“Creators Of Iran Situation Should Stay Out Of It Now”: They Have No Compunction With Being Repeatedly Wrong
Last Wednesday, in a thoughtful and persuasive speech on the merits of the Iranian nuclear agreement, President Barack Obama chastised Dick Cheney and his ilk. He didn’t mention the former vice president by name, but few in the audience would have missed the reference.
Noting that many critics of the Iranian deal also supported the invasion of Iraq, President Obama said they “seem to have no compunction with being repeatedly wrong.” Tellingly, the former vice president, who still insists that deposing Saddam Hussein was a good idea, has been among the most vociferous critics of diplomacy with Iran. “(The agreement) will in fact, I think, put us closer to the actual use of nuclear weapons than we’ve been at any time since Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II,” Cheney recently told Fox News.
He’s not the only one. Those curiously unselfconscious denunciations of the Iranian agreement continued in last Thursday’s GOP presidential primary debates. Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee said the deal would make the world “an incredibly dangerous place.” (That was at least less hysterical than his assertion a few days earlier that Obama was “marching Israel to the door of the oven.”)
Wisconsin governor Scott Walker pledged to rip up the deal on “Day One” of his hoped-for administration. In the earlier debate for second-tier candidates, former business executive Carly Fiorina said she would telephone “my good friend, Bibi Netanyahu, to reassure him we will stand with the State of Israel.”
Given our history with Iran, it’s no surprise that this deal has attracted many skeptics — including some from the president’s own party. New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, prominent among Senate Democrats, has announced his opposition.
But it is the Republican Party that remains a refuge of historical revisionism, full of prominent politicians who refuse to admit that the Iraq war left the Middle East worse off. Indeed, the toppling of Saddam Hussein significantly bolstered Iran, giving it more power in the region.
After all, Saddam was an enemy of Iran’s ayatollahs, a counterweight that kept them in check. That’s why the United States was a tacit ally of his for many years, supporting Baghdad in its eight-year war against Tehran. (Remember that 1983 photo of Donald Rumsfeld, then President Reagan’s special envoy to the Middle East, shaking Saddam’s hand?)
Even if the GOP wants to pretend that its military adventurism hasn’t had a downside, many voters remember anyway. A college student had the gumption to confront Jeb Bush at a campaign stop last May as he blamed President Obama for the rise of the self-proclaimed Islamic State. “Your brother created ISIS” when he disbanded the Iraqi Army, said 19-year-old Ivy Ziedrich.
So it is simply mindboggling to watch the politicians who’ve done the most to empower Iran denounce Obama’s diplomatic efforts to limit its nuclear power. They were wrong when they rattled their sabers to gin up public support for the invasion of Iraq, a strategic misfire with consequences that will ripple for decades. And they’re just as wrong now. Why would anyone listen to them?
Prominent Republicans are quite aware that the American public is weary of war, wary of any armchair hawks who would insist that U.S. military strength would carry the day in any conflict. Even core Republican voters are reluctant to use force; only 21 percent of GOP voters — and 14 percent of voters across the board — support military action against Iran rather than a diplomatic solution, according to an April Washington Post poll. So Republican leaders insist that they’re not pushing for military strikes against Iran.
“That’s never been the alternative,” Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told the Post. “It’s either this deal or a better deal, or more sanctions.”
But that’s a far more naive proposition than depending on the inspections regime to limit Iran’s nuclear program. President Obama persuaded China and Russia to join sanctions against Iran, but they’re ready to ink this deal. They won’t be pressed into tightening the financial noose around Tehran. And without their cooperation, sanctions won’t work.
Because America’s military might has limits, diplomacy ought to always be the first and second options. History makes that clear; the war in Iraq was merely a reminder.
By: Cynthia Tucker Haynes, Pulitzer Prize Winner for Commentary, 2007; The National Memo, August 8, 2015
“Back To The Fuhrer”: Why Republicans Are Obsessed With Comparing Obama To Hitler
Say what you will about Mike Huckabee, the guy has a way with a quip. And when he responded to the Iran nuclear deal by claiming that Barack Obama “will take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven,” the only really surprising thing was that it took this long for Obama to go from being Neville Chamberlain on the subject of Iran to Adolf Hitler.
Because this wouldn’t be the first time — or the 10th, or the 100th — that a prominent conservative has compared Obama to Hitler. Given ample opportunity to admit that maybe he went too far in his remarks, Huckabee has been unrepentant. “The response from Jewish people has been overwhelmingly positive,” he said, making one wonder which Jews he’s talking to, since as a people we tend to be a little put off by glib Nazi analogies, particularly ones that are so vivid. But Huckabee has gotten plenty of support from fellow conservatives, who are practically lining up to say that, yes, Obama really is bringing about another Holocaust.
I’m not going to bother to argue with the absurd assertion that: 1) drastically curtailing and inspecting Iran’s nuclear program will actually do more to give Iran a nuclear weapon than just leaving the regime alone to do as it likes; and 2) the moment Iran has a weapon it will launch it at Israel in an act of national suicide. (Don’t forget that Israel has something like 100 nukes, and so could vaporize every square inch of Iran without much trouble.) But I do want to comment on the propensity of conservatives to go back to the Fuhrer time and again.
Let’s step back to Chamberlain for a moment before we move on to Hitler. Conservatives were calling the Iran deal the second coming of Munich even before any of its terms had been worked out. Which highlights something important about their beliefs on this topic: For all their talk of a fantasy deal in which Iran gives us everything we could possibly want and demands nothing in return, the whole point of the Munich analogy is that negotiation is useless by definition.
When conservatives said that Obama was like Chamberlain, they weren’t saying Obama is a bad negotiator and could have gotten a better deal. It isn’t the Red Sox selling Babe Ruth to the Yankees for $100,000. The clear implication of the Munich analogy is that there shouldn’t have been any negotiations at all, and that war is inevitable so we might as well just get on with it. If your adversary is Hitler — and as far as many on the right or concerned, every potential adversary is Hitler — then war to save the world is the only option, and anyone who seeks a diplomatic solution to a dispute is a sucker.
But that was when they were being kind. Calling Obama Chamberlain suggests that his problem is naïvete, not malice. It accepts that he doesn’t actually wish for the extermination of the Jews, even if that is the inevitable result of his foolishness. But of course, conservatives have thought for a long time that Obama is absolutely brimming with malice — toward America, toward Christians, toward Jews, toward white people, toward just about anyone they like.
Which is why we’ve hardly gone a month throughout this presidency without someone comparing Obama to Hitler, on matters both weighty and mundane. He had only been in office a few weeks when Glenn Beck started comparing his program to that of the Nazi party. “Adolf Hitler, like Barack Obama, also ruled by dictate,” said Rush Limbaugh in the summer of 2009, just a few months later. Conservative commentators saw swastikas in Obama’s push to register new voters in 2008, and even in his campaign slogans. Conservative favorite Ben Carson says the government under Obama is “very much like Nazi Germany,” because “[y]ou had the government using its tools to intimidate the population. We now live in a society where people are afraid to say what they actually believe.” And that’s not to mention all the times some billionaire has compared Obama to Hitler for such appalling things as proposing to close the carried-interest loophole.
Plenty of former presidents were compared to Hitler by their opponents from time to time, but I think it’s safe to say that none has been the target of so many Nazi comparisons, coming so often and from so many prominent people, whether they be politicians or media figures.
It’s more evidence that the opposition to Obama is qualitatively different than what came before it. Never in our recent history has either party been as adamantly opposed to any political compromise as today’s GOP is. Republicans hated Bill Clinton, like Democrats hated George W. Bush, but they were willing to work together fairly regularly — no more. No president has had his legitimate occupation of the Oval Office questioned as often as Obama has; the man even had to show his birth certificate before they’d believe he’s actually an American (and many still don’t).
From the beginning, the conservative argument against Obama from so many quarters has been that he’s not just wrong or misguided, but is actually trying to destroy America and turn it into something twisted and ugly. If you think I’m exaggerating, then you haven’t been listening to their radio shows, watching their TV network, or reading their books, because that’s what they’ve been saying since before he got elected.
And if you believe that, then of course Obama isn’t Chamberlain, because Chamberlain is just a fool. Obama is the really sinister one, the one who wants to snuff out liberty and crush those who love it under his boot. He’s Hitler.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Week, July 29, 2015
“This Whole Debate Is A Charade”: Let’s Stop Pretending Republicans Have A Serious Critique Of The Iran Deal
Secretary of State John Kerry went to Capitol Hill today to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee about the deal to restrain Iran’s nuclear program. As expected he absorbed a lot of insults and invective from Republicans who are critical of the deal. Along with Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz and Secretary of the Treasury Jack Lew, Kerry tried to rebut the criticisms as best he could.
But you could see in Kerry’s occasionally exasperated expression something that we all ought to be willing to acknowledge: This whole debate is a charade.
There’s a reason no Republican has managed to answer President Obama’s challenge to articulate an alternative that would be preferable to what the six-party negotiations produced, and it isn’t because this deal is perfect or couldn’t have been better. It’s that from where Republicans sit, any deal negotiated with Iran is a bad one by definition.
That’s partly because it was negotiated by the Obama administration, of course, and the GOP has gotten itself to a position where opposition to pretty much anything Barack Obama does is not just reflexive but mandatory for any elected Republican who wants to keep his job. It’s also because the sustained critique of Obama’s foreign policy that Republicans have pushed for the last six and a half years is that everything Obama does is “weak.” The word comes up again and again in Republican statements about foreign policy; ask them what they’d do differently, and in every situation their answer always revolves around being stronger. The content of this strength is rarely detailed, but when it is it usually involves more aggressive use of the military.
And it assumes that when dealing with adversaries like Iran, negotiation is weak, again by definition. Negotiation means talking to those we hate, and even offering them concessions. Successful negotiation ends with an outcome that our adversaries actually praise, when what we really want is for them to fall to their knees and surrender to our might. This is what elected Republicans believe, and more importantly, it’s what they’ve been telling their constituents for years, so it’s what those constituents demand.
So there was literally no deal this administration could have negotiated with Iran that Republicans would have agreed to. None. From their perspective, the substance of the deal never mattered. No one who has been remotely attentive to our politics in recent years could honestly deny that.
And there’s something important to understand about whether Republicans have an alternative. Yes, it’s a reasonable rhetorical point to demand that they explain what other kind of deal they’d support. But right now, they are actually proposing an alternative: that the U.S. pull out of this deal. And we need to explore what that means.
You can argue that this deal should have been different, but when it comes time to vote on whether it should go forward, members of Congress will be choosing between two options, neither of them hypothetical. A yes vote means all the parties — not only Iran and the United States, but also the United Nations, China, Russia, and the European Union — implement this deal. A no vote, in contrast, doesn’t mean that some fantasy deal will fall from the sky. It means that the U.S. walks away from this deal, and it collapses.
That also could mean that the existing sanctions regime collapses. We can keep our sanctions on Iran, but the reason sanctions have been so devastating to the country’s economy is that they haven’t just come from the U.S., but also from the United Nations, the European Union, and elsewhere. If those other sanctions were to disappear, Iran would get most of what it wanted without having to fulfill any obligations at all. And if they want to pursue a nuclear weapon, they could then go right ahead.
So now that the deal is on the table and congressional votes are on their way, what Republicans really need to explain is not what sort of deal they might have preferred. We know their answer to that question — they’ll say they would have rather had a deal where Iran gives us everything we want, and we give up nothing. But that’s irrelevant at this point. What they need to explain now is why the U.S. pulling out of this deal — and what happens afterward — will be preferable to implementing it, imperfections and all. Do they think the Iranians will come crawling back and make further concessions? Do they think the rest of the world’s powers, which support the deal they helped negotiate, will just follow us and impose new sanctions in the hope that eventually that might lead to more negotiations (which, like these, would take years) and ultimately the fantasy deal where Iran capitulates? What precisely is the chain of events Republicans think will occur if we pull out?
If they’ve given that question even a moment’s consideration, you wouldn’t know it to listen to them. But it’s what they ought to be asked now.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, July 23, 2014
“The United States Is Not Omnipotent”: Republicans Need To Stop Childishly Pretending That American Power Is Limitless
When President Obama almost taunted critics of the Iranian nuclear deal by challenging them to describe their alternative, it was hardly a surprise that no detailed plans were forthcoming. Even the most hawkish Republican knows it would be politically disastrous to say that what we need is to launch another war in the Middle East. But there isn’t another readily available course for handling this situation if you reject what the administration negotiated.
Indeed, what infuriates Republicans as much as anything is that Obama took the country down diplomacy’s path — a path that accepts from the outset that compromise is inevitable.
More than ever, compromise seems outside the worldview of the GOP. You can see it in Congress, where the party’s base has elected more and more representatives who would rather have a noble, even disastrous failure than a partial success — if success means coming to an agreement with a president they despise. No matter how many times conservatives attempt to shut down the government and wind up with an ignominious defeat, they continue to believe that next time will be different — that Obama will surrender, and all their goals will be achieved.
You can see it in how hawkish Republicans have thought about Iran for years. Republicans were smitten by Benjamin Netanyahu’s fantasy vision of a “better deal” with Iran, which involved Iran ending its nuclear program, giving up support for Hezbollah and every other terrorist organization, becoming a force for peace in the region, and maybe also baking Netanyahu a delicious pie, all while asking for nothing in return. If you actually thought that was possible, then of course the deal that was negotiated looks like a capitulation. As Peter Beinart recently wrote, “When critics focus incessantly on the gap between the present deal and a perfect one, what they’re really doing is blaming Obama for the fact that the United States is not omnipotent.”
That fact is the assumption underlying diplomatic negotiation: If we were omnipotent, then we wouldn’t have to negotiate. We could just impose our will. Republicans find President Obama’s willingness to acknowledge that America is not omnipotent to be utterly maddening.
When you listen to them talk about foreign affairs, what comes through clearly is that they believe that if America is not omnipotent, this is merely a temporary situation that can be remedied with more military spending, a stiffening of the spine, and a Republican in the White House. There is no situation that cannot be resolved with precisely the outcome we want, if only we are sufficiently strong and tough. For instance, here’s how Mike Huckabee describes the world he would create if he were to become president:
“And here is what we have to do: America has to have the most formidable, fierce military in the history of mankind,” stated Huckabee.
“So when we have a threat, whether it is ISIS, Boko Haram, al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Iranians, whatever it is, we make it very clear that we plan to push back and destroy that threat to us. And we won’t take 10 years doing it, we hopefully won’t even take 10 months, it will be like a 10-day exercise, because the fierceness of our forces would mean that we can absolutely guarantee the outcome of this film. That’s how America needs to operate in the world of foreign affairs, and foreign policy.” [Huckabee, via BuzzFeed]
Since one of my rules for campaign coverage is to assume unless you have countervailing evidence that politicians are sincere in what they say, I’ll assume that Huckabee genuinely believes that a complex problem like ISIS could be solved in 10 days, if only we were fierce enough. While his opponents might not go quite that far, with the exception of Rand Paul they all believe that the reason there are unsolved problems in the world is that we haven’t been strong enough. They quote action movie lines and say that increasing the size of the military will give us the strength we need to bend every country and non-state actor to our will.
Huckabee may not realize this, but we already have the strongest military in the history of mankind. Could it be even stronger? Sure. We could shut down Social Security and use the money to double the size of the military (a plan I think more than a few Republicans would embrace). But even that military would confront some problems it couldn’t solve, because that’s just how the world is.
What may be most remarkable is that it was George W. Bush — who, you may remember, was not given to nuanced thinking, worrying about unintended consequences, or talk of compromise with “evildoers” — who brought us the quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan. Today, Republicans say (though obviously not in so many words) that if only we could be more like Bush, our foreign policy would be an unending string of unequivocal triumphs, as every danger to ourselves or our friends evaporated before our terrifying might.
It’s an inspiring vision, one in which perfect outcomes are not only possible but relatively easy to obtain. It’s also an outlook more appropriate for children who have no experience to learn from, than for a party asking to be given control of the world’s last superpower.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Week, July 20, 2015
“The Iran Deal isn’t Perfect – But What Deal Is?”: Critics In Congress Should Have To Explain Why They Believe War Is A Better Idea
To understand why the Iran nuclear deal is such a triumph, consider the most likely alternative: war.
Imagine a U.S.-led military strike — not a pinprick but an extended bombing campaign robust enough to eliminate 98 percent of Iran’s enriched uranium, put two-thirds of the Islamic republic’s centrifuges out of action and erase any capability of producing plutonium. Imagine that the attack did so much damage that for the next 10 or 15 years it would be utterly impossible for Iran to build a nuclear bomb. Such an outcome would be hailed as a great success — achieved, however, at a terrible cost.
But I’m convinced such action would make Iran irrevocably determined to build a bomb — and that eventually the Iranians would achieve their goal. I’m also convinced that Iran would strike out at the West asymmetrically, through proxy groups and terrorism. And given the upheavals in the Middle East, any “limited” war has the potential to spread across borders.
The historic agreement announced Tuesday in Vienna accomplishes what an attack might, but without the toll in blood and treasure that war inevitably exacts. After the agreement expires, critics note, Iran could decide to race for a bomb. But the military option would still be available — and, after years of intrusive inspections, allied war planners would have a much better idea of where the nuclear facilities are and how best to destroy them.
Military action is not the only alternative to the deal that President Obama vigorously defended at his news conference Wednesday. But the other possibilities are absurdly remote.
One is simply to acquiesce and invite Iran to become a nuclear power. Obama has ruled this out, as did his predecessors and as will his successors. It should be noted that Iran’s leaders have always denied seeking to make a bomb, though they have never explained why an oil-rich nation would need tens of thousands of enrichment centrifuges and a ballistic missile program to generate nuclear power.
None of the United States’ partners at the negotiating table — the European powers, China, Russia — is prepared to accept a nuclear-armed Iran. The government in Tehran, which is fanatical but not suicidal, probably would be satisfied to reach threshold status. Arguably this is already the case, given that Iran’s scientists have mastered the nuclear fuel cycle.
The other option — the one favored by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and most other critics of the agreement — is to negotiate “a better deal” that deprives Iran of even more nuclear capability. The problem is that negotiators could not make tougher demands on Iran than the Chinese, Russians and Europeans were prepared to support.
If Congress overrides Obama and squelches the deal, the sanctions regime that brought Iran to the table will quickly crumble. Economic pressure from the United States alone, it seems obvious, is not enough to compel Iran to give up more than it surrendered in Vienna. On the contrary: Hard-liners in Tehran, who argued all along against negotiating with the United States, would have their hand greatly strengthened.
Iran’s reaction to a defeat of the agreement in Congress might be to crank up the centrifuges in defiance. Perhaps the government would honor some elements of the deal in order to obtain sanctions relief from China, Russia and Europe. Either way, the United States would have lost leverage and Iran’s nuclear program would be less constrained.
Obviously, the United States didn’t get everything it wanted in Vienna. That’s the nature of any negotiation. The relevant question is whether the United States and its allies, including Israel, got what they needed.
“With this deal, we cut off every single one of Iran’s pathways to a nuclear program, a nuclear weapons program,” Obama said Wednesday. “Without a deal, those pathways remain open.”
The president added that “the alternative, no limits on Iran’s nuclear program, no inspections, an Iran that’s closer to a nuclear weapon, the risk of a regional nuclear arms race, and the greater risk of war — all that would endanger our security. That’s the choice that we face.”
The agreement with Iran is a landmark achievement. It’s not perfect — no deal is — but it makes the world a much safer place. Critics in Congress should have to explain to the American people why they believe war is a better idea.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 16, 2015
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