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Bill Gertz, Inside the Ring, Washington Times

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce in recent weeks has outlined ominous parallels between the disastrous 1994 Agreed Framework on North Korea’s nuclear program and the deal struck with Iran that was announced Tuesday.

Mr. Royce will be a key player in the congressional debate over whether to approve the Iran agreement that critics say will limit Iran’s nuclear program for a decade or less while providing the Islamist regime in Tehran with access to more than $100 billion in frozen funds and a broad lifting of international sanctions.

“I heard the same argument: ‘Don’t worry. We will be able to tell, even if we can’t get access to the sites. We will know if North Korea is cheating on this agreement,’” Mr. Royce told CNN. “Let me explain that it turned out we weren’t able to properly monitor what they were doing in North Korea, and as a consequence North Korea ended up with the ability, three nuclear tests, the development of a number of nuclear bombs. This is not what we want Iran to have the capability to do and play hide-and-seek like North Korea did.”

Signed with great fanfare like the Iran deal, the 1994 Agreed Framework was supposed to have ended North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.

Pyongyang and Tehran both initially signed up to the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) as a condition for getting access to nuclear technology and infrastructure for ostensibly electrical power generation. Both governments insisted they did not want to develop weapons but only wanted to generate electrical power, a questionable assertion in Iran’s case because of its vast oil resources. Iran was found to be secretly enriching uranium in 2002 in violation of its NPT obligations, and Tehran has stonewalled international efforts regarding its nuclear arms ambitions since.

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