Last evening, Jonathan Tobin wrote about yesterday’s House Oversight Committee hearing on White House narratives about the Iran deal.  As it so happened, I had a front row seat at that hearing since I was a witness in that hearing (my full testimony is here).

Many of the Democrats sitting on the committee appear to have decided the best way to address the question of Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes’ cynical spinning of facts surrounding the Iran deal was to attack John Hannah, a former official in both the Clinton and Bush administrations who ended his government service as the national security advisor to Dick Cheney. Many know that their attacks were demonstrably inaccurate, but why should congressmen bother reading bipartisan commission reports put out by Congress? The irony, here, is that their game plan mirrors Rhodes’ argument that the best way to avoid discussing the facts of the Iran deal was to make accusations about the run-up to the Iraq war.

The most noxious element, however, was that in the cynical badgering of John Hannah, who displayed class throughout the hearing, many Democrats beginning with Ranking Member Elijah Cummings and culminating with Democratic Representative Mark DeSaulnier suggested that the ‘false narrative’ put forward by the Bush administration resulted in the deaths of thousands of Americans (see around 2:16-2:19 here).

Let’s put aside the fact that this hearing was supposed to be about Iran. People only go ad hominem when they cannot make their case on the basis of facts. Nor is there equivalence between the run-up to the Iraq war and the selling of the Iran deal. While the intelligence upon which Bush based the decision to go to war was wrong, no one in the Bush administration knowingly lied, whereas Rhodes bragged about lying about the facts of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

The broader problem is this: People can oppose the Iraq war, but it was not a ‘narrative’ that killed thousands of Americans; it was, in many cases, Iranian explosively formed projectiles. To blame Bush for murders conducted by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and then turn around and bless the funding of the IRGC is morally perverse and shows a warped world view.

I still support the ouster of Saddam Hussein and continue to believe it was the right call as was the effort to encourage a democratic system, although I realize many of my friends do not. I also believe that the nation-building in which the United States sought to engage was a mistake, a conclusion with which I find myself in disagreement with some colleagues and friends. But what U.S. troops were doing in Iraq after 2004 was to protect Iraqis against terrorists who sought to kill and maim on the basis of sectarian belief or ethnicity. Cummings and DeSaulnier are effectively making two arguments: First, it was wrong to protect innocent Iraqis from terrorists after Saddam’s ouster and, second, that it is right to reward Iran for sponsoring terrorism.

I suspect both simply see Iraq and Iran as a political game and are not thinking through the ramifications of their statements. Let’s hope I’m right, because if I’m wrong and they really do believe it right to increase exponentially the resources available to the IRGC, the position which they defend so vociferously, the foreign policy philosophy now being espoused by some in Washington is far more troubling than many realize.