Iran Nuclear Deal

Floor Speech

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Mr. KAINE. Mr. President, I thank my colleagues for taking the floor on this important matter. While I serve on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I actually want to talk about this issue from my standpoint on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

I happen to believe that one of the most valuable military assets we have as a nation is information intelligence. In that capacity, what we have under the JCPOA is the dramatic ability to learn, sadly, from tragic mistakes.

After more than a decade of war in Iraq and thousands of lives lost, we know that operating in an environment where we base national security decisions on what we don't know rather than what we do know can be tragically costly.

Over the weekend, there was press about a recently declassified report from the Joint Chiefs of Staff on weapons of mass destruction. It was submitted to former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in September of 2002, around the time Congress and the administration were trying to decide whether to invade Iraq. The report that was given to the Secretary of Defense--and it was not widely shared with the administration or Congress at the time--confirmed that our officials at the very top levels of the intel and military community knew very little about the actual status of Iraq's WMD program. The report concluded that what we suspect is ``based largely--perhaps 90 percent-- on analysis of imprecise intelligence.''

While the national security apparatus was acknowledging that it was operating in the dark, it was nevertheless planning for war.

On March 7, 2003, 2 weeks before the beginning of the Iraq invasion, the IAEA presented to the U.N. an updated report on Iraq's nuclear activities. The report stated that they had conducted 218 nuclear inspections at 141 sites and concluded at the time that there was no indication of resumed nuclear activities since 1998, no indication that Iraq had attempted to import uranium since 1990, no indication that Iraq had imported aluminium tubes, and no indication that they had sought to import magnets for use in centrifuge enrichment. The IAEA said they had no information suggesting that Iraq had a WMD program specifically with nuclear weapons.

We ignored what the IAEA told the U.N. the world, and us, and instead we went to war based upon a national intelligence estimate that said we didn't know what they were doing. That decision locked us into a decade of combat operations which resulted in a tragic cost. We know the rest of the story: 4,484 Americans lost their lives in connection with the war in Iraq from 2003 to 2011 and another 32,246 Americans were wounded. We also know that it turned out the IAEA was right. Once the war was waged and we got in and had our own ability to gather intelligence and information, we found out that Iraq didn't have a program of weapons of mass destruction, so we went to war based upon a faulty assessment and we didn't have the information we needed.

Let's contrast what happened in 2002 and 2003 with the opportunity we now have before us as a result of the JCPOA. The agreement of Iran to follow for the next 25 years an enhanced inspection regime and be inspected by the IAEA to a standard that no other country in the world must follow is very unique. It will provide us and all of our international partners with significant intelligence about Iran's program. After year 25, Iran has also agreed to submit and follow the additional protocol of the IAEA, which also guarantees significant intelligence and inspections.

What does that give us? It arms us with information. It arms us with facts. It arms us with intelligence. Those are some of the best military assets we can have. With intelligence, we obviously hope that Iran never makes a move to develop nuclear weapons, but if they do, with intelligence we can blow the whistle and inform the world that they are violating paragraph 1, page 1 of the agreement where they pledged never to seek, acquire, or develop nuclear weapons. With intelligence, we can make a wise decision rather than a blind decision as to whether we should send American men and women into war to try to stop a nuclear weapons program. With intelligence, we can even target military action to be more effective. That is what the JCPOA gives us that we didn't have before. That is what it gives us that we didn't have in Iraq, and we regret that we didn't have it.

I say to the Senator from Delaware that I noticed during our recent visit to Israel that the tone seems to be changing a little bit as far as our dialogue with our Israeli allies about this deal because the dramatic nature of the intelligence is now being seen by our strong allies in Israel as something that is potentially transformative.

Two days ago, the chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces gave a speech in Tel Aviv. Gadi Eizenkot spoke on Monday at a national security conference in Tel Aviv and basically said that the nuclear deal with Iran constitutes a strategic turning point. He didn't whitewash it; he said ``many risks but also opportunities.'' What are the opportunities? He said the deal reduces the immediate Iranian threat to Israel because it rolls back Iran's nuclear capabilities and deepens the monitoring capabilities of the international community.

After all the drama about how it was a historic mistake, how refreshing it was to go to Israel a few weeks ago and hear security and intel officials talk about what this enhanced intelligence meant with respect to Israel's security.

We know there is no guarantee that a diplomatic deal will work out, and my colleagues have laid out the need for strict implementation, but we also know--and we have the scar tissue, so this is painful knowledge--that we are much safer if we have better information, we are much safer if we have better intel, and we will make much better decisions.

I certainly pray that we will never again send American men and women into war based on a false intelligence assessment. The only way we can guard against that eventuality is to have stronger intelligence. The IAEA inspections will give us better intelligence and should help us make better military decisions in the future.

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