Tag: iran letter
Making A Fetish Of John McCain

Making A Fetish Of John McCain

Its futility makes me so weary it’s hard to type the question, but I’ll type it anyway: Why do the elite Washington media, especially the influential Sunday morning shows, continue to pay deference to, and take seriously, the opinions of John McCain?

Put another way: What would it take for the elite Washington media to reconsider their fealty to McCain? What would the Arizona senator have to do to disqualify himself as the authoritative voice on national security issues, military affairs, and patriotism?

I don’t mean to suggest that McCain would have to do something disreputable, like commit a crime. But if I were a producer for one of the broadcast TV shows, like Meet the Press, I’d ask myself: Does the man whose reputation rests on his dedication to duty, honor, and sacrifice deserve such a reputation in light of recent moves to privilege the Republican Party over the United States?

Before I go on, please note this complaint of mine is just one of many — many! — complaints among media watchers. Paul Waldman, over at The American Prospect, has kvetched for years about McCain’s “mavericky maverickness.” He wrote an entire book about it. So don’t take my complaint as new or even influential. My aim is to note merely how this latest episode is a clear example of McCain’s long con on the media. It illuminates his using the veil of patriotism to shroud what is plainly partisan politics.

What episode? You already know. McCain was one of 47 U.S. senators, led by Tom Cotton of Arkansas, to sign a letter to the Iranian government, saying any deal over its nuclear program with the current President of the United States could be — and, by implication, would be — nullified by the election of a Republican president. In other words, the man who represents the United States to the world is not really the man who represents the United States to the world, because he belongs to the wrong party.

This was further complicated when McCain publicly called into question the credibility of Secretary of State John Kerry after news broke of an agreement between the nations over the framework of a nuclear deal. And there’s more! McCain said he trusted the judgment of Iran’s Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, over Kerry’s. Clearly, the enemy of his enemy is his friend.

This is in keeping with the regular habit of his fellow Republicans to elevate the interests of party over the interests of country, as Slate‘s William Saletan minutely detailed in an article titled “Why Do Republicans Keep Siding With America’s Enemies?”

I’d add only a representative remark by presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee. He recently advised any young person desiring to serve her country in the armed forces to wait until 2017. Why? Because Barack Obama is not a Republican.

“Wait a couple of years until we get a new commander in chief that will once again believe ‘One Nation under God,’ and believe that people of faith should be a vital part of the process of not only governing this country, but defending this country,” he said.

You might say: Well, McCain signed the letter only because his party wanted him to. That’s not the real John McCain. The real John McCain is an independent voice, a bipartisan figure who often challenges his party. In other words, a maverick.

McCain did memorably use the term “wacko birds” in 2013 to describe Senate Republicans like Rand Paul who were carping about the nomination of John Brennan as CIA director. (Paul didn’t like that Obama’s drone policy was Brennan’s brainchild.) And indeed, McCain might place Huckabee in the same “wacko bird” category.

But if McCain’s voting record is any indication — truly, it is the only indicator of a U.S. senator’s character that matters — McCain sides with the Republican Party’s “wacko birds” almost uniformly. And if he sides with the wacko birds almost uniformly, then there’s no significant difference between McCain and the wacko birds.

You might also say: Come on. The real John McCain isn’t a wacko bird. OK, I say, then the real one is feckless. According to Politico‘s Burgess Everett, McCain signed the letter without much thought. “It was kind of a very rapid process,” he said. “Everybody was looking forward to getting out of town because of the snowstorm. I think we probably should have had more discussion about it, given the blowback that there is.”

In other words, he only did what his party asked of him.

In other words, John McCain is a Republican partisan.

How, then, we do understand the Washington media’s universal portrayal of John McCain as a “maverick”? Waldman says it comes from mastering the art of flattery. McCain, he says, “spent a couple of decades massaging their egos and convincing them that he was their best buddy, an investment that paid off splendidly.”

I don’t doubt it, but I’d add another perspective.

John McCain, I suspect, might be better understood as a metaphor, as a mental projection of what the elite Washington media believes a man dedicated to duty, honor, and sacrifice would look like. And John McCain, knowing that few journalists personally know anyone who served in the military, much less saw mortal combat or, like him, experienced life as a prisoner of war, exploited that mental projection to the hilt. These same journalists, I would guess, are as awed by his biography as they are by anyone who can pull the levers of power in Washington. Put it together, and you have not so much a human being as a fetish: a there that isn’t there.

Given the state of the Washington media, I suppose a fetish is as good a reason for John McCain’s ubiquity as any other. As I said, nothing is going to change. Just asking why anyone takes him seriously is exhausting. And for that reason, I’ll stop asking.

John Stoehr is the managing editor of The Washington Spectator. Follow him @johnastoehr.

Photo: Marc Nozell via Flickr

Tom Cotton Slams Obama For Undermining Foreign Negotiations, Kills Irony

Tom Cotton Slams Obama For Undermining Foreign Negotiations, Kills Irony

Move over Dick Cheney; Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) has grabbed the mantle of “least self-aware politician in America.”

Over the past 10 days, Senator Cotton has been the subject of bipartisan criticism for organizing a letter — signed by 46 of his Senate colleagues — that attempted to dissuade Iran from agreeing to a deal on its nuclear program with the Obama administration. A week earlier, Cotton strongly supported House Speaker John Boehner’s controversial decision to invite Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to deliver a speech to Congress warning Americans against signing an agreement with Iran.

But, as Steve Benen flagged at MSNBC, Cotton appears to have had a change of heart on the topic of undermining diplomacy. On Wednesday, State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki said that the Obama administration is “evaluating our approach” towards the partnership with Israel in the wake of Netanyahu’s inflammatory comments during his re-election campaign. And that’s a big problem for the freshman senator from Arkansas.

“Some observers will dismiss these comments as the petulant response of a president and political operatives who didn’t get their way in the elections this week. But there is something much more worrisome underway,” Cotton said on the Senate floor on Thursday. “While Prime Minister Netanyahu won a decisive victory, he still has just started assembling a governing majority coalition.”

“These kinds of quotes from Israel’s most important ally could very well startle some of the smaller parties and their leaders with whom Prime Minister Netanyahu is currently in negotiations,” he continued. “This raises the question, of course, if the administration intends to undermine Prime Minister Netanyahu’s efforts to assemble a coalition by suggesting a change to our longstanding policy of supporting Israel’s position with the United Nations.”

Yes, less than a week after sending a letter to Tehran in an open attempt to submarine the negotiations between that country and the United States, China, France, Germany, Russia, and the U.K., Tom Cotton is suddenly worried that the Obama administration could be meddling in other countries’ affairs.

For good measure, Cotton added, “I fear mutual respect is of little concern to this administration.”

This brand of projection is nothing new for Cotton — see his attempt to dodge blame for voting against the farm bill during his 2014 Senate campaign — but it’s still rather unbecoming of a politician who claims honesty as one of his key attributes.

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

Cotton And The War Caucus Count On Constituents’ Ignorance

Cotton And The War Caucus Count On Constituents’ Ignorance

When a Man’s fancy gets astride on his Reason;

When Imagination is at Cuffs with the Senses; and

common Understanding, as well as common Sense,

is Kickt out of Doors; the first Proselyte he makes,

is Himself.

Jonathan Swift, 1704

As near as I can determine, Senator Tom Cotton’s biggest worry about Iran is that its government is as bellicose and fanatical as he is.

The good news is that based on the Islamic Republic’s response to the condescending, adolescent tone of the “open letter” he and 46 Republican senators addressed to Iran’s leaders, that seems unlikely. Judging by their measured responses, Iranian politicians appear to understand that they weren’t its real audience.

Rather, it was a grandstand play directed at Cotton’s own constituents among the GOP’s unappeasable Tea Party base. Its actual purpose was to express contempt and defiance toward President Obama, always popular among the Fox News white-bread demographic — basically the same motive that led Cotton to repeat Obama’s name 74 times during a 2014 election debate with Senator Mark Pryor.

That big doodyhead Barack Obama’s not the boss of them.

Except that particularly with regard to foreign policy, he is. But hold that thought.

Javad Zarif, the American-educated Iranian foreign minister involved in intense negotiations with Secretary of State John Kerry, observed that the senators’ letter has “no legal value and is mostly a propaganda ploy.”

The Persian diplomat pointed out that the agreement’s not being hashed out between the U.S. and Iran, but also among Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China. Any deal would be put before the UN Security Council and have the force of international law.

A future U.S. president could renounce it, but at significant political cost unless Iran clearly violated its terms.

Slate’s Fred Kaplan points out chief executives from FDR and Reagan to George W. Bush have negotiated arms control deals negotiated in ports of call from Yalta to Helsinki. “In other words,” Kaplan writes, “contrary to the letter writers, Congress has no legal or constitutional role in the drafting, approval, or modification of this deal.”

Presidents negotiate arms agreements, not raw-carrot freshman senators.

Iran’s crafty old “Supreme Leader” Ayatollah Khamenei lamented “the decay of political ethics in the American system,” but added that he stood by the process. “Every time we reach a stage where the end of the negotiations is in sight,” Khamenei said, “the tone of the other side, specifically the Americans, becomes harsher, coarser and tougher.”

Los Angeles Times columnist Doyle McManus reported the score: “Qom Theological Seminary 1, Harvard Law 0. When an ayatollah sounds more statesmanlike than the U.S. Senate, it’s not a good sign.”

Bargaining is practically the Persian national sport. They’re inclined to see a my-way-or-the-highway type like Tom Cotton as unserious and immature.

As if to confirm that impression, the Arkansas senator took his newfound notoriety to CBS’s Face the Nation, where he complained about Iran’s growing “empire.”

“They already control Tehran, increasingly they control Damascus and Beirut and Baghdad and now Sana’a as well,” Cotton said. “They do all that without a nuclear weapon. Imagine what they would do with a nuclear weapon.”

You read that correctly. Arkansas’ brilliant Harvard law graduate complained about Iran’s control of Tehran — the nation’s capital since 1796.

As for Iran’s alleged “control” of Baghdad, you’d think an Iraq veteran like Cotton would have some clue how that came about. Hint: President George W. Bush invaded Iraq. The Bush administration deposed Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein, whose invasion of neighboring Iran led to an eight-year war killing roughly a million people. They installed as prime minister Nouri al Maliki, a Shiite nationalist who’d spent 24 years exiled in, yes, Iran.

How Iranian-armed Shiite militias came to be leading the fight against ISIS terrorists west of Baghdad is that the Iraqi government begged for their help. It’s in Tehran’s national interest to defeat ISIS even more than in Washington’s. Can this possibly be news to Cotton?

Probably not, but he can count on his constituents’ ignorance. It would be astonishing if 20 percent of Arkansas voters could locate Iran on a world map, much less grasp that if Iran looks stronger, it’s because the U.S. keeps attacking its enemies. “Like all the Iran hawks before him,” Daniel Larison writes in American Conservative, “Cotton claims to fear growing Iranian influence while supporting policies that have facilitated its growth.”

For President Obama, a verifiable agreement preventing the Iranian regime from developing nuclear weapons they say they don’t want could be a diplomatic triumph, reshaping the entire Middle East without firing a shot.

To the War Party, that would be a bad thing. Meanwhile, Tom Cotton gave his first speech in the U.S. Senate, prating about “global military dominance” and “hegemonic strength” like the villain in a James Bond movie.

It was a performance calculated to make him a star.

Photo: U.S. senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas and former ambassador John Bolton speaking at the 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, MD. (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)

Iranian Leaders ‘Clearly’ Got Senate Letter Message, Cotton Says

Iranian Leaders ‘Clearly’ Got Senate Letter Message, Cotton Says

By Kathleen Hunter, Bloomberg News (TNS)

WASHINGTON — Iranian leaders “clearly have the message now” from a letter that 47 Senate Republicans wrote warning that a future U.S. Congress could reverse any nuclear deal, the chief author said Tuesday.

President Barack Obama views the Republican-led Congress as a “nuisance,” said freshman Senator Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, as he defended the letter following criticism from U.S. allies and lawmakers including some fellow Republicans.

“This president views Congress as an afterthought,” Cotton said at a breakfast with Bloomberg reporters and editors in Washington. “Iran’s leaders clearly have the message now, and I think it was important they got the message.”

Cotton said he “absolutely” stands by the decision to address the March 9 letter to Iran’s leaders. White House officials and Democratic lawmakers have accused Cotton and his colleagues who signed the letter of undermining the administration’s efforts to forge an agreement with Iran in the nuclear talks ahead of a March 24 deadline.

“That’s because they know the offer is indefensible,” Cotton, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a former U.S. Army lieutenant, said of the Democratic criticism. He accused the administration of being unable to defend “the very bad deal that they’re about to make.”

At least two Republicans who signed the letter — John McCain of Arizona and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin — said last week that they would have approached the matter differently in retrospect.

Johnson said it may have been “a tactical error” to address the letter to Iranian leaders, rather than to Obama’s administration or the American people. McCain, a prominent Republican voice on foreign affairs and national security, said an impending snowstorm in Washington short-circuited more measured consideration of the letter.

The missive has escalated political rancor in Washington surrounding the Iran negotiations, complicating Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Corker’s efforts to cobble together enough Democratic votes for legislation to require congressional review of any Iran nuclear deal to overcome an Obama veto.

Republicans hold 54 seats in the Senate and ten Democrats have said they’ll support Corker’s measure, though only after the end-of-the-month deadline passes for the current round of negotiations among the U.S., five other world powers and Iran. That’s three votes short of the number needed to override a veto.

Corker was one of seven Senate Republicans who didn’t sign the letter.

The Associated Press, citing a senior U.S. official, reported Monday that Iranian officials have twice in recent days confronted U.S. negotiators, led by Secretary of State John Kerry, over the letter.

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr