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Bill Clinton on Iran Deal: 10 Years is A ‘Very Long Time’

Former President Bill Clinton offered his support for the Iran nuclear deal in a wide-ranging interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria on Sunday.

“I believe the nuclear agreement with Iran is, on balance, the right thing to do, because I don’t believe that an Iranian nuclear capacity now would be just Iran. I think there’d be one to four other states that would get nuclear power in the Middle East. Then I think you’d have a race on by all of these various non-state actors to get fissile material and it could be a nightmare,” Clinton asserted.

The former president and husband of Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton also sought to refute the argument that the deal only caps the nuclear program for a decade. “I also think that 10 years is a very long time,” Clinton said. “A lot of people say, well, 10 years from now, they’re just going to do what they’re doing now. In 1979, if somebody had told you that the Berlin Wall would fall, the Warsaw Pact would collapse, the Soviet Union would come to an end in 10 years, nobody would have believed that. So a lot can happen in 10 years.”

But, he added, “it’s very important to be tough in enforcing it. And the snapback provisions of the sanctions, it’s really important that the United States work clearly, aggressively to keep all the countries on board with the snap back.”

Clinton also defended President Barack Obama’s Israel policy. “He certainly maintained their qualitative military superiority,” he told the CNN GPS host. “And there have certainly been some very public squabbles, not all of which are his fault. Mr. Netanyahu’s trip to the Congress was rather unprecedented.”

But he refused to call it unwise, telling Zakaria to ask Netanyahu that question.

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