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20th Century Angel of Mercy. D. R. Howe (Glencoe, MN) treats the wounds of Private First Class D. A. Crum (New Brighton, PA), H Company, 2nd Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment, during Operation Hue City, Vietnam, 1968. (Public Domain/USMC)

Just shy of fifty years ago on November 7, 1967, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by J. William Fulbright, Democrat of Arkansas, met in executive session to assess the progress of the ongoing Vietnam War. Secretary of State Dean Rusk was the sole witness invited to testify. Even today, the transcript of Rusks remarks and the subsequent exchange with committee members make for depressing reading.

Responding to questions that ranged from plaintive to hostile, Rusk gave no ground. The Johnson administration was more than willing to end the war, he insisted; the North Vietnamese government was refusing to do so. The blame lay with Hanoi. Therefore the United States had no alternative but to persist. American credibility was on the line.

By extension, so too was the entire strategy of deterring Communist aggression. The stakes in South Vietnam extended well beyond the fate of that one country, as senators well knew. In that regard, Rusk reminded members of the committee, the Congress had performed its functionwhen the key decisions were madean allusion to the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, a de facto declaration of war passed with near unanimous congressional support. None too subtly, Rusk was letting members of the committee know that the war was theirs as much as it was the administrations.

Yet Fulbright and his colleagues showed little inclination to accept ownership. As a result, the back-and-forth between Rusk and his interrogators produced little of value. Rather than illuminating the problem of a war gone badly awry and identifying potential solutions, the event became an exercise in venting frustration. This exchange initiated by Senator Frank Lausche, Democrat from Ohio, captures the overall tone of the proceedings.

Senator Lausche: The debate about what our course in Vietnam should be has now been in progress since the Tonkin Bay resolution. When was that, August 1964?

Senator Wayne Morse (D-Ore.): Long before that.

Senator Albert Gore, Sr. (D-Tenn.): Long before that.

Senator Fulbright: Oh, yes, but that was the Tonkin Bay.

Senator Lausche: For three years we have been arguing it, arguing for what purpose? Has it been to repeal the Tonkin Bay resolution? Has it been to establish justification for pulling out? In the three years, how many times has the Secretary appeared before us?

Those hearings, those debates, in my opinion, have fully explored all of the aspects that you are speaking about without dealing with any particular issue. Now, this is rather rash, I suppose: If our presence in Vietnam is wrong, [if] it is believed we should pull out, should not one of us present a resolution to the Senate[?] . [Then] we would have a specific issue. We would not just be sprawled all over the field, as we have been in the last three years.

Put simply, Senator Lausche was suggesting that Congress force the matter, providing a forum to examine and resolve an issue that had deeply divided the country and that, Rusks assurances notwithstanding, showed no signs of resulting in a successful outcome. No such congressional intervention occurred, however. As a practical matter, Congress in 1967 found it more expedient to defer to the wishes of the commander in chief as the exigencies of the Cold War ostensibly required.

So the Vietnam War dragged on at great cost and to no good effect. Not until the summer of 1970 did Congress repeal the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. Even then, the gesture came too late to have any meaningful impact. The war continued toward its mournful conclusion.

To characterize congressional conduct regarding the Vietnam War as timorous and irresponsible is to be kind. There were individual exceptions, of course, among them Senator Morse who had opposed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution and Senator Fulbright who by 1967 openly regretted his vote in favor and recognized Vietnam for the disaster it had become. Collectively, however, legislators failed abjectly.

Well, with the passage of a half century, here we are again, back in the soup (or perhaps more accurately, the sand). With the United States currently mired in the longest armed conflict in the nations historyconsiderably longer than VietnamSenator Lausches proposal of 1967 just might merit a fresh look.

Of course, the Afghanistan War (ostensibly part of a Global War on Terrorism) differs from the Vietnam War (ostensibly part of the Cold War) in myriad ways. Yet it resembles Vietnam in three crucial respects. First, it drags on with no end in sight. Second, no evidence exists to suggest that mere persistence will produce a positive outcome. Third, those charged with managing the war have long since run out of ideas about how to turn things around.

Indeed, the Trump administration seems unable to make up its mind about what to do in Afghanistan. A request for additional troops by the senior U.S. field commander has been pending since February. He is still waiting for an answer. James Mattis, Trumps defense secretary, has promised a shiny new strategy. That promise remains unfulfilled. Meanwhile, the news coming out of Kabul is almost uniformly bad. The war itself continues as if on autopilot. Lausches sprawled all over the field provides an apt description of where the United States finds itself today.

Where is the Congress in all of this? By all appearances, congressional deference to the putative prerogatives of the commander in chief remains absurdly intactthis despite the fact that the Cold War is now a distant memory and the post once graced by eminences like Truman and Eisenhower is now occupied by an individual whose judgment and attention span (among other things) are suspect.

A citizen might ask: What more does the Congress need to reassert its constitutional prerogatives on matters related to war? Surely there must be at least a handful of members who, setting aside partisan considerations, can muster the courage and vision to offer a rash proposition similar to Senator Lausches. Doing so has the potential not only to inaugurate debate on a conflict that has gone on for too long to no purpose, but also to call much needed attention to the overall disarray of U.S. policy of which Afghanistan is merely one symptom. Otherwise, why do we pay these people?

Andrew Bacevich, a Vietnam Veteran, is TACs writer-at-large.

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Yes Congress, Afghanistan is Your Vietnam - The American Conservative

In a recent meeting, President Trump correctly told his generals that they were losing the war in Afghanistan, rejected their proposed strategy, and sent them back to the drawing board to create a new one.

Like chronic alcoholism, compulsive American meddling in the affairs of other countries can only be recovered from by admitting the problem exists in the first place.

President Trump has partially accomplished this first step by recognizing what has been obvious for years, but an even more enlightened conclusion would be that the war has been lost for quite some time now and the only solution is to withdraw U.S. forces as quickly as possible.

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However, that is not the new strategy that the generals will likely come up with. Instead, as in Vietnam, they will continue to sayand probably even believethat a turnaround is still possible. They have had 16 years to win the war, but have abjectly failed to do so.

In any counterinsurgency war, if the insurgents are not losing, they are winning. Fighting guerrilla style means that insurgents use hit and run tactics against the weak points of a generally stronger enemy (usually government or foreign forces) and then flee before the stronger side can catch them.

Over time, the guerrillas are hoping to make the stronger party exhausted, and if it is a foreign occupier, make the war so costly in lives and money that that participant eventually goes back home.

The Taliban guerrillas in Afghanistan are not only winning by not losing and hanging on, they are winning absolutely by capturing and holding more of the Afghan governments territory.

Thus, after 16 years of fighting, approximately 2,400 American military deaths, more than 20,000 wounded, 1,200 U.S. civilian contractor deaths, and a whopping half trillion dollars wasted in this quagmire, instead of cutting its losses, the Trump administration seems to be willing to let the military re-escalate the war by sending 3,000 to 5,000 additional U.S.troops in.

Such forces would continue to advise and assist chronically illiterate, incompetent, corrupt, and AWOL Afghan security forces. And despite their job description, U.S. forces do fight in combat and still continue to take casualties.

If 100,000 U.S. troops could not subdue Afghanistan, the only way U.S.-trained Afghan forces could do so is if they were impeccably honest and competent forces who knew the pulse of the Afghan peopleso they could get good intelligence on who the clandestine insurgents are and neutralize them. Yet, this pipe dream is not even worth fantasizing about.

But if the United States withdraws completely from Afghanistan, wont the country go back into chaos and be a haven for future terrorist attacks against the United States? After all ISIS is now in Afghanistan, and some sources say the group is now cooperating with the Taliban to attack U.S. and Afghan targets.

Also, in western Afghanistan, Iran is now trying to keep Afghanistan unstable by supplying the Taliban with weapons, funds, and fighters to use against U.S. and Afghan forces. (U.S. ally Pakistan has always supported the Taliban in eastern and southern Afghanistan to do the same.)

The major problem with U.S. foreign policy is that, like an addict in perpetual denial, no questions have been asked about why Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda perpetrated the 9/11 attacks from Afghanistan in the first place.

President George W. Bush told us that al Qaeda had attacked us because of our freedoms, which enraged bin Laden, who then rhetorically asked why he hadnt attacked Sweden instead.

No one chose to hear what bin Laden kept repeating: he attacked the United States because of the U.S. military presence in the Islamic holy land of Saudi Arabia and U.S. treatment of Muslim countries U.S. meddling in the Middle East.

To understand bin Ladens motivation for the attacks is not to condone such brutal atrocities but to attempt to find a quieter change in U.S. policy that might take the fire out of the Islamist jihad.

The US government should have introspectively reached the conclusion that U.S. interventionism in the Middle East had helped create the problem, or at least exacerbated it, and had directed it more against the United States.

Donald Rumsfeld, then George W. Bushs secretary of defense, famously asked after 9/11, Are we creating more terrorists than we are killing?

No one has ever answered that question, but the correct answer was and is Yes, especially after the invasion of Muslim soil in Iraq and the air wars against terrorists in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and Syria that have now spanned three U.S. presidential administrations.

Even before that, the Carter and Reagan administrations helped create al Qaeda by funding the radical Afghan Mujahideen guerrillas in the 1980s and George H.W. Bush motivated bin Laden to begin his war with the United States by unnecessarily leaving U.S. military forces in Saudi Arabia after the first Gulf War.

The United States also created what eventually became ISIS, which arose as resistance to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. In Pakistan, the U.S. war in Afghanistan spilled over into that country and thus created the Pakistani Taliban.

US soldiers walk at the site of a Taliban suicide attack in Kandahar on August 2, 2017, after a Taliban suicide bomber rammed a vehicle filled with explosives into a convoy of foreign forces in Afghanistan's restive southern province of Kandahar. JAVED TANVEER/AFP/Getty

In Somalia, U.S. support for an Ethiopian invasion of Somalia created the virulently Islamist al Shabab group.

In Yemen, empirical documentation has shown that U.S. bombing of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has increased the number of fighters being recruited by the group.

Currently, the United States is at war in at least seven Islamic countries. Non-Muslim forces fighting on Muslim land angers even moderate Muslims.

Before the American fracking boom, even when the United States was more dependent on foreign oil, it was cost-ineffective to use massive military forces to safeguard what was best provided by the world oil market, but now that policy is even more absurd.

If anyone doubts that a lower U.S. profile in Muslim countries would reduce blowback terrorism, the case of Lebanon in the 1980s needs to be examined. The Shiite Islamist group Hezbollah was attacking U.S. targets regularly, but after the United States withdrew its forces from that country, the attacks gradually attenuated.

The United States needs to get out of Afghanistan for good and end its other air wars in Muslim countries. None of these countries are strategic to the United States, and wars there merely generate unwanted blowback. These brushfire wars left over from the War on Terror, which actually increased terrorism, distract and take resources from U.S. efforts to counter a much more important potential foreign policy problem: a rising China.

Ivan Eland is a senior fellow at the Independent Institute and author of "The Failure of Counterinsurgency: Why Hearts and Minds Are Seldom Won."

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We Have Lost the War in Afghanistan. We Should Get Out Now - Newsweek

The U.S. Department of Defense funded more than $76 billion dollars of weapons, communication devices, and other security equipment to the Afghan security forces since 2002, according to a new report by the Government Accountability Office(GAO).

Yet, according to top U.S. military commanders and other experts, the Afghan military is still unprepared to operate independently.

Since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the U.S. has allocated funding for nearly 600,000 weapons to be put in the hands of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF), according to Defense Department data. Nearly 81 percent of these weapons were rifles and pistols. The firepower funding also included more than 25,000 grenade launchers and almost 10,000 rocket-propelled weapons used by the Afghan Border Police.

Additional items given to the ANDSF included 162,643 pieces of communications equipment and nearly 76,000 vehicles. These vehicles were primarily light tactical vehicles like Ford Ranger pickups and cargo trucks, but also included more than 22,000 Humvees, according to the DOD data.

When the equipment reached Afghanistan, it was divided between the two main security forces: The Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police.

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The Pentagon has shipped 110 helicopters and 98 plane since 2007, when the Pentagon authorized sending aircraft. These aircraft could have carried the 314,000 unguided rockets, 8,700 "general-purpose bombs" and 1,815,000 helicopter rounds, which was also funded by the Pentagon, according to their data.

Even with all of this equipment, Gen. John Nicholson, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan,told Congress in Februaryhe needs a"few thousand" more troops to properly train and advise the Afghan military so they can eventually operate independently.

Claude Chafin, communications director for the House Armed Services Committee, told CBS News the GAO reportwas sought as "an objective review of major weapon systems and equipment provided to ANDSF to evaluate the extent to which such equipment supports the ability of ANDSF to provide security for the Afghan people."

Stephen Tankel, an American University professor and adjunct senior fellow at the Center for New American Security, said to CBS News that he agrees with top U.S. commanders that the Afghan military is still unprepared after more than a decade of American military guidance.

The "U.S. continues to spend money every year, our forces continue to die, and the mission continues to drift," Tankel said.

Some in Congress are now calling on President Trump to change U.S. policy in Afghanistan.

Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee,announced in a press release Thursday a new amendment to the 2018 defense authorization bill that aims to "strengthen the capability and capacity of the Afghan government and security forces."

While no funding specifics were outlined in the release, McCain said that "adopting a clear policy and strategy in Afghanistan, backed with the authorities and resources necessary for success, would be a critical step toward restoring that kind of leadership, which has been absent for far too long."

The conflict in Afghanistan is still claiming the lives of American troops. A suicide attack in Kandahar killed two U.S. service members last week.

The Trump administration has said it will soon release its plan on the path forward in Afghanistan, but no details have surfaced yet.

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US spent $76B on weapons and equipment for Afghan security forces - CBS News

North Koreas Kim Yong Nam was among the most mysterious, and most reported on, guests at the inauguration of Irans President Hassan Rouhani over the weekend. Some media, eager to boost the profile of foreign visitors to the ceremony that marked the beginning of Rouhanis second term, cited Kim Yong Nam as the hermit kingdoms second most powerful man.

That is slightly inaccurate, since no one is quite sure how the complex webs of power inside the North Korean regime are navigatedother than the fact that Kim Jong Un, the countrys leader and the grandson of its founder, reigns supreme. Kim Yong Nams most relevant title is President of the Presidium of the Supreme Peoples Assembly of North Korea, which is a very long way of saying he is the speaker of the parliament.

On paper, he forms part of the executive triumvirate that includes Kim Jong Un, but his powers seem to be mostly ceremonial. Simply put, Yong Nam, who used to be the minister of foreign affairs from 1983 to 1998 under Kim Jong Uns father, is the regimes envoy to the world. It was he, for instance, who issued a message of congratulations to Emmanuel Macron after he was elected French president.

This isnt Yong Nams first trip to Iran. He also visited in 2012 to attend the Non-Aligned Movements summit in Tehran. Then as now he was in the country for about 10 days, making many official visits and appearances, signing agreements for technical and educational cooperation between Iran and North Korea.

If he is forging deals to help Iran get the kind of nuclear and missile technology with which North Korea has surprised and frightened the world, but relations between the two governments go back a long way, and shared weaponry and technology has been key to their rapport.

[As The Daily Beast has reported, critics of the Iran nuclear deal with the West have gone so far as to raise the possibility that Iran continues to develop nuclear weapons and missiles inside North Korea.]

IranWire published background on the two pariah states in 2014 that helps put in perspective the curious relationship between the Islamic Republic and the worlds strangest hereditary non-monarchy.

Following are excerpts:

Iran and North Korea occupy overlapping territory in American perceptions, partly because President George W. Bush accused both countries, in his 2002 State of the Union speech, of pursuing weapons of mass destruction, mistreating their populations, and threatening world peace as members of an axis of evil.

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has written that some people over-interpreted Bushs speech to mean the axis is an alliance among the states he named (the third being Iraq), but its true that Iran and North Korea (which identifies itself as the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, or DPRK) have maintained an enduring relationship since 1979, based mainly on military trade and shared opposition to US interests.

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A History of Shared Wounds

North Koreas Great Leader, Kim Il Sung, first reached out to Irans Supreme Leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, in May 1979, sending him a congratulatory telegram on the victory of the Islamic Revolution, according to Steven Ditto, adjunct fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. On June 25th of that year, Khomeini met with DPRK Ambassador Chabeong Ouk in Qom on what Chabeong called the 29th anniversary of the aggression of U.S. troops against the meek nation of Korea. And Khomeini replied in kind, calling called for the expulsion of American troops from South Korea..

Bound together by anti-Americanism and a narrow foreign policy driven by resentment, Iran and the DPRK found a natural common ground from the outset. This fit into a larger trend of Iran establishing diplomatic and trade relations with non-hostile countries, Ditto said. That is, Khomeini envisioned that relations could be made with any country, regardless of ideological orientation.

But despite both countries lurid expressions of hatred for the United States, the relationship was ultimately propelled by revolutionary Irans military needs in the early years of the Iran-Iraq War.

The Khomeini regime was a pariah, desperate for military equipment and ammunition. They reached out to everyone they could, and few were willing to help. One of those was North Korea, said Joseph Bermudez Jr., an analyst of the Korean Peoples Army. On the North Korean side, its likely that they just saw Iran as a paying customer. Iran had oil. Iran had cash. North Korea had weapons but no cash and no oil, so it was an ideal match.

For other nations that wanted to profit from arms sales to Iran without any political cost, North Korea served as middleman. North Korea enjoyed excellent relations with the Soviet Union, and was well placed to act as a conduit for Soviet-made arms to Iran at a time when the Kremlin was wary of offending Iraq, the historian Dilip Hiro noted in The Longest War, his history of the Iran-Iraq conflict. North Korea, he wrote, also served a similar function for China, which was wary of upsetting Egypt and other Arab allies by selling Iran arms. Speedy arrival of urgently needed weapons from North Korea boosted the morale of Irans post-revolutionary forces.

A Military Relationship Forged in War

In return for Iranian financial assistance, North Korea provided Iran with the SCUD B ballistic missiles it used against Iraq in the War of the Cities, according to former U.S. intelligence officer Bruce Bechtols book Red Rogue. Even after the Iran-Iraq War ended, Irans military ties with North Korea deepened. Bechtol wrote that since the 1990s, North Korea has helped Iran to develop its Shahab missiles, based on North Korean models, and that it is believed North Korean representatives attended Irans test of its Shahab-4 missile in 2006.

North Korea has had military observers in Iran since the 1980s, says analyst Bermudez, who has lectured U.S. Army and Naval intelligence staff on North Korean defense. These people have watched U.S. operations in Iraq and the Persian Gulf, and have drawn lessons. It is likely that equipment Iran acquired from Iraq through defections or capture has been shared with North Korea. More recently, he says, there have been persistent rumors about North Korea hosting Iranian technicians, scientists, and military officials at ballistic missile tests, and vice versa. Its likely, he says, but we cant prove it.

What remains unclear is whether Iran has benefited from North Koreas longer-range missile testing. Wed like to know whether progress being made in one countrys program is benefiting another, said Jon Wolfsthal, deputy director of the James Martin Center for Non-Proliferation Studies. One question that has never been adequately answered is how far does the missile cooperation go, and has it spilled over into the nuclear realm?

Wolfsthal, who served in the White House for three years as special advisor on nuclear security to Vice President Joseph Biden, also pointed to U.S. concerns over whether the two countries share information about their nuclear programs, since North Korea has nuclear weapons. We know that North Korea knows how to build a basic nuclear device, theyve tested several. Is that information flowing? Iran has a very advanced centrifuge program based off the Pakistani network. We know North Korea has made some progress, but theyre not as technically skilled as some of the Iranian engineers, and so, have Iranians been helping the North Koreans perfect their uranium enrichment program?

Diplomatic Exchanges, Friendship Farms

It is in the long history of diplomatic and cultural exchanges that the symbolic bond between Iran and North Korea can be charted. Iranian delegations traveled to the DPRK in the early 1980s and one visit included Irans current president, Hassan Rouhani, who traveled as a representative of Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, meeting Kim Il Sung and counterparts from North Koreas Radio and Television Broadcasting Committee, said Ditto.

In 1989, Irans current Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei visited North Korea as Irans president. Khameneis official biography quotes Ruhollah Khomeinis son Ahmads claim that his father chose Khamenei as his successor based on the success of that trip.

In 1996 Iran and North Korea inaugurated friendship farms in each country. Every year, the farms hold cultural exchanges, commemorations of Khameneis visit to North Korea, and commemorations of Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il.

By the 2000s, some Iranian officials, many reformists, and pragmatic conservatives concerned with Irans integration into the global economy expressed alarm, declaring North Korea to be a negative example. In 2006, Mohsen Rezaee, Secretary of the Expediency Council and former chief of the Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), who himself led an official IRGC delegation to Pyongyang in 1993, cautioned that, should Iran follow a reactionary stance internationally and a policy of developmental stagnation domestically, it would fare no better than North Korea, Ditto says.

Curious details about cultural exchange emerge regularly, although rarely with much context, given the closed nature of the North Korean state.

In early 2013, the Iranian parliament approved as communications minister a former military official, Mohamed Hasan Nami, who holds a degree in state management from Pyongyangs Kim Il Sung University, although there is no evidence that many Iranian officials study there.

Also in 2013, satellite images showed that Iran maintains a seven-building embassy compound in Pyongyang, at the center of which stands the first mosque in North Koreaone of only five places of religious worship in the countrys capital. In May 2009, North Korea held Iranian Cultural Week in Pyongyang. Details surrounding such events remain sparse.

Once Passionate, Ties Now Tepid

While both countries support each other rhetorically, by 2014 there was evidence of growing distance and diverging trajectories that may eventually cause Iran to see its friendship with North Korea as a liability.

Although there has been extensive cooperation between Iran and North Korea, and they are partners in the military realm, Alireza Nader of the Rand Corporation argued [in 2014] that they are not strictly allies. Its really a transactional relationship based on mutual opposition to U.S. interests, and Irans inability to find other military partners outside the Middle Eastwith the exception of, maybe, Belarusand North Koreas economic isolation.

There isnt a common ideology there, said Nader. The two societies are completely different. Iran has a relatively sophisticated society, it has a sizeable middle class, its a merchant country [that is] susceptible to economic pressure. The government in Iran, while authoritarian, has to take public sentiment into consideration when making decisions. North Korea is a totalitarian state that lets its citizens starve.

Diverging Trajectories

Nader suggested, however, that while North Korea is likely to maintain close links with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, it has little to offer the Rouhani government, which wants to improve Irans economy and international standing. Rouhani, Nader said, is focused on improving relations with regional Arab states and European countries and potentially the United States, but also other Asian countries like China, Japan, India and South Korea. North Korea is at the bottom of that list.

Isolation makes strange bedfellows, Jon Wolfsthal observes. Theres no particular affinity between the cult of personality in North Korea and the Islamic Republic of Iran, but they have some common interests in terms of accessing hard-to-access materials, currency, luxury items [and] military equipment. Iran produces a lot of oil, North Korea needs a lot. North Korea produces a lot of ballistic missiles, Iran likes them, so theyve been able to work out what most people believe is a pretty sophisticated barter arrangement to keep this relationship going.

Perhaps the largest outstanding question [in 2014] was whether the two counties could maintain a relationship as Iran pursued a nuclear pact with the West. Should Iran improve its relationship with the world, association with North Korea may become an embarrassment.

If youre looking at the brands of North Korea and Iran, both are pretty low in the western world, but at least Iran has something that other countries want in terms of international engagement, economic capabilities, and location, Wolfsthal says. So you could say that [for] Iran, being associated with North Korea, which is recognized as just a police state, could be seen as hurting their brand.

A relationship that once thrived on friendship farms and mutually admiring founding leaders looked, in the twenty-first century, like a relic of an era that one party, at least, may hope to leave behind.

Editors Note: The body of this story was written before Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, and before he threatened fire and fury to stop North Koreas nuclear and missile program. He may hope his rhetoric will shock and awe Iran as well. More likely, it will drive the two countries closer together once again.

Adapted from IranWire. The body of this article was originally written by Roland Elliott Brown in 2014. The introduction was written by Arash Azizi.

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North Korea's Deadly Partnership With Iran - Daily Beast

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to reporters at Trump's golf estate in Bedminster, New Jersey U.S. August 10, 2017.

Jonathan Ernst

Last Updated Aug 10, 2017 8:16 PM EDT

President Trump on Thursday said he doesn't believe Iran is in compliance with the 2015 deal to curtail its nuclear weapons program, weeks after his administration certified that it is in compliance.

The president made the comments to reporters during his working vacation in Bedminster, New Jersey, after his administration certified in July that Iran is living up to its end of the bargain under the nuclear agreement. The administration is required to notify Congress every 90 days whether Iran is in compliance with the deal reached under former President Obama, and July was the second time Mr. Trump's administrationcertified compliance.

But on Thursday, Mr. Trump said some "very strong things" will take place "if they don't get themselves in compliance."

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"I don't think they're living up to the spirit of the agreement," Mr. Trump told reporters Thursday. "President Obama in his wisdom gave them $150 billion. He gave them $1.8 billion in cash. That's a hard one to figure. But that was his decision. I think it's a horrible agreement. But they are not in compliance with the agreement and they certainly are not in the spirit of the agreement in compliance, and I think you'll see some very strong things taking place if they don't get themselves in compliance."

Mr. Trump has long condemned the agreement his predecessor made, and on the campaign trail, pledged to rip up and renegotiate the deal.

"This deal -- if I win -- will be a totally different deal. This will be a totally different deal," Mr. Trump said at a rally on Sept. 9, 2015.

But Mr. Trump has yet to renegotiate the deal.

Mr. Trump did recently sign legislation Congress passed targeting sanctions on Russia, Iran and North Korea, although Mr. Trump called the legislation "flawed." The measure targets Iran's ballistic missile program and support for terrorism and human rights violations, while complying with the Iran deal. It also imposes sanctions on any foreign person or entity that does business with any entity the administration has already designated as having a connection to Iran's ballistic missile program.

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Trump says he doesn't think Iran is complying with nuclear agreement - CBS News