Mark Kelly says Trump 'doesn't understand the military' while criticizing Iran agreement

United States Senator Mark Kelly accused President Donald Trump of not fully understanding the country's military capabilities, leading to bad decisions. His comments come after the President announced that a memorandum of understanding had been agreed upon between Washington and Tehran for a potential peace deal. The terms of the deal or the memorandum have not been made public. Kelly claimed that Trump, who has never served in the military, might have also failed to wipe out Iran's nuclear and military capabilities entirely. 

"People like Donald Trump, who never served in the military, that doesn't understand the military and its capability, they're always the first people that want to drop a bomb on something and think that's the solution to everything, and think we can obliterate underground, you know, nuclear enrichment capacity. I mean, nobody who's a professional would ever say that to say that we're going to completely obliterate something, we can degrade it, we can damage it," Kelly, a U.D. Navy veteran, said during an interview on CNN

According to Axios, several top officials in President Trump's Cabinet have expressed doubt over Iran's willingness to commit to the nuclear concessions. The report states that CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth have all expressed concerns about the memorandum being honored by Tehran. Kelly was asked about this on the CNN interview, and he said that the administration was incompetent.

"It's just the height of incompetence with this government," he said, claiming that if the Trump administration released the terms of the memorandum, they would be faced with immense criticism, even from those within the Republican Party. "I have got to see something that isn't a tweet," Kelly added. "We need to have serious people who have experience doing these things negotiating this deal."

During his address at the G7 Summit on Tuesday, President Trump said that he appreciated the relationship built between Washington and Tehran over the past few weeks and made it clear that the U.S. was not going to invest any money in Iran. When questioned about when the terms of the memorandum would be made public, the President said that he was going to read them out in a press conference in the near future.

"I will actually not only release it, but I'll also probably have a press conference and read it to you word-by-word, so that the press covers it accurately, because it's, it's a very important document," he said. "And, unlike Obama, who could have destroyed the Middle East with a horrible JCPOA, it is the worst agreement that was a road to a nuclear weapon. Mine is a wall against a nuclear weapon."

However, a level of uncertainty about the Iran deal remains among certain GOP lawmakers. "I am somewhat concerned that Iran's view of the agreement seems different than what the American negotiating team is claiming," Sen. Lindsey Graham said as he called for the document's immediate release.