Former House Intel Chair: Iran Deal is Bound to Fail

A “race to get an agreement” led the Obama administration to believe that “it was more important to get an agreement than to get a good agreement,” prompting the US to make careless, and very likely dangerous, concessions to Iran, according to retired Congressman Peter Hoekstra, former Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

Rep. Hoekstra joined Secure Freedom Radio’s host Frank Gaffney on Monday to discuss the grave misgivings he has towards the newly made deal on Iran’s nuclear program. Chief among these misgivings is why, based on the limited knowledge it has, the US government believes it can know whether or not Iran is sticking to its assurances.

“When you hear about all the specificity that supposedly is in this agreement, about what Iran is going to do with centrifuges, what they’re going to do with enrichment, what they’re going to do with their plutonium plant and those kind of things—I just kind of look at it and say, ‘You know, when I was Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, I’d wake up every morning knowing there was a lot about Iran and their nuclear program that we didn’t know and we didn’t understand,’” Hoekstra said. “We had very, very limited insight and knowledge of what their program is. So, you know, any agreement that comes out with such specificity, it’s kind of like ‘What are you basing this on?’”

Coupled with Iran’s history of breaking promises, Hoekstra has low expectations that it can be kept to its side of the bargain. This means, Hoekstra advised, “any agreement that doesn’t begin with rigorous on-sight, unannounced inspections to determine the total extent of the program and to verify that Iran is actually meeting what they’ve agreed to, is an agreement that’s likely to fail.”

Unfortunately, he said, “this agreement doesn’t meet those criteria.”

Besides the seeming hastiness with which the talks were concluded, Hoekstra is further bothered by the manner in which the US treated its allies during the process. In particular, he found it disturbing that “frequently it was our allies that were caught by surprise with some of the content that may have been going on in those backdoor discussions, and that we brought them in very, very late—if at all—prior to actually sitting in the room with the Iranians.”

Hoekstra’s final warning was on weakening any of the sanctions against Iran. “Once you take your foot off the pedal on sanctions, it’s very, very hard to put them back in place.”