Iran Nukes – Never Trust, Verify
President Ronald Reagan repeatedly told then–Soviet general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev that we would “trust but verify” any treaty with the Soviet Union. And we insisted on agreeing on intrusive verification measures to meet his standard.
Recently on Meet the Press, President Reagan’s national security adviser, Colin Powell, declared that the standard for the Iran nuclear deal instead should be: “Don’t trust, never trust, and always verify.”
We strongly agree — but we do not concur with his apparent judgment that it is met by President Obama’s deal with Iran.
We are astonished by his stated confidence, especially in the intelligence community, given his prior firsthand experience with compelling contrary evidence: When General Powell was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, inspectors learned following the 100-day January 1991 Desert Storm war in Iraq of Saddam Hussein’s major covert effort to build nuclear weapons.
This fact had escaped notice by the intelligence community — including the vaunted Israeli Mossad. Saddam’s effort involved several thousand scientists and engineers and was judged to be within months of producing nuclear weapons.
Then in 2003, when Powell was secretary of state, following the “shock and awe” stage of Operation Iraqi Freedom, inspectors found none of the weapons of mass destruction that the director of Central Intelligence had predicted — DCI George Tenet had called this prediction a “slam dunk,” and it had led Powell to predict their presence in his major speech to the United Nations that was instrumental in gaining international support for Iraqi Freedom.
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Source: Iran Nukes – Never Trust, Verify | National Review Online
