MESOP TODAYS QUOTATION BY ROBERT GATES / Former US Defense Minister

Robert Gates, another former Minister of the Obama Administration, about the nuclear deal:

“I think that the pursuit of the agreement is based on the president’s hope that over a ten-year period with the sanctions being lifted that the Iranians will become a constructive stakeholder in the international community…that they will abandon their ideology, their theology, their revolutionary principles, their meddling in various parts of the region. Frankly, I believe that’s very unrealistic.

I don’t think the alternative is war. One alternative is a better deal….You reinforce the sanctions, and you basically say, here are the additional things we need for this agreement to work and to be worthwhile, and an agreement that reassures our allies or at least doesn’t scare them half to death. If they choose not to come back to the negotiations, but to race to a nuclear weapon, well, my guess is that will show that they intended to do that all along.” www.mesop.de