Will Republicans Fall for the Iran Trap?
If the GOP manages to kill the Iran deal, thus isolating the country
and putting it on a path to war, then the party’s political viability
could be placed on ice for a considerable period.
Robert W. Merry
July 27, 2015
The Republican Party is
walking into a trap, and there doesn’t seem to be anything on the
horizon that can save it from the disaster. In Congress, they will
vote to a person, or nearly so, in opposing President Obama’s nuclear
deal with Iran. Meanwhile, it appears that every one of the current
sixteen GOP presidential candidates will campaign against the agreement.
What’s more, at least three
GOP candidates—Florida’s Marco Rubio, Wisconsin’s Scott Walker and
Texas’s Ted Cruz—say they will rescind the deal if they become
president. No doubt others will soon echo that threat.
All this will be thoroughly debated—first, during the congressional
drama that now will unfold regarding GOP efforts to deny presidential
authority to lift U.S. sanctions against Iran; and, then, during the
forthcoming presidential election. And through those debates the GOP
position will collapse of its own weight. The underlying logic is so
flimsy and riddled with inconsistencies that ultimately the American
people will reject it.
Begin with the GOP response to Obama’s argument that the choice
facing the United States now is the current agreement, which is
imperfect but sound, and a likely war as the only remaining option for
halting or delaying Iran’s nuclear-arms program. Opponents argue that
that is a false dichotomy in that another option would be further
sanctions to force upon Iran a better agreement. There are two problems
with that response.
First,
there is no
evidence that a better deal would be in the offing should the United
States crank up the economic pressure through tougher sanctions. The
current agreement, after all, is the product of long and arduous
negotiations aimed at reaching a point that all sides could live with,
not that one side could tout as a definitive victory. That’s not how
negotiations work, and certainly not when national interest and national
pride are involved. Granted, the outcome wasn’t ideal from the American
standpoint, but no ideal outcome is ever in the cards in such
circumstances.
Second, even if a better deal were possible at some point in the
past, that train has left the station. Having gone through those
wrenching bargaining sessions, Iran simply isn’t going to go back to
square one because Ted Cruz, Rand Paul et al don’t like it. Iran’s only
viable option would be to push headlong toward nuclear weapons as a
future bargaining chip for sanctions removal and, more significantly, to
fortify it against the nearly certain war that has been promoted so
assiduously by the current Israeli government and by so many likeminded
U.S. politicians. And there wouldn’t be anything short of war to stop
the Iranians from pursuing that course.
Besides, it isn’t just America and Iran on this parchment. Other
signatories are China, Russia, Britain, France, and Germany, and there
is no reason to believe any of these countries will back away from the
agreement. So how is the United States going to separate itself from
this so-called P5+1 contingent and unilaterally pressure Iran to
renegotiate the deal, particularly as these other nations are working
within the United Nations to lift UN sanctions against Iran.
The result will be a degree of U.S. isolation never experienced since before World War II.
And so we come back to the Obama dichotomy: the current policy or a
likely war. This stark choice has not crystallized within the national
consciousness thus far. But it will. The American people are not stupid,
at least not collectively. They will be able to assess the arguments on
both sides, and the Obama argument will not only make more sense but
also will convey with more credibility where the real dangers lie in
this geopolitical equation.
In any risk assessment, there are two fundamental elements. The first
is the magnitude of the downside risk; the second is the likelihood of
it. The magnitude of the disaster that would flow from a U.S. war with
Iran (far greater than the disaster that ensued from our war with Iraq)
is not difficult to contemplate—huge troop requirements, burdensome
financial commitments, tragic casualty numbers, likely civic unrest at
home, further destabilization of the Middle East with utterly unknown
(but serious) consequences, further U.S. isolation in the world,
possibly a spreading conflagration to other parts of the world as other
powers challenge a distracted America. The likelihood of the worst-case
scenario here may not be ominously high, but even best-case consequences
could be tragic, and the law of unintended consequences is never far
away when the shooting starts.
Which brings us to the second argument of the neocon wing of the GOP,
which increasingly seems to be the entire GOP. It is that Iran is a
nation of crazies, bent on conquering the world and destroying Israel
without any serious regard to its own fate. Mitt Romney wrote just
recently, “Iran is led by suicidal, apocalypse-seeking, America-hating,
Israel-denying theocratic fanatics.” These fanatics, he added (in case
anybody may have missed the point), are “entirely bereft of restraint,
decency and respect for human life.” So naturally it follows, “If the
ayatollahs have nuclear weapons, they will use them, someday,
somewhere.”
This is breathtaking in its own fanaticism—and in the ignorance that,
one might have hoped, would have been tucked away after Romney’s 2012
presidential defeat at the hands of a lackluster incumbent. A survey of
recent Iranian history suggests that its leaders, while starkly
fundamentalist in their religious sensibility, conduct foreign policy
based on a logical understanding of their national interests and an
often brilliant pursuit of them within the context of geopolitical
reality.
They certainly never sent an army halfway around the world to
overthrow the leader of a sovereign state with the intent of
establishing a beachhead for the transformation of an entire regional
culture. Now that’s “bereft of restraint.” The only conventional war the
Ayatollahs have engaged in ensued when Iran was invaded by Iraq—with
American support. True, they align themselves with some nations we don’t
like, but those alliances, as unsavory as they may be to us, are in
Iran’s interest as a regional power in a nasty neighborhood. One can
argue that this renders Iran a U.S. adversary, but there is no evidence
that these people are fanatical nihilists who want to destroy the world.
As to the prospect that Iran inevitably would use nuclear weapons if
it had them, it is worth noting that the world has nine nuclear nations,
and only one has ever used them—and that when no other nation had them
for retaliation. Romney is saying here that Iran is more fanatical and
suicidal than any other nuclear nation in the history of the nuclear
age, even North Korea. That isn’t going to hold up when the American
people get down to assessing the arguments of this debate.
Finally, we are told that Iran will cheat on the agreement, that
inspections won’t be rigor
ous enough, that Iran always cheats and is
hell-bent on getting nuclear weapons so it will cheat here for sure and
thwart all efforts by the agreement signatories and the UN, including UN
inspectors, to monitor its nuclear activity until the world is faced
with a fait accompli. Perhaps. But how realistic is such a scenario?
With satellite technology and the CIA and Israeli intelligence and
random revelations, could Iran really spring such a fait accompli on the
world before the world caught wind of it? Once again we come to the
likelihood factor in risk analysis. The likelihood factor here is very
slim.
History tells us that the American people like it when their
presidents score big foreign-policy triumphs—and count it as a plus when
the incumbent or incumbent party seeks White House retention at the
next election. This is Obama’s big foreign-policy triumph. And, while
the American people haven’t yet embraced it as such, they will. As the
debate progresses, it will become increasingly clear that the
consequences of killing this deal or reneging on it are ominous, that
America and the world retain plenty of options if Iran proves
treacherous, and that the stakes include not only America’s relationship
with Iran but also America’s standing in the world. Not to mention the
prospects for war if the deal goes down.
If it survives over nearly unanimous GOP objections, as appears
likely, it will be a net negative for Republicans, perhaps even a big
one.
But, if the party
manages to kill the deal for America, thus isolating the country and
putting it upon a path to war, then the party’s political viability
could be placed on ice for a considerable period.
Robert W. Merry, longtime Washington political correspondent and
publishing executive, is the author most recently of Where They Stand:
The American Presidents in the Eyes of Voters and Historians.
