Iran Is A Much Greater Nuclear Threat (Dan 8)

 

Cotton: Iran Nuke Threat May Be Worse Than Russia

By Greg Richter
Sunday, 12 Jul 2015 17:22 PM

Sen. Tom Cotton didn’t disagree with incoming Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford that Russia is America’s greatest threat, but did say Sunday that Iran’s intent to harm American cannot be doubted.

“I think Russia is serious threat,” Cotton said on “Face the Nation.” One reason, he said is the legacy nuclear weapons left over from the Soviet Union. But whether they have that intent is an open question.

“With Iran, they clearly have intent,” he said. “Just two days ago their president was chanting ‘Death to America’ and burning the American flag with people in Tehran.”

Like other Republicans, Cotton said the United States should be willing to walk away from the negotiating table rather than continue to grant Iran more concessions.

The problem, he said, is that Iran doesn’t take President Barack Obama at his word that he would actually use the military option if Iran decides to begin nuclear weapons.

The United States keeps giving more concessions, sending a bad lesson to the Iranians, Cotton said.
House Speaker John Boehner, appearing on the same program, reiterated the Republican position that “No deal is better than a bad deal.”

“From everything that’s leaked from these negotiations, the administration’s backed away from almost all of the guidelines that they set out for themselves,” Boehner said. “If in fact there’s no agreement, the sanctions will get back in place. At some point Iranian regime have to change their behavior.”

Cotton Picking Idiot

 

 Tom Cotton: Military Action Against Iran Would Only Take ‘Several Days’

Wednesday, April 8, 2015
Domenico Montanaro / NPR

Sen. Tom Cotton accused President Obama of holding up a “false choice” between his framework deal on Iran’s nuclear program and war. He also seemed to diminish what military action against Iran would entail.

“Even if military action were required,” the freshman Arkansas Republican senator said on a radio show Tuesday hosted by the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins. In the comments first picked up by BuzzFeed, Cotton also said: “the president is trying to make you think it would be 150,000 heavy mechanized troops on the ground in the Middle East again as we saw in Iraq. That’s simply not the case.”

“It would be something more along the lines of what President Clinton did in December 1998 during Operation Desert Fox. Several days of air and naval bombing against Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction facilities for exactly the same kind of behavior. For interfering with weapons inspectors and for disobeying Security Council resolutions. All we’re asking is that the president simply be as tough in the protection of America’s national security interest as Bill Clinton was.”

That bombing operation lasted four days and hit nearly 100 Iraqi targets after U.N. inspectors said Iraq had not fully cooperated with inspections.

Of course, military analysts point out that Iran is a larger country than Iraq with a more sophisticated military.

“The only thing worse than an Iran with nuclear weapons would be an Iran with nuclear weapons that one or more countries attempted to prevent them from obtaining by military strikes — and failed,” said Ryan Crocker, the former U.S. ambassador to Iraq and Afghanistan, in 2013.

Added Jim Walsh, a researcher at MIT, who has studied Iran’s nuclear program, “I fear that a military strike will produce the very thing you are trying to avoid, which is the Iranian government would meet the day after the attack and say: ‘Oh yeah, we’ll show you — we are going to build a nuclear weapon.’ I think we will get a weapon’s decision following an attack, which is the last thing we want to produce right now.”

Cotton — who orchestrated a letter to Iran’s leaders, which 46 other GOP senators signed onto disapproving of any potential deal with Iran — also called the president’s underlying assumptions in making a deal “wishful thinking.”

“It’s thinking that’s characterized by a child’s wish for a pony,” he said.

It’s not the first time bombing Iran has come up around political campaigns. It was almost exactly five years when John McCain joked in New Hampshire about bombing Iran, singing “that old Beach Boys song, ‘Bomb Iran.'”

“Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, anyway, ah….,” he sang to the tune of “Barbara Ann.”

McCain, though, has also long noted that military action should be a last resort.

Hillary Clinton even said during that election cycle that if Iran attacked Israel with a nuclear weapon, “We would be able to totally obliterate them.”

The GOP Just Increased Iran's Nuclear Potential (Daniel 8:3)

Thanks, Tom Cotton. You Just Got Us a Hard-line Supreme Leader.

The next Iranian ruler could reject a deal just as easily as the next U.S. president. He probably will.

By MEHDI KHALAJI

March 10, 2015

In their controversial letter to “the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton and 46 other Republican senators suggested that even if Washington comes to a nuclear deal with President Obama, the next American president could decide to reject it, presumably if he (or she) were more of a hard-liner than Obama is.

But the next ayatollah who becomes supreme leader of Iran could do exactly the same thing—and many signs are that he is going to be more of a hard-liner. Ironically, opponents of a nuclear deal in Washington could well be contributing to this outcome by creating an atmosphere of mistrust in Tehran that only consolidates the power of the conservatives there.

Moreover, whoever the next supreme leader of Iran is, there’s every chance we could be meeting him sooner rather than later.

In recent weeks fresh reports have surfaced about the deteriorating health of the current occupant of that office, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, raising questions about Iran’s future at a critical moment in the nuclear negotiations with the West. True, it is difficult, if not impossible, to separate fact from rumor. Even though Tehran, in an unprecedented decision, recently publicized Khamenei’s “prostate removal operations,” the government considers the facts of his illness to be a matter of national security; both the Shah and Khamenei’s predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, were extremely ill during their rule, yet knowledge of their true health was limited to a handful of people and family members. And some Iranian politicians have a vested interest in spreading stories about —or at least exaggerating—Khamenei’s declining health for their own political purposes as they look to sway the views of the Assembly of Experts, the council of more than 80 members that is charged by the constitution with the succession issue.

Nevertheless, when it does come, Khamenei’s death will transform the Islamic Republic as fundamentally as the death of Ayatollah Khomeini and the ascendance of Khamenei himself did in 1989.

And if current indications are any guide, when that happens Iran could become even tougher to deal with than it already is. Even the current standoff over Iran’s nuclear program could affect the final decision about succession, since the outspokenness of hardliners in the U.S. Senate, and Cotton’s reportedly unprecedented action, will likely only stiffen the views of the hardliners in Tehran.

In any case, the next supreme leader will be able to determine to what extent any possible nuclear deal is sustainable in long term. Even more than the U.S. Senate, the next supreme leader would be in a position to renege on any pact with the West and easily justify it politically or technically. According to the official philosophy of the Islamic Republic elaborated by its founding father, Ayatollah Khomeini, the supreme leader is religiously authorized to unilaterally terminate any government contract or agreement, even with Iranian citizens, if he sees it necessary for “expediency of the regime”—which trumps both constitution and Islamic law (Sharia). Officially, the only legal source for recognizing the “expediency of the regime” is the ruling ayatollah.

Granted, there is much we don’t know about the plans for succession in Iran. First of all, such a choice has been made only once in the entire 36-year history of the Islamic Republic. If we were to assume that the Assembly of Experts, whose members are all ayatollahs and represent each country’s province, had the ultimate power to appoint the new leader, given its current makeup it would certainly choose a hardliner who might be even be more aggressive on foreign and domestic policy than Khamenei himself. The Assembly’s preference for hardliners was evident in its March 10 election for chairman, in which Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi beat Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, securing 47 votes against Rafsanjani’s 26. Rafsanjani, who is known in the West as a pragmatist and his support for a free-market economy, has lost his power base within the political structure of Islamic Republic since the end of his presidency. He has lost two major elections, parliamentary and presidential in 2000 and 2005 but in recent years he became popular among supporters of defeated presidential candidates in 2009, because of his long history of animosity with Ahmadinejad and his open criticism of the government suppressive policy toward green movement.

A Shiite theologian by training, Mehdi Khalaji is a senior fellow at The Washington Institute, focusing on the politics of Iran and Shiite groups in the Middle East.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/03/tom-cotton-republicans-letter-iran-nuclear-deal-115957.html#ixzz3U7Ln8LTj