The Republican freak out over the Obama-Kerry-Moniz nuclear agreement with Iran is in full fury. They don’t know what they’re for but they’re against anything proposed by this administration. It’s called a knee jerk reaction hence the post title. The knee jerk nuke jerks have a beef with the proposal. They are convinced that doing what we’ve been doing for years will suddenly work as if by magic. It’s very much like their reaction to recent changes in Cuba policy. Give the sanctions a chance to work say Marco Rubio, man of the future, and his ilk. And they call President Obama naive…
The alternative to this agreement is the status quo and eventual war with Iran. That would grant Little Lindsey and Senator Walnuts’ wish:
I’m also not crazy about continuing to sub-contract our foreign policy to the Saudis and Bibi. The Israeli’s are, in part, seeking to maintain their nuclear monopoly in the region. Slate’s Fred Kaplan nails the real reason the Saudi Arabian and Israeli governments oppose the deal:
The most diehard opponents—Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Saudi King Salman, and a boatload of neocons led by the perennial naysayer John Bolton—issued their fusillades against the accord (“an historic mistake,” “diplomatic Waterloo,” to say nothing of the standard charges of “appeasement” from those with no understanding of history) long before they could possibly have browsed its 159 pages of legalese and technical annexes.
What worries these critics most is not that Iran might enrich its uranium into an A-bomb. (If that were the case, why would they so virulently oppose a deal that put off this prospect by more than a decade?) No, what worries them much more deeply is that Iran might rejoin the community of nations, possibly even as a diplomatic (and eventually trading) partner of the United States and Europe.
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What Netanyahu and King Salman want Obama to do is to wage war against Iran—or, more to the point, to fight their wars against Iran for them. That is why they so virulently oppose U.S. diplomacy with Iran—because the more we talk with Iran’s leaders, the less likely we are to go to war with them. Their view is the opposite of Winston Churchill’s: They believe to war-war is better than to jaw-jaw.
Bingo. This nails the reason for King Salman’s Rushdie to judgment. Bibi, of course, has been blatantly and defiantly wrong about Iran for 25 years. As to the so-called GOP tough guys aka the knee jerk nuke jerks, when they came into office in 2001, the Bushies reversed President Clinton’s policy of engagement with North Korea. They hit that member of the “axis of evil” with more sanctions and empty threats of violence. The result was that North Korea now has nuclear weapons. Way to go, Bush-Cheney gang. The GOP’s manly men have also conveniently forgotten that the Beavis-Duce administration negotiated a nuclear deal with Libya before Gadhaffi’s sand nap. I guess the knee jerk nuke jerks mistrust Obama because he knows how to pronounce nuclear or some such shit…
The nuttiest thing about the knee jerk nuke jerk’s response is its premise. They believe that the Iranians are suicidal and would go out of their way to violate the agreement thereby triggering the chance of war. That’s as wackadoodle as past malaka of the week Tom Cotton’s letter to the Ayatollahs a while back. They somehow think all the US has to do is to dictate conditions and Iran will surrender. In short, they’re out of their frickin’ cotton pickin’ minds. The Obama-Kerry policy of engagement with Iran *could* result in the sort of country that most Persians want. If nothing else, it deters them from getting nukes for at least 10-15 years.
There’s a lot of instant expertise on nuclear matters flying around the internet. I may be married to a scientist but, in the great tradition of Speaker Boner, I’m not one myself. Unlike most deal opponents, I don’t pretend to understand the details. The reaction from nuclear experts and the scientific community seems to be positive thus far:
Jeffrey Lewis was so eager to read the Iran nuclear deal that he woke up at 3:30 am California time to pore through all 150-plus pages of the text. Lewis is a nukes super nerd: He’s the director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, and also runs an excellent arms control blog networkand arms control podcast and has a regular arms control column in Foreign Policy. He is the person to talk to on this.
When Lewis and I first spoke, in early 2015, he was skeptical, as a lot of arms control analysts were. He was skeptical that the US, world powers, and Iran would ever reach a nuclear deal. And he was skeptical that if they did reach a deal, it would be good enough. But when the negotiators released the “framework” in April, describing the broad strokes, Lewis came away impressed and happily surprised — but with some caveats and some unanswered questions.
I called up Lewis to see what he thought of the final deal. His assessment was very positive: Asked to grade the deal, he said, “I would give it an A.”
The knee jerk nuke jerk response is obvious: what the hell do they know? Many of them are scientists like that damn hippie Moniz. We don’t trust them because they’re on university faculties and read books without pictures in them. I suspect at least a few of the knee jerk nuke jerks wouldn’t trust Jeffrey Lewis, who was quoted above, because he has the same name as the Bravolebrity and star of Flipping Out. I wonder if he has a sassy, mouthy equivalent to Zoila in his lab?
Now that I’ve gone off on another digressive tangent, back to the knee jerk nuke jerks. Their opposition to the pact is based on fear. The irony is that they’re more afraid of giving peace a chance than of going to war including brogressive hero, Senator Aqua Buddha. This is insanity. It’s time to stop the madness and give peace a chance:
I watched the Obama press conference, and was impressed by his argument, which I would have taken even further (which is further proof that I’d never get elected dog-catcher) — if you oppose the agreement, then yes, you’re in favor of war…and if you’re in favor of war, then you need to come clean on the cost in casualties and money.
Gee…you’d think the fourth estate might make it their business to ask…but I guess after they report on the upcoming election/horse race, and the fund raising, and anything negative they can find on Hillary and/or Bill Clinton, they’re just plumb tuckered out. Poor things…
I’m old enough to remember that the warnings about Iran being “five years away from the bomb” began in early 1980, just a year after the revolution there, and that mantra was repeated ad nauseum ever afterwards (even though Iran, throughout that period, was rapidly exhausting its resources–and its global credit–fighting off an invasion by Iraq).
The issue with Iran was never proliferation per se (the U.S. has been materially supporting–directly or indirectly–non-NNPT members in their weapons programs), but, rather, the foreign policy determination to, first, maintain Israel as the only nuclear power in the region, even when there was no evidence that Iran was working toward weapons, and second, to foment discord inside Iran via sanctions, in the hope that such would prompt a regime change that could be used to bring Iran back to client state status.
This agreement will work to address the latter point, for a while (until some future President ignores it), but I doubt that there’s been any real change of mind in our foreign policy elite on either point.
jon stewart had it longer. the war pigs want war. and obama yanked it away. call he rite wing whambulance.