The Republican Iran Letter Is the Perfect Neoconservative Fiasco

[applegrove]

The Republican Iran Letter Is the Perfect Neoconservative Fiasco

By Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/03/iran-letter-is-perfect-neoconservative-fiasco.html

"SNIP................



The letter episode contains all the characteristic traits of a neoconservative project. First, of course, is the wild confrontationalism, which in this case was directed not against Iran but against the Obama administration. It may not be treason for the Senate to undermine the president’s negotiations with a foreign power, but it surely represents the bluntest and most hostile possible exercise of opposition to the executive branch’s strategy. Kristol’s advice in any situation, domestic or foreign, is for his side to display maximum belligerence, and the Cotton letter reflected that impulse.

Second, the letter was drafted and signed with maximum haste and a total contempt for planning or serious thought of any kind. “It was kind of a very rapid process. Everybody was looking forward to getting out of town because of the snowstorm,” confessed John McCain. “Many of the 47 signatories reasoned that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s endorsement was vetting enough,” notes former Bush administration speechwriter Michael Gerson, disgustedly. “There was no caucus-wide debate about strategy; no consultation with Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), who has studiously followed the nuclear talks (and who refused to sign).” Most people who signed on did so because they assumed somebody else had thought through the details. It was the Iraq invasion of foreign-policy maneuvers.

Third, the ploy has failed even by the standards of its own logic. The neoconservative plan for Iran is to undermine Obama’s Iran deal and replace it with what Benjamin Netanyahu called, vaguely, a “better deal.” The sequence of this strategy requires getting a bipartisan Senate group to impose more stringent sanctions on Iran, thus forcing Iran away from the table, and then securing international cooperation for stricter sanctions.

This plan never had much chance of success. But Cotton’s letter makes the chances much more remote. The partisanship of the letter undermines the prospects of any additional Democrats giving the Iran sanctions bill the veto-proof majority it needs. And if Iran does walk away from negotiations, it will argue that negotiations were sabotaged by Republican ultrahawks, not its own recalcitrance. That would make the international cooperation required for effective sanctions even harder to round up. As Gerson puts it, “this approach depends on the tightening of sanctions in cooperation with Europe, as well as Russia and China. And this effort can be held together only by the impression that the United States has negotiated with Iran in good faith.”




..............SNIP"

[Kalidurga]

1. That is a lot of words for...

Republicans are stupid.

[blm]

2. It really does illustrate exactly who they have become.

.

[Gothmog]

3. Good aryicle