WASHINGTON — (CNN) Former Vice President Dick Cheney will hammer President Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal in a speech that will come less than two weeks before Congress votes on the agreement.
Cheney is scheduled to appear Sept. 8 at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington, where he’ll deliver what the organization is billing as “a major address concerning the deal’s consequences for the security and interests of the United States and its allies in the Middle East.”
His remarks come with Congress facing a Sept. 17 deadline to vote on the pact, and Obama lobbying his Democratic allies on Capitol Hill to support it.
The White House needs the support of just 34 Democrats to sustain an Obama veto of any GOP-driven bill that would block the agreement’s implementation. Already, 28 Democrats — including Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid — say they support the pact. Just two have defected.
Cheney made clear his opposition to the agreement between world powers and Iran to drop international economic sanctions in exchange for changes to Tehran’s nuclear program and increased inspections.
He said in a July appearance on Fox News that the deal puts the world closer to “actual use of nuclear weapons than we’ve been at any time since Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” the two Japanese cities that the United States hit with nuclear bombs in World War II.
“What Obama has done has, in effect, sanctioned the acquisition by Iran of nuclear capability,” Cheney said then. “And it can be a few years down the road. It doesn’t make any difference. It’s a matter of months until we’re going to see a situation where other people feel they have to defend themselves by acquiring their own capability.”
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