Azernews.Az

By Bloomberg

Diplomats and leaders seeking an accord on Iran’s nuclear program said a deal is achievable as they prepare to enter a potentially decisive week for the talks.

“We have not yet reached the finish line, but make no mistake, we have the opportunity to try to get this right,” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Saturday in Lausanne. A six-day session in the Swiss city broke up a day earlier, and talks are due to resume in the coming week.

Negotiators from the U.S. and five other nations are seeking to ensure that Iran’s nuclear program is peaceful in exchange for relief from trade curbs that have squeezed the Islamic Republic’s economy. Issues under discussion include the nuclear capacity Iran should be allowed to keep, the nature of inspections, and the pace of relief from sanctions, especially on oil exports.

As an end-March deadline for a framework agreement nears, leaders on each side sought to keep pressure on the other, while in the U.S. debate continued to rage over the proposed deal.

President Barack Obama’s domestic critics accuse him of rushing into an agreement that won’t achieve its stated goal of stopping Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. Iran says it has no such intentions and its nuclear program is peaceful.

U.S. ‘Cheated’

Republican Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that Congress “ought to be able to analyze this deal, as is the norm.” Corker is pushing a bill that would require congressional review of an Iran accord, and he said “it appears that we’re close to a political agreement.”

Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Congress probably won’t approve any accord. “I don’t think they will reach a deal that we can live with,” he said on CNN’s “State of the Union” program.

Obama said in an interview with the Huffington Post published on Saturday that Iran hasn’t yet offered enough concessions, though “they have moved, and so there’s the possibility” of a deal.

In Iran, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said the U.S. had “cheated” during the negotiations, and the proposal to ease sanctions only in the months following an accord would be a deal-breaker.

‘Final Step’

“The removal of sanctions has to take place immediately when an agreement is reached,” Khamenei told a crowd in the city of Mashhad, in a speech to mark the Persian new year.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani blamed the U.S. and the other world powers involved in talks for the interruption of talks on Friday, and said Iran remains determined to clinch a deal.

“There is nothing that cannot be resolved,” Rouhani was quoted as saying on Saturday by the state-run IRNA news agency. “The coming days or weeks will be very tough, as taking the final step is always somewhat difficult.”

China, Russia, the U.K., Germany and France are also taking part. Agreement on a framework in the coming days would allow negotiators another three months to discuss technical details.

U.S. allies in the Middle East including Israel and Saudi Arabia, who see Iran as their main regional enemy, have expressed concern about the prospect of a deal. Israel says an Iranian nuclear weapon would threaten its existence, while the Saudis blame the Islamic Republic for fomenting unrest among the region’s Shiite Muslims, most recently in Yemen.

John Brennan, chief of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, said in an interview on “Fox News Sunday” that the U.S. will keep pressure on Iran even if there is a nuclear accord, so that “it is not able to continue to destabilize a number of the countries in the region.”