President Obama returned to American University in Washington, D.C. to deliver a speech designed to rally his Democratic Party base to support the P5+1 agreement with Iran and prevent a veto-proof vote in Congress to nix the deal. The address was 6,270 words, took an hour to deliver, and contained multiple dubious themes.
The president tried to hammer home three major themes:
- In the past, America has been a war-mongering country,
- Everyone loves the deal except for Israel and the GOP, and
- The only alternative to the deal is war.
Obama began his talk by comparing himself to John F. Kennedy delivered a speech promoting cold war negotiations at the same location in 1962 and how the Cuban Missile Crisis was resolved without firing a shot. An interesting analogy to the Iran deal if one forgets that, unlike the negotiations with Iran, those tense October days in 1963 were a crisis precisely because the president looked the USSR in the eyes until the Russians blinked.
Obama went on to echo the one of the themes of his first election and his early his presidency, that America had become a war-mongering nation and he was going to change it:
Now, when I ran for president eight years ago as a candidate who had opposed the decision to go to war in Iraq, I said that America didn't just have to end that war. We had to end the mindset that got us there in the first place.
It was a mindset characterized by a preference for military action over diplomacy, a mindset that put a premium on unilateral U.S. action over the painstaking work of building international consensus, a mindset that exaggerated threats beyond what the intelligence supported.
Leaders did not level with the American people about the costs of war, insisting that we could easily impose our will on a part of the world with a profoundly different culture and history.
Those words conflict with what Obama said just prior to mentioning America's war-mongering history. He praised JFK for ending the Cuban Missile Crisis without a shot and the negotiation of the SALT and START treaties.
Trying to incite the fears of his base, the president brought up Iraq, complaining about the millions of dollars of adverting in opposition to the deal he said;
And if the rhetoric in these ads and the accompanying commentary sounds familiar, it should, for many of the same people who argued for the war in Iraq are now making the case against the Iran nuclear deal.
Amongst the people who supported the Iraq war, and who even voted for it in the Senate, were his vice president Joe Biden, both of his secretaries of state Kerry and Clinton, and his biggest ally in the Senate, Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada). All supported the invasion of Iraq in Congress and now support his flawed Iraq deal. Diane Feinstein (D-CA) and Bill Nelson (D-FL) also supported both the war in Iraq and the P5+1 agreement.
On the other hand, the government of Israel, which strongly opposes the Iran deal, warned President Bush not to invade Iraq.
The President also suggested that America should support the deal because just about everyone else in the world supports the agreement except Israel.
At first, the argument may draw the same response my mother used to give: "If everyone jumped off of the Empire State Building..." But, with all due respect to my mom, let's concentrate on the accuracy of the president's words:
So this deal is not just the best choice among alternatives, this is the strongest nonproliferation agreement ever negotiated, and because this is such a strong deal, every nation in the world that has commented publicly, with the exception of the Israeli government, has expressed support.
Most of the Gulf States opposing the deal have done so directly to the U.S. without making their objections public. However, the Saudi Kingdom has made public statements indicating an objection to the deal.
A member of the Saudi Arabian royal family, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, told Lebanon’s Daily Star the deal would allow Iran to acquire a nuclear bomb and would “wreak havoc in the region." The prince also told Daily Star, "Saudi Arabia and the Gulf powers are prepared to take military action without American support after the Iran nuclear deal."
Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist with ties to the royal family, recently said that because of the Iran deal the kingdom is pursuing nuclear weapons.
Still, Obama tried to set up Israel as the sole "bad guy" opposed to his progressive base.
Obama indicated that, in the U.S., Republicans were merely being partisan by criticizing the Iran deal:
Unfortunately, we're living through a time in American politics where every foreign policy decision is viewed through a partisan prison, evaluated by headline-grabbing soundbites, and so before the ink was even dry on this deal, before Congress even read it, a majority of Republicans declared their virulent opposition.
And:
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.
This statement belies the truth. A Quinnipiac University Poll released Monday morning reports that American voters oppose the Iran deal by a two-to-one (57%-28%) margin. Republicans oppose the deal by a huge 86-3% margin, but Independents also oppose the deal by a huge 55-29% margin. In fact, it could be argued that it is the Democrats who are being partisan - because they are the only group supporting the deal (by 52%-32%) that some say is designed to cement their president's foreign policy legacy.
Obama repeated his contention that the only alternative to the deal is war. "Congressional rejection of this deal" he said, "leaves any U.S. administration that is absolutely committed to preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon with one option, another war in the Middle East. I say this not to be provocative; I am stating a fact."
However, French diplomatic official Jacques Audibert, who amongst other things was leader of the French diplomatic team negotiating with Iran as part of the the P5+1 group, disagrees:
Earlier this month, he met with Democrat Loretta Sanchez and Republican Mike Turner, both top members of the House Armed Services Committee, to discuss the Iran deal. The U.S. ambassador to France, Jane Hartley, was also in the room.
According to both lawmakers, Audibert expressed support for the deal overall, but also directly disputed Kerry’s claim that a Congressional rejection of the Iran deal would result in the worst of all worlds, the collapse of sanctions and Iran racing to the bomb without restrictions.
“He basically said, if Congress votes this down, there will be some saber-rattling and some chaos for a year or two, but in the end nothing will change and Iran will come back to the table to negotiate again and that would be to our advantage,” Sanchez told me in an interview. “He thought if the Congress voted it down, that we could get a better deal.”
In a conference call with over 10,000 Americans on Tuesday, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu pointed out how illogical Obama's "deal or war" argument is:
Yet there’s one claim that is the most outrageous: that those who oppose this deal want war. That’s utterly false. We in Israel don’t want war. We want peace. Because it’s we who are on the front lines. We face Iran’s terror on three borders. We face tens of thousands of Iranian rockets aimed at all our cities. We face Iran, whose regime repeatedly calls for the destruction of the Jewish state. We face Iran whose terrorist proxies try to kill Jews every day.
If you want to read the entire 6,270 word speech, you can find it posted here.