So whether my friends to my left believe it or not, I wasn’t opposed in principle to negotiating with Iran. But the deal arrived at seems a very, very poor one. I’m still educating myself, but the lack of anytime-anywhere inspections, and the un-freezing of over a $100B of funds (producing a massive influx of cash for a regime everyone agrees is the world’s largest sponsor of terrorism) just doesn’t make sense to me. If the frozen assets were decoupled (and perhaps tied to commitments on better behavior in terms of funding terrorism) and there were anytime-anywhere, remote-monitoring allowed inspections, I’d have to think hard about whether the deal was better than the alternatives (all of which suck). But with that said, here’s a POV from someone who may not be a policy expert, but who can’t be argued with having quite literally put himself in the firing line of Iran’s proxies. And full disclosure / warning: I wouldn’t presume to call Chuck a close friend, but he’s part of the circle of military folks that tolerate me as their unofficial civilian mascot, so if you choose to criticize him, don’t be a jerk about it, because given what he has gone through I will not take it well.