by Marsha B. Cohen
Mitch McConnell did it, Harry Reid didn’t. Elizabeth Warren did it, Bernie Sanders didn’t. Al Franken did it, Tom Coburn didn’t.
I’m referring to the signing of the latest letter, crafted by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and proffered by Senators Bob Menendez (D-NJ) and [...]]]>
by Marsha B. Cohen
Mitch McConnell did it, Harry Reid didn’t. Elizabeth Warren did it, Bernie Sanders didn’t. Al Franken did it, Tom Coburn didn’t.
I’m referring to the signing of the latest letter, crafted by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and proffered by Senators Bob Menendez (D-NJ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC), urging President Barak Obama to turn a cold shoulder to newly elected Iranian president Hassan Rouhani while pursuing a more confrontational and aggressive Iran policy. The Arms Control Association’s Greg Thielmann has already penned an important discussion of why this measure complicates efforts to reach a peaceful solution with Iran, which I highly recommend.
It is worth recalling that another Iranian president-elect, Mohammad Khatami — a reformist whose surprise election shocked the Iranian political establishment — was also greeted by sanctions pushed through Congress. On August 19, 1997, weeks after Khatami took office, President Bill Clinton confirmed that virtually all trade and investment activities by US persons with Iran were prohibited. Those sanctions not only boosted Iranian hardliners who oppose a detente with the US, they also helped ensure that Khatami and his supporters would be unsuccessful in making many of the economic improvements and political changes needed to improve the lives of the Iranian people. His crippled victory was followed by the election of hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005. Since then, dozens of letters, resolutions and sanctions bills have emanated from Congress, which of late seems incapable of accomplishing anything else.
According to the “76 senators” who signed the letter:
We believe there are four strategic elements necessary to achieve resolution of this issue: an explicit and continuing message that we will not allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapons capability, a sincere demonstration of openness to negotiations, the maintenance and toughening of sanctions, and a convincing threat of the use of force that Iran will believe. We must be prepared to act, and Iran must see that we are prepared.
So the US must somehow demonstrate an “openness to negotiations” while maintaining and toughening sanctions and convincingly threatening to “use force”, even as it remains mired in Iraq and Afghanistan and utterly bewildered about Syria and Egypt?
Saxby Chamblis did it, Richard Shelby didn’t. Sheldon Whitehouse did it, Ron Wyden didn’t. Chuck Schumer did it, Barbara Boxer didn’t.
Signing and not signing such letters may be of limited practical consequence — though AIPAC and other lobbying groups are certainly keeping tabs — but the political fallout of abstaining can be deafening. When Chuck Hagel was nominated for Secretary of Defense, his detractors screamed about the anti-Iran “letters” he hadn’t signed, according them equal status with his actual votes.
Tammy Baldwin, who was mercilessly hammered by her 2012 opponent Tommy Thompson for wavering on Iran sanctions, didn’t sign onto this letter.
Al Franken (D-MN), who did, won his seat in 2008 after a recount that lasted for months, unseating incumbent Norm Coleman by a mere 312 votes. Coleman, a stalwart of the Republican Jewish Coalition, is salivating at the prospect of Franken making a single false move on the pro-Israel/anti-Iran front that would enable Republicans to pounce. While Franken seems to be in a strong position for reelection in 2014, he can take nothing for granted in the current political environment.
The last listed co-signer, newbie Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), is currently focused on the economy and particularly on who will be running the Fed. But she has been quick to climb aboard the bandwagon that’s torpedoing the prospect of improved relations with Iran, as has Angus King, the Maine Independent who replaced Republican Olympia Snowe.
Of course, the 24 who, for one reason or another, chose not to sign the letter are hardly “profiles in courage”. Some aren’t seeking reelection when their current Senate term is up and can run free of the AIPAC leash, among them Max Baucus, Tom Coburn, Jay Rockefeller and Carl Levin. Perhaps the most curious non-signers are the AIPAC-endorsed, staunchly pro-Israel senators who have consistently voted in favor of increasingly crippling Iran sanctions but also recently abstained from signing a similar letter last December, urging the President to stiffen them. This group includes Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Mark Kirk (R-IL) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK).
Inferring that any senator not signing an AIPAC-crafted letter has opposed crippling sanctions or will oppose the next round of them would be a major mistake. Most of the two dozen non-signers of the latest letter, including Rand Paul (R-KY), who opposes a military attack on Iran, have voted in favor of sanctions in the past and will probably do so in the future unless some political incentive convinces them otherwise. The absent Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) were among the original cosponsors of S. 65 – the AIPAC-promoted “Back Door to Iran War” resolution that expressed support of an Israeli attack on Iran. It garnered 91 cosponsors and passed the Senate 99-0 on May 22. Kirk’s website is meanwhile applauding the House’s passage of the latest Iran sanctions in the House (as is AIPAC; the accompanying photo to this post is the lead image on its website’s front page) and urges the Senate to act as well, which will likely happen in September.
Just about every resolution and vote ratcheting up sanctions against Iran has passed the Senate with a hefty majority. Murkowski, Wyden, and Jon Tester (D-MT) were among the 44 senators who signed an AIPAC letter in June 2012 opposing negotiations with Iran although they didn’t sign this one.
President Obama has defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result”. How ironic it would be if he were to heed this latest letter and, yielding to Congress, sign off on more and stricter sanctions, just as a new Iranian president offers at least an opening for a better era in US-Iran relations.
That said, Rouhani, who stated the other day that “we need to have negotiations without threats” needs to move quickly — while Congress is on its five week summer break — in making some headlines of his own, by, for example, establishing direct contact with the United States.
]]>Now, Paul is not a foaming-at-the-mouth neocon. But neither do his views on the Middle East seem likely fulfill the hopes that the Leveretts have for the Tea Party — namely, providing “the most outspoken congressional opponents of potential moves by the Obama Administration toward military confrontation with Iran.”
For a more fleshed out account of the direction of the Tea Party’s foreign policy, check out Scott McConnell’s piece at Right Web. McConnell, a founding editor of the American Conservative, described the different approaches of neoconseravtives and Tea Partiers who tend toward fiscally-conservative restraint and writes:
Thus far, the neoconservatives appear to be parrying the challenge effectively. The question is, can the neocons, as they have with other political factions in the past, successfully co-opt this new political force in such a way as to make it amenable to their goals?
McConnell notes that Palin was discovered by neoconservative don Bill Kristol. Those Tea Partiers who have actually been successful (winning or garnering great followings and attention) have been courted by — and often seemed to please — Israel lobby forces and some neoconservative influences.
Take Tea Party favorite Marco Rubio, who will represent Florida in the Senate as of early January. The day after winning his seat, Rubio announced a visit to Israel. During the campaign, Rubio, much to the excitement of neoconservatives, said that the U.S. should attack Iran to prevent it from getting nuclear weapons. Likewise, Utah’s Senator-elect Mike Lee, another Tea Partier, met with Israeli PM Bibi Netanyahu and ran on a platform that “military action [against Iran] would be justified.” Both Senators-elect said the U.S. should allow Israel to strike Iran.
The picture with Rand Paul is significantly more complicated than what the Leveretts present. Comments Paul made during the campaign in May sparked a minor blog squabble between various elements of the “old right” — the American Conservative‘s Daniel Larison and Antiwar.com‘s Justin Raimondo. (Both could claim the “old right” mantle before the Tea Party was even a glimmer in the eye of Rick Santelli or the Koch brothers.)
Just a week after the mid-term elections that elevated Rubio, Lee and Paul to the Senate, McConnell gave an updated breakdown of Paul’s views in his Right Web piece:
On the other hand, Rand Paul, the son of the isolationist icon and early Tea Party favorite Ron Paul, has studiously avoided discussion of foreign policy issues in his campaign. In October, a GQ article reported that after Paul’s primary win he met with prominent neoconservatives Bill Kristol, Tom Donnelly of AEI, and Dan Senor (cofounder of the Foreign Policy Initiative) in Washington to talk foreign policy. While he once criticized the Republicans’ “military adventurism,” opposed the war in Iraq, and “scoffed at the threat of Iranian nukes,” he may have begun changing his positions. Senor categorized Paul as “in absorption mode” and not “cemented in his views.” Paul later met with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, where he reportedly “told them what they wanted to hear” and distanced himself from his father, who has been critical of the extent of U.S. support for Israel.
McConnell concludes by noting that the Tea Party has a strong “religious” right element as well as a “libertarian” one.
The “religious” element is likely aligned with Christian Zionists such as John Hagee and his Christians United for Israel (CUFI), whose views on the Middle East profess a Greater Israel Zionism even more fervent and violent than one finds in most public neoconservative quarters (the two groups are already strong allies). As with the neocons, Christian Zionists tend to take a moralistic worldview that finds any and all enemies of Israel (particularly Muslims) to be “evil” — unredeemable to the point of requiring extermination by force (otherwise known as Armageddon, or the final battle between good and evil, a central piece of Christian Zionist eschatology.)
Furthermore, the “libertarian” elements of the Tea Party might indeed include those who, confronted by the wider consequences of an attack on Iran, would recoil at the idea of a broad and unpredictable Middle East war. But neoconservatives — in attempting to build a diverse coalition for their aggressive policies — will constantly downplay these negative wider consequences of an assault. (As they did during much of the panel on the “kinetic option” at the big Foundation for Defense of Democracies Iran confab earlier this month.)
And as for fiscally minded small-government ideologues from either branch of the Tea Party, they will come to learn that the cost of a bombing run will only be the price of a warehouse full of ordinance, smart bombs, drones with Hellfire missiles, and the fuel to get it all into Iranian territory. That just ain’t that much dough.
If the Leveretts so choose, they can take heart that there might indeed be some Tea Partiers who, as they put it, “are stalwart in their criticism of the Iraq war and their determination that the United States not launch another ‘war of choice’ in the Middle East that will end up doing even greater damage to America’s interests and international standing.” But I’m not going to hold out hope on this score.
Tea Partiers who make it into the halls of power will likely have their principles watered down by that power. The opinions of Tea Party activists in the field won’t concern neoconservatives, who are known for focusing their efforts on elites — what journalist Sidney Blumenthal called the “Counter Establishment” in his 1986 book. Irving Kristol once said that with a magazine that has “a circulation of a few hundred, you could change the world.” (Some recent populist outreach on YouTube and other mediums notwithstanding.)
The Tea Party — or even a significant portion of it — seems to me to be an unlikely part of any coalition in Washington that will work to stop the United States from starting a war with Iran.
]]>