A Raw Deal

One reason I love to read Nietzsche is that he rails against “herd animalism.”  Like Nietzsche, I prefer people to act like individuals, not lemmings, which is why I hate political partisanship.  Political partisans refuse to buck their party’s conventional wisdom no matter what the issue.   Always, always, always they’re on the same side of the political fence.  Some call them knee-jerks.  Others call them followers.  I just call them boring. 

Consider, for example, that the same Democratic partisans who invariably rail against Republicans whenever they get involved in sexual scandals loyally defended Bill Clinton during the Lewinsky matter.   I remember those nightly talk shows, when they came in droves to spew the party mantra.  First, they’d offer some brief perfunctory noise against the President’s dalliance with an intern, and then, despite the fact that this President had to know that he’d be under a sexual microscope because of his past misconduct, they’d launch into a ten minute attack against the Republicans for making a mountain out of a molehill.  They took what we all now know to be a serious issue and completely minimized its importance.  Despite having once joined Clinton’s “Saxophone Club,” I was exasperated by his recklessness and by my party’s refusal to call a spade a spade.  Noting that I had never once voted against the Democrats – neither for President nor for any other position -- I made it a bucket list item to someday vote for a Republican.

Soon thereafter, maverick John McCain threatened to win the GOP nomination and take on Al Gore, who as a communicator was as phony as he was wooden.  I resolved to vote for McCain in the general election.  Well, we all know what happened next.  Bush Jr. pulled out dirty tricks that were straight out of his father’s anti-Dukakis campaign book, McCain lost the nomination, and by the time “the maverick” won it eight years later, the GOP had moved so far to the right that it was anything but conservative, it was reactionary.  The dream of voting for one of these politicians was removed from my bucket list.  To this day, I’ve still never been tempted to vote for an elephant when it came time to pull the lever. 

But that still doesn’t mean I always have to agree with my party’s conventional wisdom.  Recently, in fact, I’ve found myself once again at odds with it.  The trigger was Trump’s decision to withdraw from Obama’s Iran deal.   Am I thrilled with what he did?  No, I’m not even saying I’d make the same decision.  But hearing about this deal reminded me of how much I hated the way Democrats touted it when it was originally signed and how they still praise it today. 

Obama clearly saw the Iran deal as the singular foreign policy achievement of his presidency.  Today, in his Washington Post column, Eugene Robinson claimed that the deal “actually ... was quite good.”    And earlier in the week, Susan Rice took to the op-ed pages of the New York Times to exclaim that the deal “worked as intended” and that pulling out of it was “Trump’s most foolish decision yet.” 

Really?  This was the worst thing Trump ever did?  That must have been one hell of a deal. 

As Rice acknowledged, the Iran deal was “never intended, nor was it able, to address Iran’s ... support for terrorism, malign influence in neighboring countries [or its] ballistic missile program.” But she went on to defend the agreement by saying that “Iran’s nefarious activities would be far more dangerous if they were backed by a nuclear capability.  By withdrawing from the deal, we have weakened our ability to address these other concerns.” 

Perhaps she’s right.  Then again, let’s take a little time to consider the perspective of the deal’s critics. 

For years, Iran’s leaders – much to the chagrin of millions of peace-loving Iranian citizens – have supported violence and instability throughout the Middle East.  You’ll find the fruits of their efforts in Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine, among other places. Wherever the demand exists for the weapons of terror, the Iranians will make damned sure there’s a supply.  The result is that our so-called allies in the region, like the Israelis and Saudi Arabians, live in fear.

That was the situation the leaders of the free world faced when it came time to make a deal.  It remains the situation today.  Only now, thanks to this swell deal my party keeps touting, tens of billions of dollars were freed up and provided to Iran’s leaders so that they could, oh I don’t know, support the Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas, and those lovely chemical-weapons-using allies in Syria.  What’s more, this deal removed the prospect of ongoing economic sanctions against Iran and thereby will continue on an ongoing basis to free up even more money for the regime to play with.

I realize that the Iran deal has its virtues, which Rice attempted to highlight in her column.    “Iran,” she boasts, “has fully complied with its obligations. As required, Iran relinquished 97 percent of its enriched uranium stockpile, dismantled two-thirds of its centrifuges and its entire plutonium facility, abided by the most intrusive international inspection and monitoring regime in history, and forswore ever producing a nuclear weapon.” 

That’s one way of putting it.  Another is that under the deal, in addition to pocketing tons of money, Iran has been able to maintain enough of its nuclear capabilities that in 20 years, when the deal’s prohibitions sunset, it will be able to freely construct a nuclear arsenal without having violated any international treaty.  Indeed, the only protection the deal provides against such a turn of events in the future is to trust the Iranian leadership at present when they “forswear” that they will never produce a nuke.  Do you trust them?  Have they earned that trust?

Ultimately, the fans of the Iran deal claim to be hopeful that returning money to that nation’s economy will usher in a period of prosperity and thereby promote regime change.  But why is that likely?   I expect instead that the same ruthless folks who’ve been terrorizing the Middle East throughout my adult lifetime will continue to remain in control of their country.   The difference is that they’ll have more resources with which to wage conventional wars during the next 20 years, and more freedom to accumulate nuclear weapons thereafter.  None of this feels reassuring.

So why then am I not thrilled with Trump’s decision?  Because whatever leverage the free world had to strike a proper deal has long gone.  The big bucks have already been released to Iran and the rest of the world no longer has any stomach for sanctions.  In other words, by the time Trump took office, the foxes had already been allowed into the hen house, and we Americans couldn’t close the front door if we wanted to.    

When I think of Rice’s justification for the deal, I’m reminded of two sentences quoted above, which bear repeating: “Iran’s nefarious activities would be far more dangerous if they were backed by a nuclear capability.  By withdrawing from the deal, we have weakened our ability to address these other concerns.”  In theory, she may have a point.  In practice, we never did show much ability to address those “other concerns.”  In Syria, for example, her administration (Obama’s) knew that Iran was in bed with Assad’s murderers, who gassed and shot the Syrian people like vermin.  Yet despite the common knowledge that neither the Iranians nor the Syrians could fight back with nukes, we still didn’t lift a finger to stop the carnage.  It turned out that they didn’t need the nukes after all – all they needed was their savagery and our apathy.   That was a sad part of the legacy of Obama’s national security team – that and patting itself on the back for an agreement that only Neville Chamberlain should love.  

In essence, the terrorists of Tehran have proven that they don’t need nukes to support the slaughter of innocent human beings and that the rest of the world frequently lacks the passion to respond.   Maybe our lack of response is preferable to reckless warmongerism.  But that doesn’t explain why we’d free up scores of billions of dollars for these terror-peddlers to play with.  Or why we’d take comfort in a provision that requires them to strip down their nuclear arsenal, but only briefly.  Or why we thought that, despite being a pariah state, Iran had so much leverage when we negotiated the deal that we couldn’t demand more from them on the military front in return for all we’re prepared to do for them economically. 

Sorry, but I still don’t get why that deal was “actually ... quite good” or why Obama seemed more passionate about it than any other achievement of his presidency. 

Of course, I freely acknowledge that I could be missing something in my reasoning.  I’m not an Iran expert.  Maybe my party’s conventional wisdom is right after all.  But as a citizen, I’ve got to call every issue as I see it.  And when it comes to my political party, I’ve got to buck its conventional wisdom from time to time whenever my voice of reason tells me to.  I owe that much to Nietzsche, not to mention empathic rationalism.