I think most Americans
instinctively understand that most of politics is theater. That’s part of the
reason why Donald Trump’s unpredictable stand-up act is so popular since we
never know what he will say. But Congress is doing its part too to keep us
entertained. That’s the only way to interpret the hearing held
today by the House Oversight Committee. The reason for this
hearing was the continuing fallout over the New
York Times Magazine profile of Deputy National Security Advisor Ben
Rhodes in which he boasted of having successfully spun a docile
Washington press corps into helping the administration sell its Iran policy.
While Republicans led by Representative Jason Chaffetz wanted to use the
session to explore the topic of how the Obama administration misled the
American people about the Iran deal, committee Democrats preferred to use their
time talking about whether the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq
was based on lies. The result was another pointless partisan brawl the only
purpose of which was to reassure each party’s base that House members were
doing their best to make the other side uncomfortable.
In other words, it was business as usual on the Hill. But
before we file this dispiriting piece of political theater in the proverbial
circular file, it’s important to point out that the topic of the path to
appeasement on Iran is one that I think future historians will view with more
seriousness. Ultimately, that may mean Rhodes could go down as one of his
generation’s “guilty
men,” a title
that was given to those British politicians that enabled appeasement of Nazi
Germany before World War Two. Whether that it is true or not will depend on
whether the administration’s long shot bet on the Islamist regime in Iran
moderating before it ultimately gets a nuclear weapon after the deal Rhodes
championed expires in a decade. If it doesn’t — and there’s little reason other
than wishful thinking to believe that it will — we will view exhibitions such
this House hearing with even less tolerance than we to today. But before we get
to that point, it’s important to point out exactly what Rhodes is guilty of and
what responsibility Congress — both Republicans and Democrats — must shoulder
for that result.
Let’s first be
clear about what Rhodes — who refused to testify before the committee on
dubious grounds that it is inappropriate for a presidential advisor to discuss
his work with Congress — did and not do. Since the Times profile, there’s been
a lot of talk about the administration’s lies about Iran, and some of those
accusations are accurate. The administration did lie about its diplomatic
pursuit of Iran in 2013 as well as about the premise for those talks being the
nonsensical proposition that the election of a “moderate” as president of Iran.
Hassan Rouhani is no moderate but, as we now know, President Obama began the
initiative while the even less moderate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was in that office,
serving as did his successor at the pleasure of Supreme Leader Grand Ayatollah
Ali Khamenei.
But while the Times article did speak of the administration
misleading the American people, all that Rhodes admitted to in a piece that was
both revealing as well as evidence of the trademark arrogance of Obama’s inner
circle, was manipulating the press.
Critics of the
Iran deal have much to complain about what happened during the course of the
negotiations and the string of deceptions that were carried out by various
administration figures. President Obama had promised during his 2012
re-election program that any deal end Iran’s nuclear program rather than giving
it international approval and setting it up being able to produce a weapon
within a decade. There was also much said by senior officials that wasn’t true
about the type of inspections that would be used to enforce the deal as well as
forcing Iran to divulge all information about its past nuclear efforts.
But we must
also acknowledge that the basic truth about the deal was no secret. Indeed,
that’s why clear majorities of both Houses of Congress and, according to
opinion polls, the American people, opposed the agreement. All of the lies told
by the administration were not enough to convince Congress or the people that
this was a wise course of action. And, had what amounted to the most important
foreign policy treaty been submitted to Congress according to the procedure
required by the Constitution, it would never have come close to passing.
But when we
ponder that fact, we must also acknowledge that not all the guilty men and
women with respect to Iran served in the White House or the State Department.
The fact is the legislative branch let President Obama and Secretary of State
John Kerry get away with treating this treaty as if it were an administrative
decision that didn’t require Congressional approval.
Granted, it
would have been difficult if not impossible to stop them from doing so. But the
same Republican Congress that took the country to the brink over defunding
ObamaCare and almost did the same thing about Planned Parenthood funding backed
down when it came to defending their constitutional obligations on a matter of
life and death like letting Iran keep its nuclear program. Responsibility for
that decision belonged in no small measure to the Republican leaders of the two
chambers. But special opprobrium should be directed at Senator Bob Corker, the
chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, who was rolled by the administration
and his Democratic colleagues when he agreed to a bill that would give Congress
a vote on the deal as if it were a simple piece of legislation. That meant that
instead of a two-thirds vote in order to pass it, as the Constitution requires,
it was able to survive with the one-third plus one votes needed to sustain a
veto or the 40 votes needed to sustain a filibuster in the Senate. In the end,
the effort to stop the deal died because of a filibuster carried out by Senate
Democrats, all of whom had previously voted to ensure that Congress had some
sort of say about this crucial decision.
Corker, who is
supposedly under consideration as a possible choice to run for vice president
with Donald Trump, deserves a lot of the blame for what happened last year. So
do the rank and file Republicans and Democrats that didn’t rise up and demand
that this deeply unpopular measure be stopped. Today’s piece of theater
notwithstanding, if the worst happens and Iran gets a bomb, everyone who was in
Washington last year will be asked what they did to stop the deal, and few
will be completely blameless.
As I noted last week, there will be real long term consequence of
the Iran deal lies that have nothing to do with scoring political points. But
while Rhodes deserves to be upbraided for his lies, let’s not kid ourselves
about what happened. There was no shortage of information about what a bad deal
had been negotiated. All the White House spin couldn’t silence the critics nor
was it ever enough to convince most Americans that they were right. What was
lacking was a Congress that was prepared to act on the information they did
have. Rhodes’ earned himself a place in history as a principle author of a
travesty that could lead to putting a bomb in the hands of a genocidal
anti-Semitic Islamist regime. But Rhodes is not the only one that ought to be
ashamed. If Representative Chaffetz wants to put anyone on the spot, he should
also include those members of the Senate who were Obama’s willing dupes.
