Rep. Edward Markey, the Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, isn’t happy with the nuclear deal President Bush agreed to with the government of India. The deal “has blown a hole in the nuclear rules that the entire world has been playing by, ” said Markey, and “empowers the hawks in every rogue nation to put their nuclear weapons plans on steroids now that they can no longer be isolated as non-signers of an agreement that has been shredded.” The Washington Post‘s Richard Cohen, who’s no friend of the Bush administration, responds to this line of thinking by noting that it’s the nature of the regime that really matters.
In the case of the nuclear agreement, we are somehow supposed to believe that by favoring India, Bush has made it much harder to put pressure on Iran to abandon its apparent weapons program and become a “good guy” nation. This overlooks the fact that Iran is governed by a zealot who has pledged to eradicate Israel and who firmly believes in the inherent evil of the United States of America. As Bush once said about himself, the Iranians do not do nuance.
