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Frank Gaffney: I couldn’t be more pleased to have with us once again, a man I have come to admire greatly for his service to our country both in uniform in the past, his entrepreneurial skills, his best selling books, and not at least his service at the moment in the United States House of Representatives. He is Representative Chris Stewart, a member of the House Appropriations Committee, also the Permanent House Select Committee on Intelligence. Congressman it is great to catch up with you, I know you are on a district work period as they call recesses around here, but we are grateful for you taking a little bit of time to talk to us about some of the important things you are working on and we are all concerned about. Welcome back.
Rep. Chris Stewart: Well thank you and it is always great to be with you, and your right it’s not a recess, at least it sure doesn’t feel like a recess to me.
FG: Work is the emphasis of the moment I’m sure. Listen Chris Stewart; you are one of the serious thinkers about national security in the United States’ Congress. You’ve been a practitioner of it as an Air force officer and pilot. You’ve been working on these issues, notably with the Homeland Security Subcommittee and Appropriations Committee, as well as of course the Intelligence Committee. I’m anxious to get your thoughts. We’re talking with some others, Senator Tom Tillis and my colleague Fred Fleitz about the Iran deal; but what is your current reading on this, especially in light of the issues that are now sort of hemorrhaging out in terms of the verification problems?
CS: Yeah, well we are not surprised. I mean we knew all along, I’ve been saying, and many others have been saying this it is a deeply flawed agreement, and the more we learn about it, and we’re going to learn more, there will be other things that come out that will make us shake our head, as we are this morning, as we hear that, for example, the IAEA has had side agreements that would allow the Iranian regime to conduct some of their own inspections on some of the most sensitive sites we are concerned about, and you just have to wonder, what in the world is the president thinking and how could anyone with fair judgment come to the conclusion that this enhances our national security, that this enhances stability, in a very volatile and very chaotic part of the world already. I just don’t get why we would walk any further down this path. I think it is deeply dangerous to our country.
FG: What I’m troubled by is not only all that you’ve said, which is bad enough, but that the President of the United States would say, repeatedly that this is part of what he called “the most comprehensive inspection and verification regime ever negotiated”. It seems Congressmen Christ Stewart, that an awful lot of your Democratic colleagues, not all of them by any means, and I think some of the most thoughtful of them have said no, but many of them seem to be going along with this idea. In fact hanging the hat on their vote for this deal on the basis of such representations. What would you say to them and the American people?
CS: Well I would say what I have said to Secretary Kerry on a number of occasions, and that is: can you give me a single example, any instance, where Iran has worked with us or our allies in any positive fashion? Where we have any reason to believe we have a culture of trust between us, because one thing I know from my experience as an Air Force pilot, where I was one of the pilot reps for implementing the START II and START III Agreements, if you want to cheat on these agreements you can. There is no question you can find ways to deceive the other party. The reason that the negotiations with the former Soviet Union worked is because by in large we had the same interests. We truly did want the same thing. We had a generation of working together, of building trust with one another at least on that one thing. We have none of that with this Iranian deal. None of that at all. We have no history of them working with us. We have no history of trust building between us, and we don’t want the same thing. It’s very clear that Iran wants to bring chaos and wants to bring violence to a large swath of the world. There is no question they want to work against U.S. interest. Why would we think now that we can trust them on this?
FG: Yeah and Congressman you’ve spent a lot of time in that region of the world, and you know how important it is to both Persians and Arabs, that they not lose face, that they not be dishonored. It seems to me that part of what’s going on here, and in particular the way the Iranians are playing this out: their leaking information, their making statements, their exposing parts of the deal that haven’t yet come to light including secret side deals, which Congress is being denied access to, including the one you’ve just mentioned, that they’re going to inspect their own military sites for crying out loud; with the purpose of humiliating this country, it’s a kind of strategic influence operation or defeat they are trying to hand out to us. As much as they did with seizing hostages in the U.S embassy and holding them for 444 days, 36 years ago. Would you agree?
CS: Yeah, there’s no question, I think that’s a very insightful perspective as well. You have to ask yourself this, is Iran viewed as being stronger in the region now because of this agreement? Because I don’t think there is any question that they are. I think their adversaries and their potential allies are looking at them right now, and going holy cow look what they did to the United States. And it’s more than what you’ve said Frank, there’s other things as well. The fact that they included the lifting the prohibition on ballistic missile technology, that was added late in the agreement, the fact that they lifted the sanctions immediately, rather than as the president has promised for months now, that the sanctions wouldn’t be lifted until they complied with certain elements of the agreement. Now we know that’s not true. Some fifty billion dollars of the sanctions will be lifted almost immediately. Again, if you’re a player in that region, you are looking at Iran and going ‘they have certainly enhanced their power and influence at the expense of the United States’. They look much stronger we unquestionably look much weaker.
FG: Yeah and I guess what flows from that Congressman – again you’ve been giving a lot of though to these issues, not just in you Air force role, or your Congressional role, but also through your various books – this is the kind of thing that causes people to respond, it seems to me basically, in one of two ways. They either make a separate peace with the new rising hegemon in the region, the power that Iran seeks to be, or they seek their own weapons of mass destructions, nuclear weapons perhaps and others, and the means by which to use them; which can be dangerous in many respects, perhaps in terms of a conflict with Iran. But how do you see that piece of this, and the kind of legacy that Barrack Obama is creating in the region and perhaps beyond.
CS: Well what you’ve said again Frank is exactly right. If you are one of the nations in the region and you are seeking to align yourself with a stronger party, you’re certainly going to look at Iran. I think the more important point is this: remember in 2009, when President Obama had this now famous speech about how it was his intention and his desire to lead us in a world toward there were no nuclear weapons at all. Now that’s entirely Pollyannaish, and that’s entirely his view, and I think there is no question that was his desire at the time, and it’s ironic to me that exactly the opposite is going to happen now. I’m afraid; in fact I’m writing an editorial about this right now, I’m afraid this will lead to the nuclearization of the entire Middle East. Our problem now is to develop a strategy that we don’t have, that we never envisioned at this point, and that is how do we deal with the fact that not only Iran, but then Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, and Turkey, another others are going to have nuclear weapons in the next five to seven years I would say. We don’t have a strategy to deal with that, because we’ve always assumed that we wouldn’t allow that to happen, and I think it’s nearly inevitable now. I don’t know how you put this genie back in the bottle. I don’t know how you win the trust of our allies in the region, saying “no-no we’re going to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon”, and they’re saying ‘no your not, your going to facilitate them getting a nuclear weapon and we now have to do what is in our own best interest’, and that’s the problem we are going to be left with.
FG: Especially when they see aspects of this agreement, for example, that we are now obliged to help protect it. The other part of this congressman is if these governments wind up being fragile, shall we say, and I think many of them are, who knows where their nuclear weapons will wind up. Making this perhaps a nuclear-armed Islamic State problem, not just a regional cascade of proliferation. Congressman Chris Stewart, there is so much more to talk with you about. You’ve just returned form Africa. We didn’t get anywhere near that, but I hope we will have a chance to visit with you again soon on that subject and more in the meantime. Thank you for your leadership on this issue of the ObamaBomb deal. I hope you will be persuasive with your colleagues, I think as Senator Mendez put it, they should not want to have their name on this bomb anymore then he did, but good luck to you sir and enjoy the rest of your district work period. We will talk with you soon.
