Seth Lipsky of the New York Sun grasps the significance of the moment in his editorial today, “The Shape of Things to Come”:
Mr. Obama proposes that Congress enter a contract with a regime in Iran that Congress knows has lied to us, that has failed to abide by past agreements, and that can be counted on to violate the agreement the President wants to sign (and that declares the destruction of Israel “non-negotiable”). The president dast not even vouch for Iran’s integrity. He merely challenges the Congress to come up with a better idea. That is rank burden-shifting.
Let Congress return the burden to the President. Let it challenge the president’s claim that a negotiated agreement “is our best option by far,” or what the New York Times calls “unquestionably the best approach.” Such talk reminds us of Geoffrey Dawson, who was editor of the London Times in the 1930s and the journalistic apostle of Britain’s appeasement of Hitler; Dawson called the Nazi peace offer “the best immediate hope.”
We have opposed the Iranian talks from the start, and what Mr. Obama proposes underscores our main point — that the parley itself is the appeasement. The very fact that these talks were taking place has aggrandized our adversary, cost us time, and — by betraying our closest (and only democratic) ally, Israel — courted “war with dishonor,” as Duff Cooper famously put it before resigning from the British government after Munich.
It’s unlikely that a Duff Cooper will emerge from the Obama administration. It will be up to Congress to choose the shape of things to come (which was the title of H.G. Wells’ 1933 novel predicting World War II). It wrote the sanctions that Mr. Obama proposes to dismantle. The Speaker has been making his own swing through the Middle East. He knows that it is Congress that was granted the power to regulate commerce with foreign nations. The President proposed. Now let Congress dispose.”
Let Congress return the burden to the President. Let it challenge the president’s claim that a negotiated agreement “is our best option by far,” or what the New York Times calls “unquestionably the best approach.” Such talk reminds us of Geoffrey Dawson, who was editor of the London Times in the 1930s and the journalistic apostle of Britain’s appeasement of Hitler; Dawson called the Nazi peace offer “the best immediate hope.”
We have opposed the Iranian talks from the start, and what Mr. Obama proposes underscores our main point — that the parley itself is the appeasement. The very fact that these talks were taking place has aggrandized our adversary, cost us time, and — by betraying our closest (and only democratic) ally, Israel — courted “war with dishonor,” as Duff Cooper famously put it before resigning from the British government after Munich.
It’s unlikely that a Duff Cooper will emerge from the Obama administration. It will be up to Congress to choose the shape of things to come (which was the title of H.G. Wells’ 1933 novel predicting World War II). It wrote the sanctions that Mr. Obama proposes to dismantle. The Speaker has been making his own swing through the Middle East. He knows that it is Congress that was granted the power to regulate commerce with foreign nations. The President proposed. Now let Congress dispose.”
Read the whole thing here.
