King Obama's Arrogance May Placate Iran, But Not The U.S. Senate

Obama's Arrogance May Placate Iran, But Not The U.S. Senate

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BY GEORGE F. WILL

07/29/2015  

It came two days after the announcement of the nuclear agreement with Iran, yet little mention was made on July 16 of the 70th anniversary of the first nuclear explosion, near Alamogordo, N.M. The anniversary underscored the agreement's attempts to thwart proliferation of technology seven decades old.

Nuclear-weapons technology has become markedly more sophisticated since 1945, but not so sophisticated that nations with sufficient money and determination cannot master or acquire it. Iran's determination is probably related to America's demonstration, in Iraq and Libya, of the perils of not having nuclear weapons.

Critics who think more severe sanctions are achievable and would break Iran's determination must answer this: When have sanctions caused a large nation to surrender what it considers a vital national security interest? Critics have, however, amply demonstrated two things:

First, the agreement comprehensively abandons President Obama's original goal of dismantling the infrastructure of Iran's nuclear weapons program. Second, as the administration became more yielding with Iran, it became more dishonest with Americans.

For example, John Kerry says that we never sought "anywhere, anytime" inspections. But on April 6, Ben Rhodes, Obama's deputy national security adviser, said that the agreement would include them. Kerry's co-negotiator, Wendy Sherman, breezily dismissed "anywhere, anytime" as "something that became popular rhetoric." It "became"? This is disgraceful.

Verification depends on U.S. intelligence capabilities. And as Reuel Marc Gerecht says in the Weekly Standard: "The CIA has a nearly flawless record of failing to predict foreign countries' going nuclear (Great Britain and France don't count)."

In the 1960 campaign, John Kennedy cited "indications" that by 1964 there would be "10, 15 or 20" nuclear powers. As president, he said that by 1975 there might be 15 or 20.

It is a law of arms control: Agreements are impossible until they are unimportant. The U.S.-Soviet strategic arms control "process" was an arena of maneuvering for military advantage until the USSR died of anemia.

Might the agreement with Iran buy sufficient time for Iran to undergo regime modification? Although Kerry speaks of the agreement "guaranteeing" that Iran will not become a nuclear power, it will. But what will Iran be like 15 years hence?

Since 1972, U.S. policy toward China has been a worthy but disappointing two-part wager. One part is that involving China in world trade will temper its unruly international ambitions. The second is that economic growth, generated by the moral and institutional infrastructure of markets, will weaken the sinews of authoritarianism.

The Obama administration's comparable wager is that domestic restiveness will subvert the Iranian regime. The median age in Iran is 29.5 (in the U.S., 37.7; in the European Union, 42.2). More than 60% of Iran's university students, and 70% of medical students, are women. Ferment is real.

In 1951, Hannah Arendt, a refugee from Hitler's Germany, argued bleakly that tyrannies wielding modern instruments of social control (bureaucracies, mass communications) could achieve permanence by conscripting the citizenry's consciousness, thereby suffocating social change.

The 1956 Hungarian Revolution changed her mind: No government can control human nature or "all channels of communication."

Today's technologies make nations, including Iran, porous to outside influences; intellectual autarky is impossible. The best that can be said for the Iran agreement is that by somewhat protracting Iran's path to a weapon, it buys time for constructive churning in Iran. Although this is a thin reed on which to lean hopes, the reed is as real as Iran's nuclear ambitions are apparently nonnegotiable.

The best reason for rejecting the agreement is to rebuke Obama's long record of aggressive disdain for Congress — recess appointments when the Senate was not in recess, rewriting and circumventing statutes, etc.

Obama's intellectual pedigree runs to Woodrow Wilson, the first presidential disparager of the separation of powers. Like Wilson, Obama ignores the constitutional etiquette of respecting even rivalrous institutions.

The Iran agreement should be a treaty; it should not have been submitted first to the U.N. as a studied insult to Congress. Wilson said that rejecting the Versailles Treaty would "break the heart of the world."

The Senate, no member of which had been invited to accompany Wilson to the Paris Peace Conference, proceeded to break his heart. Obama deserves a lesson in the cost of Wilsonian arrogance. Knowing little history, Obama makes bad history.

Read More At Investor's Business Daily: http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-on-the-right/072915-764069-obamas-lack-of-historical-knowledge-leads-him-to-make-bad-history-on-iran.htm#ixzz3hTWi5TVP
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