By Rich Lowry
Wednesday, March 11, 2015
Tom Cotton hasn’t been frog-marched from the Russell
Senate Office Building — yet.
To believe the Arkansas senator’s harshest critics,
that’s only because felonious traitors don’t get the punishment they deserve.
Earlier in the week, Cotton wrote an open letter to the
leaders of Iran pointing out true and obvious things about our constitutional
system, and the world came crashing down on his head. Disgracing the Senate,
per a hyperventilating Vice President Joe Biden, was the least of his supposed
offenses. He was aiding Iranian hard-liners, violating the Logan Act and
committing an act of treason. If there were any doubt about the latter, the New
York Daily News ran a picture of him on its front page, along with some
Republican co-signatories, with the subtle headline, “TRAITORS.” It seems like
just yesterday that the political class was experiencing convulsions of outrage
over Rudy Giuliani saying that President Barack Obama doesn’t love America. All
the great and good agreed that questioning someone’s patriotism is so far out
of bounds that any presidential candidate who didn’t denounce it had
disqualified himself for high office.
That was then (i.e., three weeks ago). Cotton’s alleged
sedition is hard to fathom. It’s not as though he wrote secret letters to the
Iranians (that’s what Obama has made a practice of doing). It’s not as though
he traveled to a foreign country to glad-hand a foreign thug in an express
effort to undermine the president’s foreign policy (that’s what then-Speaker
Nancy Pelosi did when she went to Damascus and met with Bashar Assad). Cotton
wrote a letter, got 46 other Republicans to sign it and posted it on his
website. As Brian Beutler of The New Republic pointed out, the letter is
functionally indistinguishable from an op-ed. We are usually not in the
practice of accusing people of felonies for things they write, even on college
campuses.
It’s a trope among Cotton’s critics, who clearly think
they are subjecting him to a killer jiujitsu move, that he is allying himself
with Iran’s hard-liners. On the Senate floor, Sen. Debbie Stabenow accused him
of standing “on the side of the ayatollahs and the most extreme voices in
Iran.” Fred Kaplan of Slate asked, “Do the senators think they’ll score points
by cozying up to Ayatollah Khamenei?”
This is a hilarious plaint after Obama went out of his
way in 2009 to say nothing when the Iranian regime was crushing the country’s
true moderates who were out in the streets in the short-lived Green Revolution.
Do Cotton’s antagonists not realize that Iranian nuclear negotiator Mohammad
Javad Zarif works for Khamenei and that if there is any deal, the Supreme
Leader will have to sign off on it? It is Obama who has been wooing — cozying
up to, in Kaplan’s phrase — the most powerful hard-liner in Iran, unless we are
supposed to believe that Khamenei himself is now a moderate.
The contents of Cotton’s letter shouldn’t have been news
to anyone. If the mullahs weren’t already aware that there is bipartisan
opposition in Congress to any likely deal and the agreement won’t have the
force of a treaty, they need to watch more C-SPAN and read up on the U.S.
Constitution.
It is inarguable that as a matter of domestic law a
subsequent president can get out of the agreement at will — this would be true
even if it were a treaty — and Congress can pass laws in contravention of the
agreement, if a president will sign them. If these are things the Iranians
don’t know, and John Kerry hasn’t let them in on the joke in Geneva, shouldn’t
someone tell them?
Whenever there is contention over U.S. foreign policy,
the hoary cliché is trotted out that politics once stopped at the water’s edge.
But a golden age of consensus in U.S. foreign policy never existed, except
perhaps immediately after World War II. Anyone who thinks otherwise missed the
Quasi-War of the 1790s, the Mexican-American War of the 1840s, the League of
Nations debate of 1919-1920, the Vietnam War of the 1970s and the Iraq War of
the 2000s — among other divisive and poisonously political foreign policy
questions throughout American history.
What is notable about the foreign policy debate in the
Age of Obama is that it represents the world turned upside down. In the
president’s transposition of the norms of American foreign policy, inviting the
leader of a close ally to address Congress is an affront and forging a — to put
it gently — highly generous deal with an enemy is such an urgent necessity that
no one should say a discouraging word. A more confident administration would
have brushed off Speaker John Boehner’s invitation to Bibi Netanyahu, as well
as the Cotton letter. The Obama administration is so defensive because it has a
lot to be defensive about.
It has been outnegotiated by the Iranians, who have
steadily moved the terms of a deal in their direction. Once, we wanted to
prevent Iran from having a nuclear-weapons capability. Once, we wanted zero
enrichment and zero centrifuges, and so did the United Nations. Those goals
have long since been abandoned by an Obama administration desperate for a deal,
any deal, so it can include an opening to Iran among the president’s legacy
achievements. So, here is my own seditious foray into directly interfering with
the conduct of U.S. foreign policy — if I really want to skirt the Logan Act, I
will write it on a postcard, put a stamp on it and drop it in the corner
mailbox:
To Whom It May Concern in Tehran,
You are unlikely to ever encounter someone this weak and
credulous again in the Oval Office.
Sincerely,
Rich Lowry
The president used to say that no deal is better than a
bad deal. Now, that line is inoperative. It’s any deal is better than no deal,
and woe to anyone who dares say otherwise.
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