President Barack Obama's efforts to hammer out a nuclear limitations deal with Iran may end in a "crash landing," says Richard Perle, a former assistant secretary of defense who believes Obama's veiled threat to offer up an Iran deal to the United Nations instead of seeking Congress' approval is a recipe for disaster.
"Most presidents recognize that to act against a significant segment of opinion in the Congress in this era is not conducive either to his best interests or for that matter to [those of] the agreement he's trying to achieve," Pearle said on Monday's edition of "The Steve Malzberg Show" on
Newsmax TV.
"If you're going to be on the crash landings, you'd better be on the takeoff. Obama is excluding from the takeoff people who he will need if there's a crash landing and the likelihood of a crash landing is significant."
Perle said that nobody who follows the U.S.-Iran negotiations closely believes that the Middle East nation can be trusted.
"What happens if this agreement gets signed and six months later or nine months later or a year later there is a further revelation about a hidden facility or hidden activity as there has been consistently over the years?" he said.
"Where does that leave the president if he has treated the Congress in this way and relied on the United Nations rather than the people who elected him?"
Perle, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, who was once chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, added that the Obama administration is "so narrowly focused" on the Iranian nuclear weapon program that it has "ignored everything else."
"The irony is that this agreement as we think it's shaping up, won't deal effectively with the nuclear weapons issue. It just leaves so many ways that Iran can continue to work toward a nuclear weapon," he said.
"[Israeli Prime Minister] Bibi Netanyahu was right when he said in his joint address to Congress that this does not block the road, this paves the road to Iran's nuclear weapons because they'll keep the whole nuclear establishment in place.
"The limits that are now under discussion are simply not sufficient to bring that program to a halt or even significantly to interfere with them."
The Obama administration has been criticized even by Democrats for leaving Congress out of the loop on the deal.
Tensions came to a head earlier this month when 47 Republican senators signed an open letter to Iran's leaders warning a deal signed by the White House wasn't worth the paper it was written on without congressional approval.
On Monday, Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican warned Monday that the White House would face a "violent backlash" in Congress if it takes a nuclear deal with Iran to the UN before Congress.
Administration officials told Associated Press that because the U.S. is negotiating with five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, it expects the council will pass a resolution to register its support for any deal.