Lieutenant General Michael T. Flynn (pictured) heavily criticized the JCPOA, saying it reads like a high school paper and concedes too much to Iran. PHOTO: Wikipedia.

A former senior U.S. military official said the two-month-old Iran nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), reads like a high school paper, in an interview published Tuesday on blogging platform Medium. 

“People should read the deal; it’s only an hour and a half read. It’s poorly written and it’s striking how poorly constructed it is  —  it feels like a high school paper,” Lieutenant General Michael “Mike” Flynn, former Defense Intelligence Agency director, told his interviewer, Jason Criss Howk, a former colleague with whom he has worked in Kabul and Washington D.C.

“A large portion of it is the annex that releases pressure from a long list of state sponsors of terrorism, narcotics cartels, and illegal market owners,” Flynn said. “We are letting off some very ruthless people.”

Flynn prefaced his remarks by saying that the document indicates that the U.S. and the rest of the P5+1 powers who negotiated the agreement were “too anxious to get any deal.”

“We gave up all our leverage,” he said. “We got beat by a nation of expert negotiators who got everything they wanted and needed from the deal for only making promises of allowing future observations.”

He  also listed the top three possible negative consequences he foresees as a result of the deal. “Number one,” he said, is “the elimination of Israel.”

The second is a “large regional war,” involving Iran and Saudi Arabia fighting each other, “not the proxy wars in the smaller states” that have characterized the region to date.

The third is domestic reinforcement of the Iranian regime, which will likely be encouraged under the deal to strengthen its hard-line approach and silence all dissent and moves towards democracy. “There is no longer a penalty for their harsh behavior towards their citizens,” Flynn said.

“Bottom line,” he said, is that the deal “takes all restraints off of Iran to do as it pleases in the region and around the world.”