It has not been a smooth month for those who want to keep Iran in pariahdom forever and thus seek to kill any international agreement on Iran’s nuclear program. The sanctions bill that is the deal-killers’ principal vehicle at the moment and is in the Senate Banking Committee has not been attracting the hoped-for Democratic co-sponsors.
The strong position taken on the issue by President Barack Obama obviously is a major reason for this. And however unlikely this may seem with almost anything that happens these days in Congress, reason and good sense have probably had some effect — among those who realize that the bill adds no negotiating value whatever in threatening additional sanctions on an Iran that already knows full well such sanctions would follow any breakdown of negotiations.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the United Nations in 2012, drawing his own “red line” on how far he will let Iran go in refining nuclear fuel.
With the exception of Sen. Robert Menendez (who has alienated himself from the President by wanting not only Iran but also Cuba to be in pariahdom forever), the deal-killing campaign has increasingly taken on an all-Republican flavor. That makes all the more obvious how, in addition to the other motivations behind the campaign, it has become a partisan endeavor to deny Mr. Obama a foreign policy achievement.
There also has been the widespread and thoroughly justified criticism of Speaker of the House John Boehner’s invitation to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress on the subject — criticism that has been wider than Boehner probably expected.
The inappropriateness of this invitation was apparent even to many people who may not fully appreciate how much Netanyahu has been trying to undermine U.S. foreign policy, and how he is much more of an adversary of the United States than an ally on this issue. His unwavering opposition to any agreement with Tehran, even an agreement that moves Iran farther away from having a nuclear weapon, is motivated by objectives the United States does not share and in some respects — such as the objective of limiting U.S. freedom of action regarding whom it cooperates with on Middle Eastern issues — is directly opposed to U.S. interests.
Many people also recognized the narrowness and cheapness of what Boehner did. He ignored the usual procedure, as former Speaker Nancy Pelosi described it, of consulting with Congressional leaders of both parties before offering someone the high honor and exceptional privilege of addressing a joint session of the U.S. Congress.
People recognize that it debases the currency of this privilege to extend it a third time to Netanyahu when the only person so far to have addressed Congress three times is Winston Churchill. (We Americans knew Winston Churchill well. Winston Churchill was a friend. Bibi, you’re no Winston Churchill.)
People also recognize that it is an indignity for the People’s House if a foreign leader is to use it as a prop to berate the host country’s policies as well as to try to score points with his voters in his own country in an election just a couple of weeks after he is scheduled to speak. He would be using Congress as a prop just as he used as a prop a cartoon drawing of a bomb — which he doesn’t use anymore because the preliminary agreement that Netanyahu has always denounced drained his cartoon bomb by ending Iran’s medium-level enrichment of uranium.
Zbigniew Brzezinski summarized well the nature of Boehner’s move: “Speaker Boehner has an odd definition of leadership: inviting a foreign leader to undermine our President’s policy in front of Congress?”
The opponents of an agreement may be increasingly aware that their fiction about supposedly just wanting to strengthen the U.S. negotiating position is wearing thin. There have been compromises of this cover story that have become difficult to hide, such as the direct, willing, and repeated admission of the freshman senator from Arkansas that the purpose of new sanctions legislation would be to kill the negotiations, not to aid them.
