing aggressive behavior without them (also) being weeks away from breakout (to the bomb), which is where they were. Iran was able to master the nuclear fuel cycle, build covert facilities and stack them with centrifuges when George W. Bush was president. When Obama came in and I accepted to be secretary of state, we faced the very real potential of Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon.”
That was why she spent the first two years of her tenure as secretary of state “putting together an international coalition to impose the sanctions that drove them to the negotiating table, which finally led to the agreement,” said Clinton.
“We have to go after any violations on ballistic missiles,” she added. “We’ve got to work much harder to contain the threat that they continue to pose because of their very aggressive support of terrorism — whether it is Hezbollah, Hamas. But we are in a stronger position than we would have been to deal with this other malicious behavior, because of the nuclear agreement.”
