When your best argument for an agreement is that the deal’s opponents are “making common cause” with your negotiating partners, it’s safe to say you’ve lost the debate.
In what was billed as a major foreign policy address, perhaps the most critical of his presidency, President Obama recently attempted to defend the P5+1 nuclear deal with Iran as it comes up for review in Congress.
The lines most calculated to draw a sharp domestic political contrast were these:
Just because Iranian hardliners chant “Death to America” does not mean that that’s what all Iranians believe.
In fact, it’s those hardliners who are most comfortable with the status quo. It’s those hardliners chanting “Death to America” who have been most opposed to the deal. They’re making common cause with the Republican caucus.
It’s hard to imagine words that would simultaneously be more slanderous, self-serving and yet self-contradictory than those. The president is accusing the opposition party in Congress of joining with people who, quite bluntly, want to destroy the country.
Let’s take this in reverse order
One presumes that the president is talking about the “hardline” mullahs who allegedly oppose the nuclear deal, the position that the Republican caucus in Congress takes, almost unanimously.
And yet, it’s the very people Kerry was negotiating with — the leadership of the country — who were leading chants of “Death to America,” promising no softening of Iran’s support for terror, and tweeting out pictures depicting Obama shooting himself in the head.
These aren’t the Iranian opposition, or even the Iranian opposition faction within the hand-picked “parliament” (to call it such is an insult to democratic deliberative bodies everywhere). These are the people actually running the country, sitting across the negotiating table from United States and P5 negotiators, charged with reaching an agreement.
It’s possible, I suppose, that they opposed the deal at some point, but Obama and Kerry did their best to placate them by capitulating on virtually every negotiating point.
On his first point, however, Obama is undoubtedly correct. Not only not all, probably not even most Iranians, want to destroy the U.S. Those Iranians were out in the street in 2009, in the aftermath of an election stolen by the current leadership.
Those Iranians were chanting not, “Death to America,” but rather, “Obama, Obama, you are either with us or with them.”
Those Iranians sent a memo to the State Department begging for help:
“Will they continue on the track of wishful thinking and push every decision to the future until it is too late, or will they reward the brave people of Iran and simultaneously advance the Western interests and world peace.”
And it was those Iranians who Obama, in his zeal to extend a hand to the ruling mullahs, all but ignored under the pretext of not wanting the U.S. to become the issue.
It’s enough to make you ask who, exactly, is “making common cause” with people who chant “Death to America.”
Joshua Sharf is a contributor to the Salomon Center for American Jewish Thought and Watchdog Arena. He is head of the PERA project at the Independence Institute, a Denver based free-market think tank. Follow him @joshuasharf. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.
