“Is The Iran Deal ‘Liberal’?”: Shifting The Reigning Washington Foreign-Policy Paradigm From War-Making To Deal-Making
So, Senator Chris Coons, what do you think of the Iran deal?
There’s a pause. I have spoken a few times in recent weeks to the Delaware Democratic Senator, because a) he is deeply immersed in the details of this negotiation and b) he’s coming from what seems to me roughly the right place here: He wants to support his president and he wants to see diplomacy succeed, but he doesn’t trust Iran and he wants a deal that has a chance of actually working. He’s thoughtful and smart and not a demagogue, and his ultimate support (or not) of the thing really will hang on the details and what he concludes about them.
So he opens by telling me that he first wants to give credit to President Obama and John Kerry for getting this done, because any negotiation is hard, this one almost incomprehensibly so. Then he gives an answer: “It seems on the face of it from press accounts to meet most of the goals that were set.” He hadn’t read it yet, but he’d read enough about it to draw a few conclusions.
Still, Coons says he hasn’t made up his mind yet how he’ll vote. “I’m aware that it’s easier to be critical than supportive because this deal is so complex and the stakes are so high,” he told me. “I do think the diplomacy was worth exploring.” He wouldn’t say this of course, but it seems to me unlikely that Congress can kill the deal; Obama needs the backing of only 34 senators, which would result in a failure to override his certain veto of a “no” vote. It’s hard to imagine he can’t get that.
We’ll circle back to Coons, but first let’s acknowledge a point that liberal Obama-backers everywhere ought to acknowledge in this case: The deal is a big gamble. Nobody can know today that it will work in the main goal of keeping the Islamic Republic from getting a nuclear weapon. Of course, nobody knows for certain that it will fail either, and Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton and John Boehner’s instant and predictable Munich-ification of a deal they obviously hadn’t even read was revolting.
But the way to counter their false, know-nothing certitude is not with more false, know-nothing certitude. From a liberal internationalist point of view, it’s clearly a good thing that Obama is trying to shift the reigning Washington foreign-policy paradigm from war-making to deal-making. The war-makers have been wrong about everything for the last 15 years, have told us endless lies, have harmed American credibility, have sown destruction and death—and, by the way, have done a hell of a lot more to strengthen Iran than we doves have. So deal-making is a fine principle for which to strive. But that doesn’t mean the deal is without risks and downsides, and liberals do themselves and the world no favors by not acknowledging them just because Tom Cotton is such a dreary soapbox haranguer.
Here were Coons’s four concerns in the order he listed them to me. First, the inspections regime; second, the timing of the sanctions relief; third, the degree to which the International Atomic Energy Agency will be able to keep track of the possible military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear activities; and fourth, restrictions on centrifuge development after about year 10. “I need to have a much better sense of the breakout time after 10 years,” Coons said, noting concerns that limits on centrifuge development might ease after the tenth year.
For my money, Coons’s second concern is the biggest potential problem here. Iran will get a $150 billion windfall starting in December, and while the regime will presumably spend some of that money at home, it’s a certainty that the Syrian regime and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Houthis in Yemen are all going to get their share.
Combine this money with the deal’s lifting of the conventional arms embargo, which hasn’t gotten much attention yet but you can be sure will get more, especially once Congress starts holding hearings on this, and you have a recipe for Iran to make far more trouble in the region than it has been in recent years. It should not comfort Americans, and American liberals in particular, that the likes of Bashar al-Assad and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, both busy murdering Syrian children and suppressing any chance of real democracy being able to grow in Syria and Lebanon, praised the deal to the heavens.
Coons told me he had a lengthy phone call with Joe Biden Tuesday, and “that’s precisely what I was discussing with the vice president.” He said he’d let Biden speak for himself, but he did tell me that he pressed Biden on questions like what we’d be doing to beef up our commitments to our allies and to check Iranian influence. He says Biden assured him that stern measures were in the works. We’ll see about that. This, too, will be much discussed in the upcoming hearings, and it’s not only Republicans who have these concerns.
Obama says people should judge the deal only on whether it prevents Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, that it isn’t designed to change the nature of the regime or address regional terrorism. What this means is the administration made the decision that keeping a nuke out of Iran’s hands was the job that took precedence over all other tasks. All in all that’s probably the right call. Lindsey Graham said Tuesday that this deal would start an arms race. Not if it holds. If anything, it’s the opposite that’s true: Without a deal, Iran would surely develop a bomb more quickly, leading Saudi Arabia and perhaps others to do the same.
But surely Obama doesn’t mean to suggest that we shouldn’t discuss the other possible consequences of the deal. American liberals in particular should discuss these things. Nuclear non-proliferation is an old-school liberal value, but so is seeing our country take stands against the fundamentalist extremism that Iran exports and the kind of slaughter of civilians we see in Syria.
I was pleased to see that Hillary Clinton’s statement on the deal took both of these concerns seriously. Oddly, it’s not on her website. I got it via email, and the part that impressed me says this: “Going forward, we have to be clear-eyed when it comes to the broader threat Iran represents. Even with a nuclear agreement, Iran poses a real challenge to the United States and our partners and a grave threat to our ally Israel. It continues to destabilize countries from Yemen to Lebanon, while exacerbating the conflict in Syria. It is developing missiles that can strike every country in the Middle East. And it fuels terrorism throughout the region and beyond, including through direct support to Hamas and Hizballah. We have to broadly confront and raise the costs for Iran’s destabilizing activities…”
That’s real liberal internationalism, and I hope she spells out in the coming weeks what “broadly confront” means. I’d rather have her doing it than Jeb Bush or Scott Walker.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, July 16, 2015
“What I Learned From Beau Biden”: Our Politics Of Recrimination Does A Profound Disservice To How Much All Of Us Care About Family
Between now and the 2016 election, we need to have a searching national debate over family values.
It will not be about whether we as a country are for them. We are. What’s required is a grounded and candid discussion about what those words actually mean.
Note that I did not follow the convention of putting quotation marks around family values. That punctuation is appropriate only when the phrase is defined in a narrow, partisan way, aimed at claiming that some large number of Americans don’t believe in family responsibility or love.
I will be haunted for a long time by last Saturday’s funeral for Beau Biden, the vice president’s son, who died of cancer at the age of 46. I suspect anyone who watched or listened to the eulogies feels this way, and I hope especially that staunch social conservatives give some of their attention to hearing the tributes. Beau Biden’s sister, Ashley, and his brother, Hunter, spoke with a power and an authenticity about love, devotion, and connection that said more about how irreplaceable family solidarity is than a thousand speeches or sermons.
And President Obama captured rather precisely what family is about when he described what he called “the Biden family rule.” Its components: “If you have to ask for help, it’s too late. It meant you were never alone; you don’t even have to ask, because someone is always there for you when you need them.”
I certainly don’t pretend that social conservatives who experience these eulogies will suddenly convert to liberalism or be transformed into supporters of Obama or Joe Biden. What the Biden funeral brought home is that the feelings and convictions that very nearly all of us — left, right, center, and apolitical — have about the bonds between parents and children, brothers and sisters, truly transcend our day-to-day arguments. We so often wage political war around the family that we forget how broadly shared our reverence for it is.
This helps explain the paradox of the gay marriage issue: Our opinions on it have changed in large part because of ties of family and friendship. A Pew survey released this week found that now 57 percent of Americans favor allowing same-sex marriage, while 39 percent oppose it. Just five years ago, only 42 percent of Americans supported same-sex marriage, while 48 percent opposed it.
The key to this long-term shift is deeply personal. The number of Americans who know that someone they care about is gay or lesbian has skyrocketed over the decades, and risen a lot even in recent years. Pew found that the proportion of Americans who know someone who is homosexual has gone to 88 percent, from 61 percent in 1993. Among those who know many people who are gay or lesbian, 73 percent support same-sex marriage. Among those who know no gays or lesbians, 59 percent are opposed.
These numbers underscore again that so many of the issues related to family are more complicated (and less about ideology) than the angry, direct-mail style of discourse we are accustomed to on these matters would suggest.
Yet you don’t have to be right wing to worry that the family in the United States faces severe stresses and challenges. It would be genuinely useful if the 2016 campaign focused on practical measures that would help parents do their jobs.
Discussions of how policies on taxes, child care, family leave, wages, and criminal justice affect the family’s well-being (and specific proposals in each area) would be so much more constructive than polemics that cast one part of our population as immoral enemies of family life and the other as narrow-minded bigots. A politics of recrimination does a profound disservice to how much all of us care about family.
In 2007, after a Democratic presidential debate, I was approached in the spin room by Beau Biden, then Delaware’s attorney general. He wanted to talk about how well his dad performed, and his father had, indeed, done very well that night on the stage. But Beau Biden was most animated (and spoke at much greater length) when he turned to describing what an extraordinary father Joe Biden had been.
This fact about a politician certainly didn’t require anyone to vote for him. But it always helped explain to me why I feel as I do about Joe Biden and also why our discussions of family life need to recognize that love and commitment go way beyond politics. Family is too precious to let it divide us.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, June 10, 2015
“No More Immunity From Punishment”: At Last, Violence Against Women Act Lets Tribes Prosecute Non-Native Domestic Abusers
Two years after Congress reauthorized the Violence Against Women Act, Native American tribes can finally take advantage of one of the law’s most significant updates: a provision that allows tribal courts to investigate and prosecute non-Native men who abuse Native women on reservations.
Starting Saturday, tribes can claim jurisdiction over non-Native men who commit crimes of domestic violence, dating violence or who violate a protection order against a victim who lives on tribal land. Until now, that jurisdiction has fallen to federal or state law enforcement, who are often hours away from reservations and lack the resources to respond. The result has effectively allowed non-Native abusers immunity from punishment.
For the first time, tribal law enforcement will now have the ability to intervene.
“I want to encourage all tribal governments to get this law on their books,” said Juana Majel of the National Congress of American Indians. “On most reservations, there are a handful of bad actors who have figured out how to slip between jurisdictional boundaries. They need to get the message. If they continue to assault our women, we will prosecute and put them in jail.”
There are epidemic levels of domestic violence on tribal lands. Three out of five Native women have been assaulted in their lifetimes, and 34 percent will be raped, according to the National Congress of American Indians. Getting to the heart of the VAWA provision, 59 percent of assaults against Native women take place at or near a private residence, and, as of 2010, 59 percent of Native women were married to non-Native men.
On some reservations, Native women are murdered at a rate more than 10 times the national average.
House Republicans nearly torpedoed the entire VAWA bill in 2013 because they opposed the new protections for Native victims of abuse. Vice President Joe Biden, an original Senate sponsor of the 1994 law, stepped in and negotiated directly with then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.). Congress ultimately reauthorized VAWA, but with Democrats providing the bulk of votes for it.
Three tribes have already been granted the new jurisdiction as part of a 2014 pilot project authorized by VAWA. Those tribes — the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, the Pascua Yaqui Tribe, and the Tulalip Tribes — had to submit applications laying out their proposed codes and procedures, and were approved by the U.S. attorney general. To date, they have charged a total of 26 offenders.
As of Saturday, tribal courts may take advantage of the new authority with only the approval of their tribal council. The courts must provide people with the same rights guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution.
“This is a major step forward to protect the safety of Native people, and we thank all members of Congress for passing the Violence Against Women Act of 2013 and recognizing tribal authority,” said Brian Cladoosby, president of the National Congress of American Indians.
In related news, Acting Associate Attorney General Stuart Delery on Friday gave the green light to two tribes to move forward immediately with the new jurisdiction. The Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, and the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate of the Lake Traverse Reservation, are both large tribes in rural areas with larger populations, which means they can be a model for other large rural tribes interested in rolling out the new authority.
By: Jennifer Bendery, The Blog, The Huffington Post, March 6, 2015
“In Boehner We Trusted”: Netanyahu Throws Boehner Under The Bus; Biden To Skip Speech
There’s been scuttlebutt all week about congressional Democrats skipping Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s upcoming speech as a way to send a message about the party’s disappointment. The way in which Netanyahu and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) went behind President Obama’s back, and partnered to undermine U.S. foreign policy, does not sit well with many Dems, and even an informal boycott of his congressional address would be a big deal.
Those Democrats inclined to skip the Prime Minister’s remarks will apparently have some cover.
Vice President Joe Biden is expected not to attend a March 3 speech at the Capitol by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu because he will be traveling abroad, Biden’s office confirmed to NBC News Friday.
It is not clear yet where Biden will be traveling at the time of Netanyahu’s speech, which has become controversial both because of its proximity to the Israeli elections and because it was planned by Republicans without prior consultation with the White House.
The second part is of particular interest. As the AP’s report notes, the Vice President’s office didn’t point to a specific commitment abroad on March 3, only that Biden is “expected to be traveling.” The office didn’t say where or why.
It’s hardly unreasonable to wonder if this is the diplomatic equivalent of, “I’m washing my hair – somewhere.”
Just as striking, meanwhile, is the degree to which Netanyahu’s administration appears to be throwing the Republican leadership under the bus.
A senior Israeli official suggested on Friday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been misled into thinking an invitation to address the U.S. Congress on Iran next month was fully supported by the Democrats. […]
“It appears that the speaker of Congress made a move, in which we trusted, but which it ultimately became clear was a one sided move and not a move by both sides,” Deputy Israeli Foreign Minister Tzachi Hanegbi told 102 FM Tel Aviv Radio on Friday.
Or to put it another way, “We totally trusted Boehner to do this the right way; he didn’t; so blame him for this fiasco.”
We talked the other day about this increasingly messy problem, and the growing debate as to who screwed up more; Boehner or Netanyahu. These latest comments from a senior Israeli official suggest the Prime Minister is eager to tilt the scales in the GOP leader’s direction.
That said, in the same interview Deputy Israeli Foreign Minister Tzachi Hanegbi suggested Netanyahu’s speech will go forward as planned. The question now is how many Democrats intend to show up.
I’ve generally been skeptical about whether a large-scale boycott would come together – a few House Dems have announced their intention to stay away, though it’s a pretty small group – but the news about Vice President Biden may very well change the entire dynamic for Democrats.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 8, 2015
“A Big Flipping Deal”: Conservatives Need To Acknowledge That They’ve Lost This Battle
President Barack Obama should have skipped his Obamacare victory lap and instead let Vice President Joe Biden talk about the Affordable Care Act officially surpassing 7.1 million enrollees because achieving that milestone is – to paraphrase the colorful expression for which the vice president is well remembered – a big flipping deal.
Let’s be clear on what it’s not: It’s not a definitive number in the sense that there are many questions left to be answered which will help clarify its meaning. As a House GOP leadership aide noted to reporters after White House Press Secretary Jay Carney announced that the 7.1 million figure had indeed been surpassed, we still need to know how many of the enrollees were previously uninsured, how many have paid their premiums, how many are getting subsidies and what the age breakdown is of the enrollees.
Some of these questions are not as mysterious as many conservative critics seem to believe: The Los Angeles Times’ Noam N. Levey reported Monday, for example, that roughly one-third of the initial six million enrollees were previously uninsured and that all told 9.5 million people who hadn’t had insurance have gotten it through Obamacare; 80 percent of enrollees having paid seems to be a consensus conservative estimate; and young people reportedly made up around 27 percent of those signing on through the Obamacare exchanges, though that number may well have been higher in the final surge and was reportedly higher among those signing up in the harder-to-track private market.
And in any case, this is only the first Obamacare enrollment window; nearly twice as many people are expected to enroll in 2015 as did this year, and many more the following year. And let’s keep the full scope of the Affordable Care Act in mind as well: Obamacare numbers guru Charles Gaba estimates that altogether somewhere between 14.6 and 22.1 million people have gotten coverage under the law.
So in short, the 7 million news is not a be-all, end-all vindication of the Affordable Care Act. It is, as Bloomberg’s Megan McArdle writes, “the end of the beginning” for the law (h/t BBC’s Anthony Zurcher).
But keeping all that in mind, we also need to acknowledge another thing that it’s not: It’s not the beginning of the end.
Commentary in recent weeks and months looking toward yesterday’s deadline contemplated almost solely the scope of the next presumed Obamacare failure – whether the law would fall short of the reduced-expectations 6 million enrollee figure, let alone the original 7 million benchmark. The fact that in the end the exchanges blew by the lower figure and even exceeded the positive one, even after the bungled initial rollout of the website and more glitches on the final day of the enrollment period, is a testament to not only the fact that the law has some life in it but also the mobilization skills the administration was able to marshal in the closing weeks. (It was, if anything, reminiscent of the 2012 presidential ground game; hey now that the enrollment deadline has passed, do you think the people who masterminded getting millions of people to sign up might be available to help Democrats mobilize their notoriously somnambulant off-year voters? Just wondering.)
Republicans and conservatives, of course, are insisting that there’s nothing to see here except for fraud or failure. But the former just recalls their 2012 “unskewed” infatuation while the latter, as Steve Benen points, has them taking on an increasingly Baghad Bob-style mien. They can insist that the story of Obamacare is one of unremitting, uninterrupted failure, but who are you going to believe – Republicans or your own eyes?
Those on the right who keep trying to poke holes in the law by raising questions need to answer one they’d like to ignore: What happened to Obamacare’s inevitable collapse? Because 7.1 million enrollees is, after all, a big flipping deal.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, April 1, 2014
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