Gary Samore, a former advisor to President Obama, was never pollyannish on the prospects of a U.S.-Iran nuclear deal. After decades working on arms control for Presidents Clinton and Obama, he knew firsthand how hard it can be to roll back a nation's nuclear program once its scientists have mastered the know-how to build a bomb.
That made Samore a natural fit as president of United Against Nuclear Iran, a group staffed by former U.S. diplomats that worked hard to intensify sanctions and boycotts against Iran to turn up pressure on the Tehran regime.
But last week, when Samore decided after careful examination that he had no choice but to support the Iran nuclear agreement, it cost him his job. UANI has come out strongly against the agreement and is running TV ads against it.
According to a report in The Nation, which examined the group's "Schedule B" filing that tax-exempt nonprofits must submit to the IRS, the top donors to UANI are a pair of trusts associated with the billionaire Thomas Kaplan and a family foundation operated by Republican mega-donor Sheldon Adelson and his wife Miriam. Together, the funding associated with Kaplan and Adelson accounted for more than three-quarters of the group's total revenue of $1.7 million for the 2013 tax year.
Samore's departure was ironic both because the deal he supports offers the best chance of preventing a nuclear Iran, and because the harsh sanctions UANI has advocated was probably instrumental in inducing Tehran to make compromises most observers would have considered unthinkable only two years ago.
Iran will submit to inspections unprecedented in scale and scope, and a stringent verification regime that allows the U.S. to elect to snap international sanctions back into effect if it is found to be cheating -- even if Russia and China would rather let it slide.
The deal's opponents insist we can do better. But when interviewed after his departure from UANI, Samore said he was "skeptical that we can reject this agreement and negotiate a substantially better deal within any kind of reasonable time frame."
In reaching that conclusion, Samore joins a chorus of distinguished military and diplomatic officials, past and present, who argue that it represents the best chance to deny Iran a nuclear weapon. These are people whose credentials with respect to American and Israeli security are simply unimpeachable.
Some one hundred former U.S. ambassadors of both parties have encouraged Congress to approve the deal, including Ryan Crocker, whom President George W. Bush appointed as ambassador to Afghanistan and Iraq, where he dealt with the Iranians in close quarters.
They join 60 national security leaders and several dozen scientists and proliferation experts.
And they join several key Israeli security figures. Although Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made no secret of his opposition to the deal, many of the most respected figures in his own security establishment support it, including his own former advisor, retired general Yitzhak Ben-Yisrael.
Ami Ayalon, former director of the Israeli secret service Shin Bet and a former commander in chief of Israel's navy, supports the deal, calling it "the best possible alternative from Israel's point of view."
Dov Tamari, the former Israeli military intelligence chief and retired commander of the IDF special forces, also supports the agreement.
Former Mossad director Efraim Halevy says that if preventing Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons "is of cardinal, existential importance, then what is the point of canceling an agreement that distances Iran from the bomb?"
All of these experts recognize that both Israel and the United States are safer if Iran cannot acquire a nuclear weapon, and that the deal presents our greatest chance to make that happen.
Nonetheless, UANI's remaining leadership remains steadfast in its opposition to the agreement, without offering a plausible alternative. With their ritualistic repetition that "no deal is better than a bad deal," they neglect to consider that if we reject the deal now, we'll be left with something far worse than no deal at all.
Sinking the agreement would not mean a return to the status quo, but the collapse of the international sanctions regime UANI has done so much to build, and which has induced Iran to make these historic concessions.
It would give Iran's leaders the ability to build a nuclear weapon virtually free of charge, setting the stage for a counterproductive military conflict in which the United States stands alone.
In other words, it would destroy everything UANI itself has worked to build. For all of us who remain united against a nuclear Iran, it would be a stunning defeat.