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Thursday, July 30, 2015
Top French Official Contradicts Kerry on Iran Deal

Declassified
Top French Official Contradicts Kerry on Iran Deal
By Josh Rogin Jul 30, 2015 3:28 PM EDT
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-07-30/top-french-official-contradicts-kerry-on-iran-deal

Secretary of State John Kerry has been painting an apocalyptic picture of
what would happen if Congress killed the Iran nuclear deal. Among other
things, he has warned that “our friends in this effort will desert us." But
the top national security official from one of those nations involved in the
negotiations, France, has a totally different view: He told two senior U.S.
lawmakers that he thinks a Congressional no vote might actually be helpful.

His analysis is already having an effect on how members of Congress,
especially House Democrats, are thinking about the deal.

The French official, Jacques Audibert, is now the senior diplomatic adviser
to President Francois Hollande. Before that, as the director general for
political affairs in the Foreign Ministry from 2009 to 2014, he led the
French diplomatic team in the discussions with Iran and the P5+1 group.
Earlier this month, he met with Democrat Loretta Sanchez and Republican Mike
Turner, both top members of the House Armed Services Committee, to discuss
the Iran deal. The U.S. ambassador to France, Jane Hartley, was also in the
room.

According to both lawmakers, Audibert expressed support for the deal
overall, but also directly disputed Kerry’s claim that a Congressional
rejection of the Iran deal would result in the worst of all worlds, the
collapse of sanctions and Iran racing to the bomb without restrictions.

“He basically said, if Congress votes this down, there will be some
saber-rattling and some chaos for a year or two, but in the end nothing will
change and Iran will come back to the table to negotiate again and that
would be to our advantage,” Sanchez told me in an interview. “He thought if
the Congress voted it down, that we could get a better deal.”

(The Elysee Palace office and the French Embassy in Washington did not
respond to my requests for comment on Thursday morning. After publication on
Thursday afternoon, a spokesman for the embassy, Arnaud Guillois, issued a
statement saying it "formally denies the content of the remarks." The
embassy would not elaborate, except to say that it spoke for Audibert. He
did not respond to a request for an interview.)

Audibert's comments as recounted by the lawmakers are a direct rebuttal to
Kerry, who in remarks to the Council on Foreign Relations on July 24 said
that if Congress voted down the deal, there would no chance to restart
negotiations in search of a tougher pact. Kerry also said that Congressional
rejection of the Iran deal would erode the U.S. credibility to strike any
type of international agreement in the future. “Do you think the Ayatollah
is going to come back to the table if Congress refuses this and negotiate
again? Do you think that they're going to sit there and other people in the
world are going to say, hey, let's go negotiate with the United States, they
have 535 secretaries of State?” Kerry said. “I mean, please.”

This argument is being echoed by a throng of U.S. commentators and former
Obama administration officials who support the deal. They all say that if
the Congress doesn’t lift U.S. sanctions, the rest of the international
regime will collapse and allied countries will rush to do business in Iran.
That would make the U.S. sanctions moot and put U.S. businesses at a
disadvantage, the argument goes. (Kerry pointed out in his council speech
that the French foreign minister, the French commerce minister and German
officials were all visiting Iran with delegations this month.)

Audibert disagrees with that analysis, too, according to the two lawmakers.
He told them that if U.S. sanctions were kept in place, it would effectively
prevent the West from doing extensive business in Iran. “I asked him
specifically what the Europeans would do, and his comment was that the way
the U.S. sanctions are set in, he didn’t see an entity or a country going
against them, that the risk was too high,” Sanchez said.

Audibert also wasn’t happy with some of the terms of the deal itself,
according to Sanchez and Turner. He said he though it should have been
negotiated to last forever, not start to expire in as few as 10 years. He
also said he didn’t understand why Iran needed more than 5,000 centrifuges
for a peaceful nuclear program. He also expressed concerns about the
robustness of the inspections and verification regime under the deal,
according to the lawmakers.

To be sure, Audibert wasn’t speaking on behalf of the entire French
government, and there may be a variety of views about the deal in Paris. The
French ambassador to Washington, Gerard Araud, has been on Capitol Hill
pushing for the deal along with his British and German counterparts. “It’s
just one person’s opinion, but he has good credentials to be talking about
it,” Sanchez said of Audibert. “We have Kerry saying the French are just
going to bust in there and do this and this, and here we have somebody who
seems to disagree with that.”

When the lawmakers returned to Washington, news of their conversation with
Audibert spread among their colleagues. Turner confronted Kerry with
Audibert’s statements during a July 22 closed-door briefing with Kerry and
more than 300 House lawmakers. The briefing was classified, but Turner’s
questions to Kerry were not.

“Are you surprised Jacques Audibert believes we could have gotten a better
deal?” Turner asked Kerry, according to Turner.

“The secretary appeared surprised and had no good answer as to why the
national security adviser of France had a completely different position than
what the secretary told us the same day,” Turner told me.

Sanchez was not at that briefing, but since then, many lawmakers have asked
her about the information, especially Democrats, she told me. “It’s one
piece of information that people will use to decide where they are,” she
explained.

While the chances of Congress voting down the deal and then overriding a
presidential veto are slim, they are not negligible: Many Democrats,
including Sanchez, remain on the fence. They are scrutinizing it and
examining the administration’s claims one by one. Now, one top French
official has sent them a strong message that there could be better
alternatives.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board
or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

(Updates sixth paragraph with comment from French Embassy.)

To contact the author on this story:
Josh Rogin at joshrogin@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor on this story:
Tobin Harshaw at tharshaw@bloomberg.net

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