“The Familiar, Reflexive Anti-Agreement Posture”: GOP Oppossiton, Not Because Of Provisions, But Because it’s A Deal With Iran
As observers around the world digest the details of the preliminary nuclear agreement with Iran, one of the striking aspects of the reactions is how pleasantly surprised some proponents are. There’s a large contingent of experts saying this morning, “I was ready to live with an unsatisfying deal, but this is a bigger win for America than I could have imagined.
Fred Kaplan, for example, said the framework “turns out to be far more detailed, quantitative, and restrictive than anyone had expected.” Max Fisher called the blueprint “astonishingly good,” adding that it’s “almost astoundingly favorable to the United States” and “far better than expected.”
It’s against this background that congressional Republicans screamed bloody murder. “Neville Chamberlain got a better deal from Adolf Hitler,” Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) said in a statement.
Obviously, these are not the comments of someone who wants to be taken seriously by adults. Indeed, I can’t help but wonder how many GOP critics already had their furious press releases -pre-written, waiting for an agreement to be announced, so they could start whining before reading it.
But Jon Chait recently noticed the broader problem.
[T]he conservative case against the Iran deal is hard to take seriously because the right has made the same case against every major negotiation with an American adversary since World War II.
The right opposed every nonproliferation treaty with the Soviets. The right opposed Nixon going to China. The right condemned the SALT treaty and the START treaty.
As Peter Beinart explained a while back, Reagan and Clinton were both confronted with ugly Munich comparisons from far-right ideologues – many of whom are literally the same people furious with Obama for curtailing Iran’s nuclear ambitions now.
This is no small detail. In fact, it’s one of the more important aspects of the entire debate.
If some policymakers oppose literally any agreement, without regard for policy or principle, solely out of reflex, then their concerns must be dismissed out of hand. There’s ample room for a spirited debate on the merits, but for the discussion to have any integrity, it should be limited to those who take the disagreement itself seriously.
Their vitriol has no real meaning precisely because it’s unrelated to any evidence or facts.
The right opposes a deal with Iran, not because of the provisions included in the preliminary agreement, but because it’s a deal with Iran.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 3, 2015
“A Nuclear Deal With Iran Isn’t Just About Bombs”: An Opportunity For Iran To End Its Chapter In Extremism
To prove that Americans can be every bit as crazy as Iranians, I took my daughter along on my last trip to Iran, in 2012, for a road trip across the country.
Iranians were stunned to see a 14-year-old Yankee teeny-bopper in their midst. In Mashhad, a conservative Islamic city that might seem wary of Americans, three Iranian women in black chadors accosted my daughter — and then invited her to a cafe where they plied her with ice cream, marveling at her and kissing her on the cheek as she ate.
They weren’t political, but they yearned for Iran to be a normal country again.
As the Iranian nuclear talks creep on into double overtime, let’s remember that this isn’t just about centrifuges but also about creating some chance over time of realigning the Middle East and bringing Iran out of the cold. It’s a long shot, yes, but it’s one reason Saudi Arabia is alarmed, along with Iranian hard-liners themselves. Those hard-liners survive on a narrative of conflict with the West, and depriving them of that narrative undermines them.
It’s odd to be debating a deal that hasn’t been reached, but, frankly, critics are mostly right in their specific objections to a deal, and in their aspirations for it.
“A better deal would significantly roll back Iran’s nuclear infrastructure,” noted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. “A better deal would link the eventual lifting of the restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program to a change in Iran’s behavior.”
All true. Of course, a better deal would also involve gifts of delicious Persian baklava for every American. And a pony.
Netanyahu also suggests that a deal would give “Iran’s murderous regime a clear path to the bomb.” That’s a fallacy.
Iran is already on a path to nuclear capability. Netanyahu should know, because he’s been pointing that out for more than two decades. Beginning in 1992, he asserted that Iran was three to five years from a nuclear capability. Over time, that dropped to “a year or two,” and then to “months.”
But even if Netanyahu’s warnings have been alarmist, he has a point: Iran is getting closer. The problem is that fulminations don’t constitute a policy.
The West essentially has three options:
■ We can try to obtain a deal to block all avenues to a bomb, uranium, plutonium and purchase of a weapon. This would allow Iran to remain on the nuclear path but would essentially freeze its progress — if it doesn’t cheat. To prevent cheating, we need the toughest inspections regime in history.
■ We can continue the sanctions, cyberwarfare and sabotage to slow Iran’s progress. This has worked better than expected, but it’s not clear that we have a new Stuxnet worm to release. And, partly because of congressional meddling, international support for sanctions may unravel.
■ We can launch military strikes on Natanz, Isfahan, Arak, Fordow and, possibly, Tehran. This would be a major operation lasting weeks. Strikes would take place in the daytime to maximize the number of nuclear scientists killed. All this would probably delay a weapon by one to three years — but it could send oil prices soaring, lead to retaliatory strikes and provoke a nationalistic backlash in support of the government.
Imagine if we had launched a military strike against Chinese nuclear sites in the 1960s. In that case, Beijing might still be ruled by Maoists.
On balance, with either the military option or the sanctions option, Iran probably ends up with a nuclear capability within a decade. With a nuclear deal, it’s just possible that we could prevent that from happening. Perhaps no deal is achievable; the Iranian side has been recalcitrant lately. In that case, we continue with sanctions and hope that the economic pressure further delegitimizes the government and eventually forces Iran back to the table.
But, again, this isn’t just about uranium but also about undermining an odious regime and creating the conditions for Iran to become a normal country. I’ve rarely been to a more pro-American country, at the grass-roots, and there’s a pent-up anger at corruption and hypocrisy. That doesn’t mean that there’s going to be a revolution anytime soon. But it means that there’s a chance for movement after the death of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is 75 and underwent prostate surgery last year.
In the office of Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, whom Khamenei edged out to be supreme leader, I was once jokingly introduced as coming from the “Great Satan.” An aide, referring to Iran’s own regime, immediately quipped: “America is only Baby Satan. We have Big Satan right here at home.”
So, sure, a nuclear deal carries risks and will be ugly and imperfect, but, on balance, it probably reduces the risk that Iran gets the bomb in the next 10 years. It may also, after Ayatollah Khamenei is gone, create an opportunity for Iran to end its chapter in extremism, so that the country is defined less by rapacious ayatollahs and more by those doting matrons in Mashhad.
By: Nicholas Kristof, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, April 3, 2015
“An Opportunity Of Historic Significance”: Breakthrough: Iran’s Nuclear Concessions Vindicate Obama’s Diplomatic Strategy
As outlined by President Obama at a news conference this afternoon, the tentative nuclear agreement reached with Iran appears to include significant concessions that will achieve the most important metric demanded by the United States and its diplomatic partners — namely, to extend the “breakout” period required for Tehran to develop a single nuclear weapon. The full deal is complex and yet to be completed, but the highlights seem to answer the most pressing concerns about a sustainable and verifiable non-proliferation regime.
According to the president and negotiators in Lausanne, Switzerland, where the talks had continued into the early hours today, the government of Iran has agreed to cut its uranium-enriching centrifuges from 19,000 to 6,000, greatly reducing its capacity to rapidly produce weapons-grade material. For the next 10 years, only about 5,000 of those centrifuges will actually operate at all. The excess centrifuges and related machinery will be held in storage monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency, to be used only for replacement parts — and Iran will construct no new uranium-enrichment facilities for the duration of the agreement.
Taken together, these changes are expected to extend the “breakout” period from a few months to at least one year.
Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif also agreed that his country would not enrich uranium over 3.67 percent for the next 15 years and will slash its present inventory of more than 20 tons of low-enriched uranium to well under a ton for the same duration. Moreover, Zarif and his team conceded that Iran will ship all the spent fuel from its heavy-water reactor at Arak, which might have been reprocessed into bomb-ready plutonium, to other countries for reprocessing — a sticking point earlier in the talks. The Arak facility itself will undergo a reconstruction process — including the destruction of the reactor’s original core — that will make production of plutonium there impossible, and Iran will construct no further plants capable of producing plutonium for at least 15 years.
The deal provides for continuous IAEA monitoring of all Iranian nuclear reactors and programs — described by Obama as the most intensive ever undertaken — and for sanctions relief that will only begin when Iran has met all of its initial commitments to restructure and dismantle its weapons-related equipment and programs. It also includes restrictions on certain kinds of conventional weapons and technology.
As the president said with his usual lucidity, these negotiations — and their ultimate success — are an opportunity of historic significance to reduce the risks of war and proliferation.
But the Iran talks also represent a chance to promote peaceful change in that unfortunate country, whose people desperately hope that the Rouhani government can progress toward normal relationships with Western countries, especially the United States. The best guarantees of peace and security — for the world, the U.S., the Mideast region, and yes, Israel — will be realized by strengthening the forces in Tehran that seek to transcend Iran’s status as diplomatic and economic pariah.
Partisan efforts to scuttle the nascent bargain have long been underway, and will now intensify. The perpetrators are almost exclusively “experts” who were wrong about very similar issues concerning the supposed nuclear ambitions of Iraq — and led us into a pointless war that cost many thousands of lives and trillions of dollars. The American people support President Obama’s use of internationally backed sanctions to encourage a negotiated agreement rather than armed conflict — and his approach is proving more effective than the belligerent attitude promoted by his critics over the past decade. Let us hope that he and Secretary of State John Kerry, both of whom deserve enormous credit for their moral courage and pertinacity, will be able to bring forth a signed agreement by the next deadline in late June.
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, The National Memo, April2, 2015
“Bibi Makes Israel The Latest Culture War Pawn”: If He Can’t See The Consequences For His Country, He’s Just A Madman
So now Lindsey Graham has called Bibi Netanyahu to congratulate him on his great victory and to reassure him that Congress will be passing its gimlet eye closely over any deal the Obama administration strikes with Iran. This news comes hard on the heels of John Boehner’s announcement that he suddenly feels moved to go visit Israel.
I can’t begin to conceive what these people are thinking. What does Netanyahu think he’s accomplishing by making Israel a right-wing cause? Does he really think this is how he saves Israel? Does he forget that this is a country in which 70 or 80 percent of Jews vote Democratic? Did he not see the recent poll that had his approval rating among Democrats at 17 percent? I see here that last November in a J Street poll, his approval rating among U.S. Jews was 53 percent. I bet after this past month, they’re down in the low 40s or high 30s.
Netanyahu knows this country. He lived here—high school in Philadelphia, college in Boston, and a stint in New York (when he was Israel’s UN ambassador, during the Reagan years). He knows our political culture. He understands what a radical-right party the GOP is becoming, and thus he presumably understands that the vast majority of U.S. Jews are never going to be able to vote Republican, whatever the two parties’ Israel lines. He knows full well that the perfervid support for Israel in evangelical-right precincts has far less to do with love of Jews than with hatred of Arabs, or, for many, the belief that Armageddon in the Middle East means Jesus is coming.
He knows all this as well as most senators and congressmen. So why does he persist in making Israel a Republicans-first issue, and for that matter why do Republicans do it too?
Well, it’s not hard to figure why Republicans are doing it. It’s partly about Barack Obama, and the visceral loathing of him among their base; the Muslim Other-ing of Obama and all that. But they clearly must think this is going to get them more Jewish votes at the presidential level. They think back to Ronald Reagan’s time. In 1980, Reagan got 39 percent of the Jewish vote, against Jimmy Carter’s 45 percent (independent candidate John Anderson got the rest). That’s as close as a GOP presidential candidate has ever come to winning the Jewish vote since Israel became a state. (Amusing side note: In 1948, the year of Israel’s creation, the Republican candidate, Tom Dewey, did worse among Jews at 10 percent than left-wing third-party candidate Henry Wallace, who polled 15 percent; Harry Truman got 75 percent.)
But there’s no remotely Reaganesque figure on the horizon. And anyway, by 1984, things were back to normal—Walter Mondale, even as he was getting pasted by Reagan overall, won 67 percent of the Jewish vote. And more to the point, as I noted above, this Republican Party is not the Republican Party of Reagan’s time. That was a conservative party that still had a large number of old-line moderates, like senators Charles Percy and John Heinz. Today’s party is far more right wing than that one was. Very few Jews are going to vote for a party like that—especially against a Clinton, if Hillary is the Democratic nominee, but in fact against pretty much anyone.
So that’s what they’re thinking, farkakte as it is. But this doesn’t explain Netanyahu. He truly believes that a nuclear Iran is an existential threat, fine. But that doesn’t explain this behavior. If he truly believes that about Iran, then the logical, self-interested thing for him to do, especially knowing that most Jews are loyal Democrats, is to get as many Democrats in Congress as possible to choose his point of view over Obama’s. Given AIPAC’s muscle and the traditional pro-Israel posture of most Democrats in Congress over the years, that should not be a heavy lift.
But instead he does the opposite. Recall that about a month ago, he pointedly refused to meet with Senate Democrats. Dick Durbin and Dianne Feinstein, who invited him, were obviously tossing him a lifeline, saying to him: However bad your relationship with Obama, come square things with us, and we’ll still have your back. But no. He said he feared it would look partisan, you see, because his speech to Congress, well, that was bipartisan! Once you’ve entered the Hall of Mirrors, it can be hard to find your way out, I guess.
It’s one thing to alienate Obama (and Obama, to be fair, has done his part to sour the relationship as well). But it’s quite another to alienate rank-and-file American Jews, and still another to alienate Democrats in Congress. Not an easy trifecta to hit, but he is managing it.
If he can’t see the consequences for his country, he’s just a madman. Let’s just say hypothetically that the Obama administration follows through substantively on spokesman Josh Earnest’s astonishing comments last week about the potential policy implications of Netanyahu’s pre-election comportment. Let’s say, for example, that the United States decides to stop blocking a vote at the United Nations on recognition of a Palestinian state. Right now, about 135 nations recognize Palestine. Very few Western European countries are among that number. Many of them withhold their support simply or mainly for the sake of not crossing the United States.
Once we signal that we won’t block a vote, the map of nations that recognize Palestine will presumably expand across Europe rapidly. The British and French have worked on the proper resolution language. As it happens, the Arab League is meeting this weekend in Sharm-el-Shiekh, and you can be sure that its officials are alive to this reality. And so Netanyahu might lose Western Europe, and then he’ll come crying to Washington, and it might be too late.
Strange way to save a country.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, March 22, 2015
“Netanyahu, The Linchpin Of GOP Foreign Policy”: Hooray! Boehner Wins The Israeli Elections! Time For A Victory Tour!
It’s pretty ironic: just as Bibi Netanyahu seems ready to get over the recent unpleasantness with the Obama administration and get back to the status quo ante of unfriendly cooperation, the Speaker of the US House of Representatives is packing for a trip to Israel that is inevitably being called a “victory tour.” According to Josh Marshall, the trip is expected to last ten days. I’m not 100% sure John Boehner has spent ten straight days in Ohio in recent memory.
But since Boehner accommodated Bibi’s wish for a pre-election campaign rally on the floor of the House, the Israeli leader is hardly in a position to say no, though he may feel like a husband who’s tried to make his wife jealous by consorting with her deadliest enemy, only to discover the intended catspaw on his doorstep with a suitcase.
In any event, Boehner’s trip is a vivid reminder of something I’ve been saying off and on since 2012: the current Israeli government has become the linchpin of Republican foreign policy, as central to the GOP’s calculations on how it views the world as the USSR was (in a negative rather than positive sense, of course) before Gorbachev. So of course Bibi’s victory is Boehner’s victory, and he’d want to share in the celebration. He may claim he’s just another Catholic tourist going to the Holy Land for Holy Week. But I suspect it’s Netanyahu’s resurrection rather than Jesus Christ’s we’ll eventually hear him talking about.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, March 20, 2015
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