A former director of the CIA is convinced Iran will violate the terms of an agreement reached Tuesday regarding its nuclear program.
During an appearance on
Newsmax TV's "Newsmax Prime," James Woolsey tells host Joe Pags the agreement is "worse than worthless."
"Having the agreement is not really going to constrain them effectively because even where there are not some obvious and open loopholes, they will lie about what they're doing and what the circumstances are like," says Woolsey, who ran the CIA under President Bill Clinton from 1993-1995.
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"So there's no real chance that the agreement is going really to constrain them in its current condition. An agreement modeled after what we were talking about a couple of years ago might, if done right, have had some useful effect. What they've agreed on now is, as I've said, worse than worthless."
The United States and five other countries, a group known as the P5+1, struck a deal with Iran Tuesday.
Critics of the deal, including high-ranking members of the GOP, Republican presidential candidate
Donald Trump, Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu, and others think the agreement is rife with problems.
The results of a poll released Tuesday showed the majority of Americans agreed with the deal's critics.
Woolsey says Iran will be able to take advantage of sanction money, which he's told is more than $100 billion.
"That creates a situation where we have tipped to them billions of dollars essentially in order to help them," Woolsey says. "That's not our objective, but it's what we're doing in order to help them move forward with their terrorism and there are attacks on other states such as on Saudi Arabia and Yemen via the Houthis, the attacks all over Lebanon and Syria and so forth by Hezbollah. The terrible events they bring out in Gaza with their support for Hamas.
"It just goes on and on and we are in a very difficult situation with Iran and certainly they're not doing anything to justify confidence that they will follow their word and do what they say they are going to do and sign the agreement."
Woolsey adds that the U.S. is now "in a very weak position because of all the concessions that our negotiators have made under the instructions I'm sure of the president. I don't think we should blame the negotiators for this. They're acting under orders."
Republican candidates for president blasted the Iran deal Tuesday.
"This is the most dangerous, irresponsible step I've ever seen in the history of watching the Mideast," South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said.
On the other side of the coin is Democratic candidate for president
Hillary Clinton, who called the deal an "important step."
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