More than half of Americans would recommend that lawmakers approve the controversial nuclear agreement with Iran, which Congress is preparing to vote on before a Sept. 17 deadline for action, according to a University of Maryland study.
Researchers from the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland and the Program for Public Consultation surveyed an online group of 702 registered voters about the deal from Aug. 17 to Aug. 20. Participants received background information on Iran’s nuclear program and the treaty, as well as critiques of the deal, followed by rebuttals.
They then assessed alternatives to the current deal, as well as critiques and rebuttals of those alternatives, before making their final recommendation on what Congress should do.
Fifty-five percent said Congress should approve the deal, 23 percent suggested ramping up sanctions, 14 percent recommended pursuing better terms and 7 percent proposed threatening military force.
Primary investigator Steven Kull, director of the PPC, said he is “very confident” the results provide an accurate reflection of how the general population of American voters feels.
“With most polls these days, if you just ask people if they approve or disapprove of the deal with Iran … more people tend to say they oppose it,” Kull said. “However, if you give people just a little bit of information, you do get a majority favoring it. “
Rather than gathering respondents’ “off-the-cuff” opinions, the study asked participants to consider their options and assess alternatives, providing “much better insight” into the attitudes of an informed public, said Nancy Gallagher, primary investigator and interim director of CISSM.
“Nobody who says they don’t like it has said in any detail what they would do instead and why there’s any reason to think that whatever they would propose doing instead would be better than this,” Gallagher said.
While the study suggests a majority of Americans favor congressional approval, Kull said, they do have many issues with the agreement.
“The bottom line is that people don’t love the deal,” Kull said, “but when they think through the alternatives, the alternatives look less attractive for most Americans.”
Some of the participants’ biggest concerns were that inspections of nuclear facilities cannot take place “anytime anywhere” — Iran can have up to 24 days between notification and inspection — and that Iran might use $100 billion of unfrozen assets for nefarious purposes, researchers found.
“You end up with something that neither side is completely happy with, and both sides made concessions, and clearly the U.S. didn’t get everything it wanted,” Kull said. “These are things that make people uneasy.”
But about half of participants also accepted rebuttals to these concerns — that Iran would use most its unfrozen money to shore up its economy and could not remove all signs of nuclear activity during the 24 days before an inspection.
Gallagher said these findings suggest more Americans would approve of the deal if they had more information.
Multiple student groups on the campus have voiced opposition to the deal.
Terps for Israel and UMD Students for a Nuclear Free Iran held a phone and email drive last month urging lawmakers reject the deal. In the past month, students made more than 800 calls to congressional offices across the country, said Terps for Israel President Michael Krasna.
“As a pro-Israel group, we find it our obligation to speak out against things and defend Israel against things that put it in jeopardy and put it in danger,” Krasna said. “This deal, we believe as an organization, does put Israel in jeopardy, and it really puts America in grave danger.”
Krasna, a junior government and politics major, said he read the deal and it “falls short of all expectations that I believe should be in an international agreement with a country that supports terror that kills innocent civilians, hangs gays, persecutes minorities in its own country and that threatens our ally, Israel.“
UMD College Republicans also opposes the deal, said Breyer Hillegas, the group’s president.
“We want a deal, but we want a good deal, and we think that this deal is a really bad one,” the senior biology major said. “We need to be able to hold [Iran] accountable and not give them so much trust. It just appears that the United States loses on this deal and Iran kind of wins.”
President Barack Obama last week secured the votes he needs to prevent a veto override in the Senate last week, when Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Maryland) became the 34th senator to back the deal. On Thursday, Senate Democrats blocked a resolution to express disapproval of the deal, and though Congress must officially vote next week if at all, Gallagher said the debate is far from over.
“This is going to continue to be a very controversial issue,” Gallagher said. “And I think there are likely to be, just as there were with Obamacare, all sorts of efforts by people who oppose it to block its implementation.”
