Sen. Bob Corker was in the Times Free Press office Wednesday slamming his hands on the table and bemoaning the shortcomings of the Iran nuclear deal. (“Unfortunately, we were so weak!” he said of U.S. negotiations with Iran.)
The show from our Tennessee senator and chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee was an exercise in smoke and mirrors.
The Republican-controlled House and Senate is expected to pass a resolution next month disapproving of the Iran nuclear deal. In response, President Barack Obama can – and says he will – veto that resolution.
To override that veto and block the deal, Republican leaders will need to muster two-thirds majorities in each chamber. But since that would require about a quarter of congressional Democrats to turn on the president in his legacy foreign policy initiative with an election year coming up, even Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky, has acknowledged such an override is unlikely.
The reality is that all the anti-Iran deal rhetoric and hand-slamming is a rather highly choreographed dance of GOP avoidance. Think back to 2011 when a similar shimmy resolved the crisis over House Republicans’ refusal to raise the federal debt limit on terms the president could accept.
McConnell pushed Congress to let Obama raise the debt limit unless lawmakers blocked it, which required a veto override that proved unattainable. Obama got the increase his administration needed to avert economic calamity, and Republican lawmakers largely avoided blame for sequester-panicking the country while still getting to vote against raising the debt limit.
Here we are again on the same dance floor. This time the song is about the Iran deal.
Corker, both in the newspaper offices and in an Op-Ed piece in The Washington Post on Monday, insisted that maintaining tough sanctions could prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. Never mind that sanctions haven’t worked to date and here we are just months away from Iran completing a bomb.
Further, Corker – and other Republicans, too – completely ignore concerns that blocking the agreement the Obama administration reached with Britain, China, France, Germany, Iran and Russia would damage the United States’ leadership and crack the international consensus that makes those very sanctions possible.
“It’s totally unrealistic to believe that if we backed out of this deal that the multilateral sanctions would stay in place,” Henry Paulson, who was the Treasury secretary under President George W. Bush, told the Aspen Institute last week.
Oh, but we can’t trust Iran not to cheat, the GOP chants. And for that matter, Corker adds that we can’t trust Russia and China, either.
Well, probably not. But even Gary Samore (a former nuclear adviser to Obama who until earlier this month was the head of a group opposing the Iran deal until he saw the final document and analyzed it) now says that despite those same trust concerns, he believes the accord will put the United States in a stronger position to respond than a congressional rejection would.
“We will have bought a couple of years, and if Iran cheats or reneges we will be in an even better position to double down on sanctions or, if necessary, use military force,” Mr. Samore said. “If I knew for certain that in five years they would cheat or renege, I’d still take the deal.”
Finally, Corker played the U.S.-as-deal-victim card.
“Unfortunately, the agreement ties our hands in countering Iran’s efforts. If we try to push back, Iran will threaten to speed up its nuclear development since it already will have a windfall of money “
Hardly. America-as-victim is where we are now with no deal. Unless, of course, Corker and friends want to use America’s large storehouse of bombs to snuff Iran’s near-bomb right now. With no deal, Iran won’t have to speed up its nuclear development. It will have a bomb in a matter of two or three months.
But don’t bother trying to reason with Republicans – even the very smart Bob Corker.
The fact is, Corker and the GOP find it more acceptable to create diversions. They would rather avoid the potential political consequences of backing out while leaving responsibility for the very hard stuff of Iran policy and other governing on the shoulders of Obama and Democrats.
They do this because they think we’re too naive to notice. And all too often, we are.
Perhaps we should call this the new Republican age of flimflam and hand-slam foreign policy: If you can’t make war because Americans don’t want it, make smoke and noise and point fingers at everyone else.
The U.S. has nothing to lose and everything to gain by seeking diplomatic means to stop another unstable country from becoming a nuclear power.
The button to start a war is always within reach. The careful logic of preventing war is harder to find. And the path to stopping a war is even more elusive.