It was not surprising that Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) embraced some of the most convoluted logic about the Iran deal to rationalize her support for it. After all, McCaskill, back in 2008, was one of candidate Barack Obama’s strongest, earliest and most vocal supporters.
So, as President Obama leads the nation and the world down the road to perdition by enabling Iran to enrich uranium far beyond the five percent level needed for nuclear energy, McCaskill is once again following her party leader in lockstep. {mprestriction ids="1,3"}She acknowledges that the deal is “flawed,” but then parrots Obama’s tiresome mantra that the alternative is worse.
What McCaskill is hiding from her constituents is that the reason the sanctions genie is escaping the bottle is because Obama took the deal to the United Nations before taking it to Congress; and the Russians, Chinese, and Europeans, mired in recession, are eager to establish markets irrespective of Iran’s blueprint for hegemonic dominance in the Middle East.
Russia has already agreed to sell the Iranians advanced anti-aircraft missiles, and the Europeans are salivating over the prospects of rebuilding Iran’s deteriorated oil and transportation infrastructure. Why worry about the long-term consequences of rebuilding a terror state when there are profits to be made?
The alternative to the deal was not war but a better deal, one negotiated by professionals who understood the stakes rather than an amateur whose sole concern was a presidential legacy inked with his own narcissism.
The deal will not keep Iran from weaponizing uranium. It will, however, release billions of dollars that Iran will use to further its activities as the world’s major sponsor of terrorism, destabilizing the region and starting a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.
The Obama administration claims that the negotiations began because the so-called moderate Hassan Rouhani had been elected president. As McCaskill knows all too well, not only were Rouhani’s policies indistinguishable from those of his predecessor, hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but the negotiations began while Ahmadinejad was still in office.
The Iranians had gamed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. By becoming a signatory state, they received access to technology in exchange for pledging not to enrich uranium for the purpose of creating nuclear weapons. Iran used the technology to enrich uranium far beyond the five percent level nuclear energy requires. That could have been deduced by any undergraduate physics majors simply by looking at the number and type of high-speed centrifuges the Iranians were running.
Sen. John Kerry secretly met with the Iranians in Oman, where he acknowledged their right to enrich uranium, which, of course, they took as a green light to continue doing what they were doing — enriching uranium to 22 percent — a value totally unnecessary for peaceful application. Instead of preventing Iran from weaponizing uranium, Kerry gave away the store in advance. Iran had been on the ropes. The sanctions had crippled its economy and brought into question the very legitimacy of its government. Instead of playing the strong hand and pursuing America’s interest, Kerry acted as if the Iranians had the stronger hand.
Former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and James Baker, writing in the Wall Street Journal, reminded the American public that for 20 years, three American presidents, from both parties, saw Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons as so antithetical to American interests that they were willing to go to war to prevent it.
The deal that McCaskill euphemistically calls “flawed” is more accurately described as a disaster. Not only will Iran be able to enrich uranium far beyond the level necessary for peaceful purposes, Iran will also conduct its own inspections and choose its own sites to be inspected and soil samples to be tested. Trusting Iran — which cheated on the NPT — to inspect itself is as fatuous as permitting drug addicts to not only submit their own urine samples but to conduct their own urine tests.
As the deal is being debated, Russia has agreed to sell Iran its most advanced anti-aircraft missiles, which are capable of surreptitiously following multiple aircraft before destroying them. The Obama administration has raised objections to the deal, to no avail.
McCaskill is voting to change the balance of power in the Middle East and to subordinate America’s interests to Obama’s legacy. Party loyalty at the expense of national security is simply unconscionable. Missouri deserves better. More importantly, America deserves better.
Paul Miller is president and executive director of the news and public policy group Salomon Center for American Jewish Thought. Follow him on twitter @pauliespoint.{/mprestriction}