Did you catch President Obama’s sales speech for his Iranian nuclear deal at American University?
My head is still spinning and I think I did something to my back trying to follow the president’s arguments on Wednesday afternoon.
Basically, the president said if Congress doesn’t approve the treaty that he, John Kerry and his State Department softball team made with the ayatollahs, three bad things are gonna happen.
Iran will develop nuclear weapons in a hurry.
There will be a new war in the Middle East.
And the United States will lose its credibility as the global leader of diplomacy.
You can argue that the same three bad things will happen, or are already happening, whether or not we sign the Iranian nuclear deal, but let’s not go there.
Obama pulled out all the stops trying to persuade everyone that his bad deal is not only a good deal, it’s the best deal with Iran we can ever hope to get.
He ended his sales pitch by asking Americans to contact their representatives in Washington to urge them to approve the Iranian deal.
He said two years of negotiations “have achieved a detailed arrangement that permanently prohibits Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon” and contains “the most comprehensive inspection and verification regime ever negotiated to monitor a nuclear program.”
Republicans in the Senate and a few Democrats beg to differ with the president and his self-congratulatory BS. They’d prefer to study the details of the deal – and maybe improve them -- before they sign it.
They also want to make sure the smiling Iranian despots in Tehran realize that we have this thing called a Constitution and no treaty Obama and his team whips up can become law until the Senate ratifies it.
The president appeared at American University in Washington because that’s where John Kennedy gave his “Strategy of Peace” speech in 1963.
JFK called for the U.S. and the Soviets to seek peaceful solutions to the Cold War, which Obama noted was how it ultimately ended.
Obama praised Kennedy and Ronald Reagan and quoted them about the importance of seeking peace and the avoidance of war through diplomacy.
He forgot to mention that Kennedy and Reagan also backed up their hard diplomacy with big military sticks and a willingness to swing them.
Sometimes diplomacy – which Obama acts likes he invented in 2008 – has to take a backseat to a military solution.
In his speech Obama didn’t quote Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, though he did point out that Israel’s leader strongly disagrees with the Iranian deal.
That’s an understatement. As Netanyahu has said, “The nuclear deal with Iran doesn’t block Iran’s path to the bomb. It actually paves Iran’s path to the bomb.”
The deal won’t bring peace or security for Israel or anyone else, Netanyahu said.
It will “spark a nuclear arms race in the region. And it would feed Iran’s terrorism and aggression that would make war, perhaps the most horrific war of all, far more likely.”
President Obama expressed his deep respect for Netanyahu, then said he was wrong to be against the deal.
Obama also expressed his love for Israel. Saying he’ll always see to it that America defends our loyal ally, he insisted the deal he has crafted is “in America’s interests and Israel’s interests.”
Deal or no deal, in the long run everyone knows Iran is as untrustworthy as any nation on the planet.
Its leaders are responsible for destabilizing half the countries in the Middle East and they’ve not even pretended to renounce their intentions to destroy the state of Israel.
On Wednesday Obama boasted that his nuclear deal with Iran could become one of our country’s greatest diplomatic feats.
Let’s hope not.
Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “The New Reagan Revolution”. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to Reagan@caglecartoons.com. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter