Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said he hopes “warmongers” won’t sway the U.S. Congress. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

JNS.org – Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said Tuesday that he hopes the U.S. Congress won’t be swayed by “warmongers’ propaganda” during its upcoming vote on the Iran nuclear deal.

“What happens in the U.S. Congress, that’s certainly a U.S. issue,” Zarif said at a news conference in Tunisia, AFP reported.

Praising the deal as “mutually beneficial” to the U.S. and Iran, Zarif added, “And if people are not too much concerned with the propaganda being raged by warmongers in our region and outside our region, there’s no reason for the deal to face any impediments in the United States.”

President Barack Obama has leveled similar criticisms at opponents of the Iran deal. During a speech in July, he said the most fervent critics of the deal in Congress are “the same folks who were so quick to go to war in Iraq and said it would take a few months.” But Obama has denied the assertion that he has described critics of the agreement—including many prominent Jewish leaders and organizations—as “warmongers.”

“At no time have I suggested that somebody is a warmonger, meaning they want war,” Obama said in the webcast hosted by the Jewish Federations of North America and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations last week.

Obama reiterated that view in an interview with the Forward newspaper, saying that if Congress rejects the deal, then “the logical conclusion is that if we want to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, military strikes will be the last option remaining at some point.”