WASHINGTON — The Obama administration deserves “the benefit of the doubt” over a pending nuclear deal with Iran, Secretary of State John Kerry said Sunday, maintaining that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s objections to it shouldn’t be “turned into some great political football.”
“Israel is safer today because of the interim agreement that we created,” Kerry told ABC’s “This Week.” “Now, I guarantee you, we have said again and again, no deal is better than a bad deal. We’re not going to make a bad deal.”
Kerry also said that “given our success on the interim agreement, I believe we deserve the benefit of the doubt to find out whether or not we can get a similarly good agreement with respect to the future.”
Kerry downplayed the administration’s attacks on Netanyahu’s scheduled address to Congress, which was arranged without Obama’s knowledge — and which National Security Adviser Susan Rice denounced as “destructive” to US-Israel relations.
“The administration is not seeking to politicize this,” he said.
But Kerry refused to discuss claims by an Iranian spokesman that Netanyahu’s speech would aid Iran by sowing discord between Israel and its allies.
“I’m just not going to play the game of walking — walking into a debate about Iranian propaganda with respect to this visit,” he said.