Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said on Thursday that any potential deal to end the conflict between the United States and Iran “does not sound imminent” and that its parameters are “likely pretty skimpy” after he met with Qatari officials mediating the negotiations.
Murphy spoke to reporters after visiting Qatar and Saudi Arabia earlier this week and described his impressions of a potential Iran deal from his discussions with the mediators.
Any such deal would likely resemble the ceasefire memorandum that briefly halted the conflict in June in return for the United States re-opening the Strait of Hormuz to Iranian shipping and other U.S. concessions without any firm commitments from Iran to de-nuclearize or address its ballistic missile and drone programs, according to the senator.
“It will require us to give billions in sanctions relief and release frozen funds, and it may have some relatively small commitments from the Iranians on restrictions of their nuclear program,” Murphy said, of current negotiations. “That seems to be the totality of the agreement.”
Murphy travelled to Qatar and Saudi Arabia earlier this week and met with Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani and Ali Al Thawadi, whom the senator described as the Qatari official acting as the “primary go-between between the United States and the Iranians.”
Earlier on Thursday, U.S. President Donald Trump said that the United States and Iran continued to have “productive discussions” and that he would not renew military strikes against the Islamic Republic before the U.S. midterm elections.
Murphy has been one of the leading critics in the Senate of the Trump administration’s conduct in the Iran war and accused the administration of carrying out an “active cover-up” about the war’s costs after, he said, the Pentagon rejected his request to visit U.S. military bases in the Gulf region.
“It is absolutely outrageous that I and Republican senators are being denied the ability to see the damage for ourselves,” Murphy said.
A U.S. Defense Department Inspector General report released in September excluded costs from the Iran war related to infrastructure damage from Iranian missile and drone attacks.Murphy said that despite being denied access to certain sites, the damage he was able to see at U.S. facilities was extensive.
“It was extraordinary,” he said, of destruction caused by Iranian drone attacks on the U.S. embassy in Saudi Arabia.
“Had that attack happened during the daytime, there’s no doubt that there would have been many, many Americans killed,” he said.
“They clearly have not given us a full account of the damage,” Murphy said of the Trump administration. “They are slow-walking information about troops being wounded and often providing no context around how those injuries have happened.”
“This is a really dangerous moment when the administration is giving its middle finger to the Congress, pretending as if we are totally irrelevant,” he told reporters.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has seized on Murphy’s claims of a Trump administration cover-up to claim that Iran has caused more damage to the U.S. military than the administration publicly revealed.
Murphy said that if Democrats take back Congress in November, they would push to defund the war against Iran.
“If the war is still going early next year, Congress should not appropriate funding for the Department of Defense without a requirement that this war end and we should not pass the National Defense Authorization Act without a provision in that bill to end the war,” he said.
“We will potentially have power in both the House and the Senate,” he told reporters. “We should make the end of the war a priority.”
