What will it take for there to generate a backlash about President Obama’s demonization of opponents of his nuclear deal with Iran? The president began his frontal assault on AIPAC for its temerity in challenging the deal in an appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart in terms that recalled President George H.W. Bush’s behavior a generation ago. He continued the same theme last week in his speech at American University when he likened Republicans who opposed the deal to hardliners in Iran who chant “Death to America.” As our Max Boot noted earlier, he repeated the charge and claimed it was factually accurate on an appearance on CNN with Fareed Zakaria yesterday. Obama had two purposes. One was to isolate Israel and its supporters with false dual loyalty charges. The other was to neutralize Congressional opposition by claiming it was solely generated by political considerations. For Republicans, that means claiming they will oppose anything he does. For Democrats like Senator Chuck Schumer and Rep. Eliot Engel, they are dismissed as bending to Jewish pressure in their constituencies. But the question to ask about this Nixonian campaign to delegitimize critics is what is the ultimate purpose of his efforts and why it is that they are going unchallenged by a liberal mainstream media that would cry bloody murder had George W. Bush used this kind of language about Iraq war foes?
The notion that the GOP politicized Iran has the situation exactly backward. Up until 2013, Iran was one of the few examples of a consensus issue within American politics. The president employed tough rhetoric about Iran and even pledged in his 2012 foreign policy debate with Mitt Romney that any deal with Tehran would require it to give up its nuclear program. Huge bipartisan majorities supported tough sanctions on Iran and though he opposed these efforts, Obama signed the bills when they came to his desk. But in the last year as Obama retreated one by one from each of the West’s positions in the talks with Iran, the White House began working on breaking up that bipartisan coalition. It did so specifically by appealing to Democrats to abandon their past positions on the nuclear threat on the basis of partisan affiliation or personal loyalty to President Obama.
The only change in the political equation on the issue in recent months is the decision of many mainstream Democrats to shed their scruples about a pact that, at best, allows Iran to become a threshold nuclear state now and gain a bomb when it expires in a decade, on purely partisan grounds. Yet, in showing his brass knuckles approach to political warfare on this issue, Obama has used his media cheerleaders like Zakaria, Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic and the editorial page of the New York Times to tar opponents with the stigma of politicizing foreign policy.
What is motivating the president to behave in this manner?
The president did not hesitate to demonize Republicans as terrorists during the fiscal cliff and government shutdown negotiations. Having gotten away with that smear and convinced his media allies to adopt the same tactics, what is there to deter him from doing so again on Iran? Surely, not a desire to promote civility in our political discourse, a stance that he once promoted during when the “hope and change” mantra was key to his success. Obama discarded any notion of treating opponents with respect or showing a willingness to deal with them fairly a long time ago.
But while demonizing Republicans is second nature to a president that has never tried to seriously work with his opponents on any issue, his impulse to do the same to Israel and AIPAC is rooted in something different and far more troubling than mere partisanship.
Obama’s feud with the Israeli government is often misrepresented as purely a personal one with Prime Minister Netanyahu. But while his animus for the refusal of the Jewish state and its backers here to kowtow to his appeasement of Iran isn’t really about Netanyahu, Iran has become a personal issue for the president.
Obama’s no longer content to merely disagree. Now he speaks of AIPAC and its bipartisan supporters in terms that seem to imply they are have divided loyalties or are even disloyal Americans. But in his interview with Zakaria the real point of the Iran deal was once again laid bare to the press and the public, should they be interested in the question. Despite the president’s repeated misleading assertions, the details of the Iran deal are important and provide damning evidence of the fact that it does not achieve the goal of stopping Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. But the impetus for both the deal and the president’s vicious rhetoric about its critics are revealed again with the president’s defense of Iran’s Supreme Leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as being “just a politician, like everybody else.” As Secretary of State Kerry did in his interview with Goldberg last week, the president claimed that there is no connection between Khamenei’s rhetoric and the chants of his supporters and actual policy.
But there is a connection and it is to be found in Iran’s support for Hezbollah and Hamas in their terrorist war on Israel as well as the entire thrust for regional Hezbollah that has characterized Iranian foreign policy under Khamenei and his predecessor Ayatollah Khomeini.
The need to defend Iran’s theocratic and terror-supporting tyrant as a reasonable person while constantly attacking a genuine democratic leader like Netanyahu (who recently won his third consecutive term in office) is obvious. It illustrates that the rationale for the deal is Obama’s desire for détente with Iran. The president’s foreign policy legacy isn’t a nuclear-free Iran since the deal at best postpones that outcome, bur rather a new Iran-centric vision that by extension downgrades the U.S. alliance with Israel.
These are high stakes indeed, and they explain why President Obama is willing to say virtually anything to ensure that enough partisan Democrats back the deal in order to ensure that it survives the “no” votes of what will be a bipartisan majority against it. It was always Obama who has played the partisan on Iran, not the Republicans. And the reason was a desire for détente with Iran that he knows the majority of Americans and perhaps even Democrats don’t support. Though his media liberal backers are treating his tactics are reasonable because they sympathize with his vision, it is time for principled Democrats to speak up and call him out for his atrocious rhetoric politicizing Iran and Israel.
