You sir, are no Winston Churchill.
What is Tom Cotton afraid of? All this drama queen talk seems ridiculous. You would think that all of the Soviet Union was marching towards DC.
Are people really listening to Tom Cotton? He did not disappoint. He evoked Hitler within one minute. That’s quite a record.
@Kelly_3406
You raise a good point. I am not sure why Bush chose to not have the agreement ratified by Congress.
W.R.T. a new agreement – I am not sure that Iraq would have accepted any agreement – they wanted us out.
here’s a simple way to collect all the Clinton emails regarding government business:
Search the government email servers for any email with [email protected]. No one can conduct business without ccing others and the length of email chains virtually guarantees that even if an email started outside the government servers that it would cross over and include a government address before any interesting government business got done.
Both US Navy vets. That must be it.
Scout — Put a truly serious economic and fiscal squeeze on those mullahs — which is what many Repubs and some Dems in Congress are calling for. There has been a propagation of the sense that the current sanctions on Iran are causing them real problems. Maybe some problems; but, looking at the scope of Iranian military and political actions in the Middle East, one has to wonder. Then comes a report (not yet confirmed) that the Iranians may have found or a created a sub rosa loophole using a chain of offshore banks to bring billions of dollars into their coffers.
I just heard this minute on CBS radio news that a second Congressional letter is being addressed to Obama and signed by many, many people on both sides of the party aisle. According to CBS, the signers apparently don’t like the looks of that alleged 10-year grace period and the lifting of current sanctions and want a deal in which the prohibition on Iranian nukes lasts decades if not longer.
@Wolve
Obama tried harder to influence the Israeli election of 2015 than to support the Iranian uprising of 2009.
Rep. Eliot Engel (Dem-NY), ranking minority member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, on Dept. of State briefings of the House and reports out of the Lausanne negotiations:
“Iran’s leaders don’t deserve an ounce of trust. We need absolute safeguards.”
Wolve – the only reason sanctions have had the effects they have had thus far (and they have been pretty effective) is because the other P5 nations and the UN have joined in. There has been a higher degree of international solidarity on sanctions up until now than I can remember there ever being in one of these rogue country situations. That all goes up in smoke if the US flushes the joint negotiations down the toilet. The US acting unilaterally cannot do much more than make a small dent in Iran’s economy if Europe, Russia, and China are not on board. So when you’re planning your next stage sanctions offensive, make sure you plan to keep those other economies hitched up.
re Engel’s remarks: the negotiations no doubt largely have been about safeguards.
@Scout
From what I have heard, 360 members of the House from both sides of the aisle are as concerned as Engel is about those “safeguards.” Seems to me that what they fear, based apparently on their briefings by State and from the Lausanne grapevine, is that the Iranians will get a ten-year hiatus from pressure during which they will benefit economically and fiscally from the lifting of sanctions and have enough wiggle room to build the bomb sub rosa even before the ten years is up. Like Engel said: Not an ounce of trust. Absolute safeguards.
I agree with Engel. We have to find a way to take the bomb away from those mullahs, not just kick the proverbial can down the road for a few years, relying on a likely pipe dream that internal regime change in Tehran might allow us to scrape out of this thing. Either those guys are honest about not wanting the bomb and will agree to solid and workable safeguards or they are bullshitting and playing for the time to be able to snooker all of us. Now or even ten years from now, the mullahs with the bomb will create an absolute Middle East nightmare. I think we had better drag a whole lot of people into the realm of sensibility about the need for ultra-sanctions now rather than later. And Putin be damned.
I have no doubt that those are the concerns that control the negotiations. It makes getting to a comfortable Yes very challenging. Nothing new there.
And, to return to the sanctions point, what do you feel will motivate Europe, Russia, China and the UN to continue to support sanctions if the US torpedoes the agreement negotiations? Remember, the reason there was cohesion on the international sanctions regime was because there was consensus that there should be negotiations and that Iran was unlikely to slow its advance toward weapons capability without a credible sanctions regime. However, if the US at the eleventh hour throws over the table, it seems very unlikely that Europe, Russia and China will continue to support the present regime, let alone your super-sanctions package (by the way, the present regime is pretty tight – what would you add to it?). The United States trying to impose sanctions on its own, or with very limited or half-hearted support from only a few other countries (and I can’t imagine which other countries those would be once the edifice begins to crumble) is very much the sound of one hand clapping.
Fair question and opinion. I suspect that the current sanctions are not as tight and effective as we have been led to believe. I will stay alert for some confirmation of that report on the sub rosa chain of banks allegedly feeding cash to Tehran by the back door. In any case, there are people in the Senate, including Bob Menendez, who have been pushing for much stronger sanctions. The White House has been trying to fend that off during the negotiations. I don’t have details on those Senate proposals yet, but I would have to say offhand that they must be considered by both the Senate and White House to be far stronger and disruptive to Tehran than what we have going now.
The key questions here are: 1) Why should an executive agreement with Iran be expected to produce a different result than it did for N. Korea? We all know the ultimate result of Clinton’s 1994 multi-lateral agreement was a nuclear capability for N. Korea. 2) Why isn’t an agreement with Iran being pursued as a treaty? It would be a far more powerful constraint on both the Iranians and the P5 if a treaty was ratified and goes into force as international law.
Obama seems to like to invoke Reagan. Reagan did not use executive agreements for strategic agreements like START with the Russians.
The current regime is extremely tight, but no doubt one can always find a screw to tighten here or there. The difficulty is that these sanctions have worked precisely because they have been truly international in their application. The difficulty facing the United States now is that it has very little unilateral leverage over Iran, and that it has to act in concert with other nations even to maintain the current level of discomfort Iran is being subjected to.
Interesting report today (20 March) in the Wall Street Journal Online. France appears to be taking a tougher line vis-a-vis Iran than the U.S. This potentially places Paris at odds with the Obama administration. John Kerry is headed to London Saturday to meet with French Foreign Minister Fabius and their counterparts from the UK and Germany to try to thrash this thing out.
In a nutshell, the French do not seem happy with the rush to have what they see as an inadequate agreement by the end of March or by the planned schedule for lifting the sanctions on Iran. Sounds like they think the US is moving too fast and is not tough enough with regard to stopping the Iranian nuke program in its tracks. Their views sound closer to the views of Israel and the Saudis than those of Washington……except for 360 members of the U.S. House and 47 members of the U.S. Senate.
The French have been very aggressive on this for some time, W. The story you cite (and many others to the same effect going back some weeks now) indicate the intricacy of the negotiations even on the P5+1 side. The situation is very much in flux, even within each of the two sides.
Well, Scout, maybe the general or specific French differences have been out there somewhere for some time. Can’t say that I caught it earlier but don’t doubt it. That certainly makes it look like Kerry was trying to cover up the split when, after meeting FM Fabius in Paris in early March, he told the media that: “We are on the same page. We know what we are chasing after and we are chasing after the same thing.” (AP, 7 March 2015)
Kerry’s statement today said that he was going to confer in London with the Western allies about “sticking points.” There’s little doubt that this negotiation has a very complicated internal dynamic.
And back to Tom Cotton’s speech on the video. This is not good. Not good at all.
http://www.freebeacon.com/national-security/northcom-russian-cruise-missile-threat-to-u-s-grows/
We’re really in a position where the depletion of our forces over the past twelve years has to be reversed. However, getting elected representatives to take this seriously (and back it up with sound funding choices) is no small matter. I think Cotton (and others who have said similar things) is right to identify these problems. I would appreciate it, however, if the same people who are shining a light on the sad state of our military would also be precise about what the adversary threat is likely to be, how it should be addressed (e.g., the balance between strategic and tactical capability), and how the Nation pays for it. This latter point is usually where Republican rhetoric on defense begins to look fairly hollow. Right now, the Administration’s ask on defense spending is greater by a considerable amount than the Congressional budget being put forward by Republicans.
I got some email today that said there is a bi partisan group of lawmakers who want to cut social security to pay for it. Screw that!
I agree that, if we don’t increase defense spending now, we are going to be in a serious defensive and geopolitical spot. Despite Putin, I am not so worried about a Russian threat as I am about the increasing ability of the Chinese to push us back from the Western Pacific and increase their threats to take ocean and island territories from neighboring claimants who are our allies and who depend on us to cover them. Not to mention Taiwan. And then the North Korean leadership, armed with nukes and growing missile offenses on a powder keg peninsula can be the stuff of nightmares. Add Iran with long distance missiles, including that 1200-mile cruise missile and growing influence throughout the Middle East (big shipload of military weapons and equipment already delivered to the Houthi in Yemen), and we get nightmare #2. Last but not least, I was struck by that cruise missile in a launch mechanism designed to look like a shipping container, deliverable from a freighter, a truck, or what have you. It’s like any damned bastard with big bucks and dedicated to causing great harm could just go shopping for a cruise missile.
I posit that we had better get moving collectively or our current tech advantages will vanish.
@ Moon – they can’t pay for the necessary increases in defense by cutting from somewhere else. This will require additional revenues. Something that Rs aren’t very good at, even though some of them may talk a good game about defense issues.
@ Wolve – the immediate (and near to middle) term problem is that all of the things you mention are in play simultaneously. The strategic planning for dealing with that kind of Hydra-headed challenge will have to be creative, and we probably won’t get to take a mulligan if we get it wrong.