If you haven’t already, check out President Obama’s speech on the Iran nuke deal. He makes a convincing argument for supporting the agreement and provides a plausible overview of what will happen if Congress doesn’t approve it.
Come for the well-reasoned summation, but stay to hear PBO strip the bark off the always-wrong neocons. Here’s an excerpt that explains the high-pitched squealing you heard yesterday, as if a million neocons suddenly cried out in rage and were suddenly silenced:
Between now and the congressional vote in September, you are going to hear a lot of arguments against this deal, backed by tens of millions of dollars in advertising. 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.
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.
And, of course, those calling for war labeled themselves strong and decisive while dismissing those who disagreed as weak, even appeasers of a malevolent adversary.
More than a decade later, we still live with the consequences of the decision to invade Iraq. Our troops achieved every mission they were given, but thousands of lives were lost, tens of thousands wounded. That doesn’t count the lives lost among Iraqis. Nearly a trillion dollars was spent.
Today, Iraq remains gripped by sectarian conflict, and the emergence of al-Qaida in Iraq has now evolved into ISIL. And ironically, the single greatest beneficiary in the region of that war was the Islamic Republic of Iran, which saw its strategic position strengthened by the removal of its long-standing enemy, Saddam Hussein.
[snip]I recognize that resorting to force may be tempting in the face of the rhetoric and behavior that emanates from parts of Iran. It is offensive. It is incendiary. We do take it seriously.
But superpowers should not act impulsively in response to taunts or even provocations that can be addressed short of war. Just because Iranian hardliners chant “Death to America” does not mean that that’s what all Iranians believe. In fact, it’s those…
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.
The same people who have spent the last six years baselessly accusing the president of being a stealth-jihadist, anti-American, Israel-hating, limp-wristed appeaser / power-mad dictator haven’t been silenced, of course: They are meeping all over the Internet like schoolyard bullies who just took a shot in the stones.
But it’s a somewhat muted meeping. Like his predecessor Harry S. Truman, President Obama didn’t give them hell; he told the truth, and they thought it was hell.
About Those High-Pitched Squeals You Heard Yesterday…Post + Comments (172)
