Barack Obama appears intent upon concluding an agreement with Iran that, according to critics from both parties, could allow it to become a nuclear power on the installment plan. About which, several observations:
First, that the letter sent to the mullahs from Tom Cotton and 46 other Republican senators was sent to the wrong address. Presumably, even the nutjobs in Teheran know enough about the U.S. Constitution to grasp that any agreement that emerges from current negotiations will need congressional approval. And were Obama to resort to the "executive agreement" dodge in order to bypass Congress, such an agreement would almost certainly be repealed with vehemence as the first order of business on the first day of the next Republican presidency (which is more likely to be January 20th, 2017, if Obama continues with his current Iran policy).
The protocol problem in all this isn't in Teheran (or Republicans in the Senate); it's with the "constitutional scholar" in the White House. Yes, presidents should be given great deference in the conduct of our nation's foreign affairs--we can't, after all, have 535 secretaries of state--but the second part of that understanding is that they also demonstrate sufficient respect for the congressional role in ratifying treaties. No president should embark upon the kind of course that Obama has on such a momentous issue for our nation's security without congressional support.
Second, the administration's catfight with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is both embarrassing and morally perverse. Israel is the only stable democracy in a region historically pervaded by psychopathic regimes and movements. On its worst human-rights day it is leagues beyond anything its Arab and Persian adversaries offer.
There is thus something morally offensive in Obama criticizing Israel because their people elected someone he doesn't like in a region where elections are an alien concept and in seeking to distance our country from a loyal ally while snuggling up to a state sponsor of terrorism which specializes in killing Americans.
As with so much else in Obama's worldview, his visceral hostility to Israel (and his related sympathy for America's adversaries) flows from the anti-colonial, anti-Western (and yes, anti-American) sentiments that flourish in the radical left milieu out of which he came. This is what you get when you put Jeane Kirkpatrick's "blame America first" crowd in charge of American foreign policy.
Third, that the administration approach to Iran's nuclear program is based on a false choice--that the only options we have are appeasement or war; hence the preference for appeasement.
Therein also lies an additional source of the hostility to Netanyahu: his pointing out, in embarrassingly irrefutable fashion, before Congress no less, that a range of other alternatives do in fact exist; more precisely, that a combination of tightened sanctions and falling oil prices that economically gouge Teheran can allow us to chart a middle course between the extremes. After all, those bent on appeasement always most despise those who call attention to it.
But let us also not forget, in the end, that there can be no effective diplomacy with adversaries without the threat of force.
Which means that, yes, we should be willing to use whatever level of force necessary to prevent Iran from acquiring the ability to destroy Chicago, Washington and New York (and who can, with any true sense of conviction, pledge that such an attack wouldn't occur? And who wishes to therefore leave it to chance and see how it goes?).
But the key is that the best way to prevent having to go to war against Iran to prevent it from becoming a nuclear power is to resolutely communicate that we will go to war in order to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power. We likely won't have to resort to that "last resort" if we make clear that we are ultimately willing to. Iran can't develop nuclear weapons unless we allow it to, and there is no conceivable circumstance under which we should, since it would be difficult to conceive of a more dangerous development than a fanatical Islamist theocracy armed with such weapons and (assuredly, eventually) the means of delivering them across vast distances.
The United States is immeasurably more powerful than Iran. We almost certainly also have a greater stake in preventing Iran from getting nuclear weapons than Iran has in acquiring them. Their repugnant regime's survival doesn't depend upon obtaining such weapons; our survival (and that of our allies and every other country in the Middle East) would be threatened by such an occurrence.
So let us not be misled by the mullahs' bluster--as the far weaker party, Iran's leaders fear war with us far more than we fear war with them. And if this somehow weren't true, then the claim that they are rational enough to be trusted with nuclear weapons--more precisely, sufficiently rational to be sufficiently deterred by our much larger nuclear arsenal--instantly falls apart.
The Islamic Republic of Iran was founded by Ayatollah Khomeini on hate; more precisely, hatred of us, the "great Satan." So why should we ever allow it to acquire weapons that could turn our major cities into cinders?
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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial on 03/30/2015