by Our Foreign Desk

SENATE hawks led a backlash to the Iran nuclear deal yesterday in Congress, buoyed by an anti-Tehran protest in New York.

US Secretary of State John Kerry, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew faced a grilling from the Republican-dominated foreign relations committee.

The three had already given classified briefings to Senate and House of Representatives members on the agreement, which Congress has 60 days to review.

The deal between the P5+1 group of permanent UN security council members plus Germany and Iran over its nuclear energy programme lifts sanctions on Tehran in return for verification that it is not developing nuclear weapons.

Following a briefing with Mr Kerry on Wednesday, former House committee on homeland security chairman Peter King said he was “still convinced that this is a bad deal for America.”

Republican Tom Cotton blustered: “Iran is a terror-sponsoring anti-American regime. This deal is going to give tens of billions of dollars — at a minimum — without doing anything to rein in their support for terror or their support for America’s enemies.”

Even most of Mr Kerry’s Democratic Party colleagues said they were undecided following the briefings.

Senate foreign relations committee member Tim Kaine said: “My questions are about our ability to detect cheating after some of the provisions start to expire.”

Mr Cotton and fellow Republican Mike Pompeo wrote a letter to President Barack Obama on Wednesday, complaining that the agreement included two “side deals” the International Atomic Energy Agency was negotiating separately with Iran, a claim State Department spokesman John Kirby denied.

Thousands of people gathered in New York’s Times Square on Wednesday evening for a self-styled “Stop Iran Rally,” chanting: “Kill the deal.”

Zionist lawyer and commentator Alan Dershowitz, who defended Israeli war crimes in Lebanon in 2006 and has advocated bulldozing whole Palestinian villages in retaliation for attacks, said he was “opposing the deal as a liberal Democrat.”

He said he believed democracy was “ignored” because the Obama administration negotiated the deal without congressional input. “That is not the way democracy should operate,” he told the crowd.