Iran has already gotten "the plane load of cash and a lot of the benefit of it," so the United States should not pull completely out of the Iran nuclear deal, Rep. Mac Thornberry said Sunday.
"I do want us to look at everything that Iran is doing, their missile program, the problems they're causing in Yemen, Syria," the Texas Republican, who chairs the House Armed Services Committee, told "Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo" on Fox Business.
"One of the fundamental flaws of the [Iran] nuclear deal was it just focused very narrowly on their nuclear program," Thornberry added.
In January 2016, just before the deal was reached, the Obama administration delivered $400 million, by plane to resolve a dispute between the United States and Iran before the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Iran released four American prisoners that day.
President Donald Trump is expected to decertify the Iran deal this week, and Thornberry said he believes that will happen.
If it happens, Thornberry said he hopes Congress will look at the matter more broadly than just the technical compliance with one part of the agreement.
"What we are talking about are pieces of paper," he said. "What backs up those pieces of paper is the most important thing and that is our power. U.S. Military power. And so whether we are talking about Iran or Korea, China or Russia, the best thing that we could do however the certification issue comes out, the best thing we could do is get serious about rebuilding and growing our military."
Thornberry, who has often criticized the Iran deal, said in July that the agreement has done little to curb Iran's missile program, after news broke that it had launched a satellite-carrying rocket into space.
"We saw this pattern with North Korea," Thornberry said at the time. "We've increasingly got to worry about the Iranian missile program, which by the way, is not constrained at all under the treaty dealing with nuclear weapons that the Obama administration signed."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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