Peg -- agree, the Repubs want to harrass Obama, as always on whatever -- but I think this goes well beyond that -- they don't want any deal, even a genuinely good one -- they want a war -- the same ultimate war they've wanted all along, Iran always having been the ultimate goal/target to have been set up by our going into Iraq and Afghanistan, going straight back to the PNAC, Project for the New American Century [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century ], report/plan and the parallel/accompanying report/plan prepared by those same folks for the Israeli government in that same later 1990's timeframe [of course, much more on that already on the board]
and if it happens, it will be a significant and very costly war -- Iran at 636,000 square miles is half again the size of Iraq (169,000) and Afghanistan (252,000) combined, and at 77 million people (12 million in metro Tehran) it's also considerably more populous than Iraq (36 million) and Afghanistan (32 million) combined [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tehran , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghanistan ] -- and then on top of that there's the reality that Iran is also vastly more developed/industrialized and technically (including militarily) advanced/capable than Iraq has ever been, let alone Afghanistan
it will be significant and very costly even if somehow we just relatively quickly strike Iran (necessarily massively; even without going after non-military/civilian infrastructure and governmental institutions, hundreds of significant/necessary targets all over Iran) into submission, or at least strike Iran into having lost its key assets/capabilities, and we manage to do so without Iran in return having exacted/inflicted any significant costs on us or the other countries in the region, without any of Iran's clients having initiated (additional) open conflicts in their locales, and without some more generalized eruption of related terrorist/guerilla incidents having materialized more generally
we will have to emply some very heavy munitions, if not literally including low-yield nuke bunker-busters then including other (still little-discussed/revealed kinetic, i.e. in-themselves inert but weighty things going very fast that just slam into things) weapons that on impact release similar energies, in order to effectively/sufficiently compromise more than just a few of their sites, a number of which are located in or very near population centers including Tehran -- there will be radiation releases, at least potentially if not inevitably (very) significant, included among the impacts
and of course, at some point, at least if the war isn't just going to be an ongoing strike campaign of open-ended duration (and corresponding accumulative impacts/costs), and whether under some ultimate truce or not, to ever wrap things up somebody's gonna have to go in there on the ground and control and occupy, for at least some duration
the Senate does have to ratify any treaty involved in a deal -- and to the extent current sanctions are mandated by current statutory law, Congress would have to pass and the President would have to sign legislation amending/repealing that current statutory law if and as needed in order to implement sanctions relief required by a deal
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