We used to say politics ended at water’s edge. It was a cliché, meaning we always put aside our partisan domestic sniping for a united front on matters of our international security.
By matters of international security, I mean those such as the ongoing one involving Iran, specifically our talks with that country’s leaders about their maybe agreeing they wouldn’t develop nuclear weaponry.
But those days of water’s edge unity … they came before y’all sent the Barack Obama-detesting and itching-to-fight Tom Cotton to the U.S. Senate, maybe for “decades,” or so he brags in a nice heads-up letter he has written to Iran.
Y’all sent him for six years, but he’s 37 and it may take Arkansas a while to climb back from the deep end off which it has gone.
As you know, the Obama administration is engaged in apparently serious and conceivably productive talks with six other nations and Iran about some politically negotiated arrangement by which Iran would … well, we don’t know. That’s what’s to be worked out.
As you also know, congressional Republicans consider Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, not Barack Obama, their president, and Netanyahu warned them in the real State of the Union address last week that Iran can’t be trusted.
Netanyahu’s key Senate operative is our Cotton, who went to the Heritage Foundation a few days ago and said in a speech that what we need to do in Iran is impose “regime change.”
He means somehow putting in our own people, a new Shah, maybe, this one perhaps domestically liked. This new leader would do as we say, disarm the country entirely and submit it to our unfettered observation and verification.
Cotton perhaps believes he can manipulate Iranians as readily as he manipulated Arkansas voters.
Rest assured that Cotton is more than a young man of words. He is a young man of bellicosity and belligerence. He is a man of fighting patriotism. He is a man of right-wing think tanks. He is a man of the Weekly Standard. He is a man of bold and reckless action.
What he did was write a letter to Iran saying it needs to be aware that any executive agreement it signs with this Obama character wouldn’t be a formal treaty and thus wouldn’t be binding much longer. He wrote that this Obama character soon will be leaving office while real Americans in the Congress would be sticking around, maybe for decades, and pulling the plug on anything Obama sells us out on.
Apparently Cotton does not favor congressional term limits. I didn’t, either, until his election.
Cotton got 46 Republican senators to sign the letter — seven declined, and no Democrats signed — and released his missive as an open letter.
This seemingly unprecedented action — a direct interjection into foreign policy by a block of U.S. senators seeking to undercut the active current administration’s ongoing undertaking — outraged the White House.
It seemed to amuse Iran, whose foreign minister dismissed it as a propaganda ploy and said any reneging by the United States would amount to a violation of international law.
The letter surely puts Iran at an advantage. It could pull out of negotiations now and blame the United States for sending a fatally mixed signal about its intent and credibility. Or it could sign anything and pay no attention to any obligations, knowing that nearly half the United States Senate intends to renege anyhow.
It’s hard to argue that Cotton’s plan — to put in our puppet — wouldn’t be the best solution for the United States.
In matters of international security, puppets are best.
At least that’s the case so long as the local people don’t rise up and run off our puppets and take over our embassies and hold our emissaries hostage.
And that, of course, never happens. Certainly not in Iran.
Indeed, there is no need to talk or negotiate or agree to anything with the transitory leaders of some place you intend to transform peacefully and forthwith into practically our 51st state.
Well … about that peaceful part: Cotton also says we need to keep war with Iran on the table. He doesn’t say outright that regime change would require military action. But he does say regime change would require the credible threat of it. And you can’t credibly threaten it unless you’ll actually do it.
We could fight ISIS with one hand and Iran with the other. Nothing could possibly go wrong.
Or maybe we could keep one hand free for shaking, just in case diplomatic negotiations still have a place in this world.