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What Should We Say to Democratic Congressmen about Iran?
Congress will have a recess period before it votes on the Vienna Agreement with Iran via the Corker bill. Anyone who has both Republican senators and a Republican representative will almost certainly have no need to convince them to vote against the agreement.
All the action is, therefore, with the Democrats. It was Milton Friedman who said that the secret of good government is “making it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing.” That is precisely the task at hand over the next seven weeks.
I’m a spectator because I live in a state with two Republican senators and my representative is a member of the Republican leadership. No need to worry about how they will vote!
What should people here who are less fortunate be doing in the next seven weeks to stop the Vienna Agreement?
I’m not sure I would know how to talk to a Democrat politician in a way that would convince him to do something I want him to do. Invoke the ghost of Scoop Jackson? Ask them what they think Jack Kennedy would do about this?
I am serious about asking this question because I would like to see a groundswell that moved the “persuadables” in the Democratic party into doing the right thing. A groundswell has to start somewhere.
Why not here?
Published in Foreign Policy, Politics
Technical question — is there a specific bill with a specific name? Or is the “Iran deal” the only term we have right now?
It’s the Iran deal or more formally the Vienna Agreement (which evokes the Munich Agreement in my opinion). There is not going to be a bill as much as it will be a resolution of disapproval.
In my opinion the Republicans should pass a resolution, at least in the House, the states that the Congress views the Vienna Agreement as an anti-constitutional treaty without legal validity unless it gets a 2/3 majority vote of the Senate, which it won’t.
The Corker bill should be treated as breached by Obama because he has failed to provide copies of all the side agreements (see news reports today) AND he added conventional weapons and ICBM provisions to the agreement when it was supposed to be only about nuclear weapons. However that is a separate issue from getting enough Dems to vote for the disapproval resolution.
Throw in a point about $150 billion of money given to Tehran because frozen accounts are turned over to them. A lot of that money will go to efforts to kill Americans.
I would add the point that the Democrats should not sacrifice national security to Obama’s grandiose ambitions. If “national security” is going to be a big issue in the 2016 election, do they want to be on the wrong side of that issue?
Sound like you actually care whether the Democrats lose more seats in Congress in 2016. Do McDermott et al want to be in the minority permanently while members of the U.S. House of Representatives? From what I hear it’s no fun being a minority member there.
Sadly “Baghdad Jim” McDermott has shown an affection in the past for enemies of America and so there is no telling what he thinks of the genocidal mullahs in Tehran.
That’s what I was wondering — if the resolution of disapproval had any technical reference yet. I suppose “vote for a resolution of disapproval of the Vienna Agreement” does the job.
I agree. Partly because it’s an outrage. Partly because, if I remember right, someone in the administration basically admitted they know that’s what Iran will do with it. Partly because, for very good reasons, it will be a major Republican talking point next year.
From Lensman:
“The Corker bill should be treated as breached by Obama because he has failed to provide copies of all the side agreements (see news reports today) AND he added conventional weapons and ICBM provisions to the agreement when it was supposed to be only about nuclear weapons.”
This has been my thought as the details of this have become clearer. If we had strong leadership in the Senate, they could form a case to treat the agreement as a treaty, and process it as such. I think this would have better optics than the Corker bill.
Advice for our next president (Rick Perry?): The entire center of Iran is unoccupied. Drop enough bombs there to create a 5 mile deep crater. Then call up the Ayatollah and say, “We’d like to renegotiate the nuclear agreement that my predecessor foolishly signed. We can obviously end your nuclear program by turning it into molten glass, but we really don’t like hurting people if we don’t have to.”
An offer they can’t refuse per The Godfather.
I like the idea of a demonstration to show that we can bomb anything we want to hit. I don’t think anything in the inventory will create a crater that is even 1000 feet deep, much less 25,000 feet.
The bigger problem is what some experts have mentioned about Iran: Mutual Assured Destruction is not a deterrent with the mullahs. It’s an incentive. There is a martyr complex with that crowd.
Also there is a 12th Imam prophecy that involves an apocalyptic war presaging the return of the Missing (12th) Imam. He will return by “climbing out of a well” in a particular location in Iran. Reportedly the Iranian government has built a road from that well to make it easier for him to return. Why he is at the bottom of a well or will come from there is not clear to me.
Lyndon Johnson screwed up the war in 1965-68 when he treated the rulers of North Vietnam as if they were just like the Senators he used to negotiate with when he was majority leader there. Obama is making a similar mistake and seems to believe that Ayatollah Khamenei is just like the crooked pols he knew in Chicago. They just want “respectability” and to re-join the “community of nations.”
Remember the line from Goldfinger when Bond says that he won’t talk when he is tied to a table and threatened with a deadly laser beam? Goldfinger replies, “I don’t want you to talk, Mr. Bond. I want you to die.”
Death to America is a policy besides being a slogan. Ask your Democrat Reps and Senators if they want to bet America’s security and their chances of being re-elected on the proposition that Khamenei is lying about that.
So bomb every well in Iran. Make a desert and call it peace.
When Tacitus originally coined the phrase, “make a desert and call it peace” he was not being complimentary. He thought how Rome handled the situation in Spain to be a low point in its history.
Proof that every society has peaceniks who believe in coddling enemies.