Critics of the preliminary deal over Iran’s nuclear program are now claiming that they would have cut a better, more stringent deal than President Obama has achieved.
“Is there a better deal to be had?” U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said over the weekend. “I think so. What I would suggest is, if you can’t get there with this deal, is to keep the interim deal in place, allow a new president in 2017, Democrat or Republican, to take a crack at the Iranian nuclear program.”
“The best deal I think comes with a new president. Hillary Clinton would do better. I think everybody on (the Republican) side except maybe Rand Paul could do better.”
Graham and his allies, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, are arguing nonsense. To credibly claim that they would have negotiated a better deal, they would have to be willing to negotiate with Iran in the first place. And they have repeatedly, emphatically insisted that they are not. If they had their way, they wouldn’t have a better deal, they would have no deal.
From the beginning, they have opposed negotiation, period. They attacked Obama as naive to believe that a deal could be reached, and many predicted that he would never be able to build international support for sanctions tough enough to force Iran to the negotiating table. They have treated war as inevitable, as our only real option. Graham himself has advocated war since at least 2010, proposing not just “a surgical strike on (Iran’s) nuclear infrastructure,” but a major war to also destroy Iran’s navy, air force and Revolutionary Guard.
So when Obama announced in 2013 that an interim agreement with Iran had been reached, and that Iran had agreed to roll back its nuclear program as an act of good faith while more intense negotiations took place, Graham was apoplectic. He strongly condemned the interim agreement — the very same interim agreement that he now wants to extend indefinitely — and suggested that Iran would cheat on it. (It has not.)
Netanyahu likewise condemned that 2013 interim agreement as an “historic mistake” and began immediate and ongoing efforts to undermine it. He has expressed no interest whatsoever in seeing talks succeed, in part because he does not believe that any deal can be verified. And if that’s your attitude — if you reject the approach of “trust but verify” that Ronald Reagan took in arms talks with the Soviet Union — then there’s no deal that you are willing to accept.
It’s important to acknowledge that in the end, Graham, Netanyahu, U.S. Sen. David Perdue and others critical of this deal might still prove correct. It is still quite plausible that a final deal can’t be reached, that hardliners in Iran will succeed in stopping it just as hardliners in this country are attempting to do, or that once a deal is in place, Iran will prove unwilling to live by it. Any of that could still happen.
But if it does, all of the options that are available to us today, including military action, would still be available to us then. In fact, if Iran is caught cheating, we and our allies would enjoy considerable international support for doing whatever is then deemed necessary as a response. If that includes war, it is at least war as a last option, not a first option.
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