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House Speaker Paul Ryan to AIPAC: ‘Instead of Dismantling Iran’s Nuclear Program, We Legitimized It’
by Shiryn Ghermezian
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan addressing the AIPAC conference on Monday. Photo: Twitter.
US Speaker of the House Paul Ryan blasted the nuclear deal and its aftermath during his address to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) Policy Conference on Monday night.
“I don’t think it’s an accident that every few months we hear of Iran launching yet another ballistic missile,” Ryan told AIPAC delegates at the Verizon Center in Washington, DC. “Instead of dismantling Iran’s nuclear program, we legitimized it.”
Ryan called the agreement a “terrible deal, the worst in our lifetime — not sine 1939 have we seen horrible foreign policy like this Iran deal,” because of which “our friends in the Middle East are losing faith in us, or at least in our judgement.”
“We all wanted negotiations to succeed, but we were supposed to get something out of it. It’s fine to negotiate with our enemies; it really is. But not at our friends’ expense. That doesn’t make any of us safer,” he said. “Iran got billions of dollars in sanctions relief in exchange for what? For taking out some — not all, just some — of its nuclear program. And in 10 or 15 years, all those limits expire. In other words, they get something for essentially nothing. It was a steal, and that’s even if they don’t cheat.”
Ryan also came down hard on the Obama administration for its treatment of Israel. He said he believes it “understands that we need our allies, but it fails to understand what our allies need.”
“They need more than big assurances that we got their back,” he said. “They need to see with their own eyes the measure of our full commitment.
Ryan also called Israel “a sea of democracy in a sea of authoritative regimes,” and called the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program a “huge threat” not only to the Jewish state, but also to the US.
