Lead image by AP Photo.

OPINION

Tom Cotton's Truth Bomb

Critics of the senator's letter to Tehran are missing the point.

By RICH LOWRY

Tom Cotton hasn’t been frog-marched from the Russell Senate Office Building — yet.

To believe the Arkansas senator’s harshest critics, that’s only because felonious traitors don’t get the punishment they deserve.

Earlier in the week, Cotton wrote an open letter to the leaders of Iran pointing out true and obvious things about our constitutional system, and the world came crashing down on his head. Disgracing the Senate, per a hyperventilating Vice President Joe Biden, was the least of his supposed offenses. He was aiding Iranian hard-liners, violating the Logan Act and committing an act of treason. If there were any doubt about the latter, the New York Daily News ran a picture of him on its front page, along with some Republican co-signatories, with the subtle headline, “TRAITORS.” It seems like just yesterday that the political class was experiencing convulsions of outrage over Rudy Giuliani saying that President Barack Obama doesn’t love America. All the great and good agreed that questioning someone’s patriotism is so far out of bounds that any presidential candidate who didn’t denounce it had disqualified himself for high office.

That was then (i.e., three weeks ago). Cotton’s alleged sedition is hard to fathom. It’s not as though he wrote secret letters to the Iranians (that’s what Obama has made a practice of doing). It’s not as though he traveled to a foreign country to glad-hand a foreign thug in an express effort to undermine the president’s foreign policy (that’s what then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi did when she went to Damascus and met with Bashar Assad). Cotton wrote a letter, got 46 other Republicans to sign it and posted it on his website. As Brian Beutler of The New Republic pointed out, the letter is functionally indistinguishable from an op-ed. We are usually not in the practice of accusing people of felonies for things they write, even on college campuses.

It’s a trope among Cotton’s critics, who clearly think they are subjecting him to a killer jiujitsu move, that he is allying himself with Iran’s hard-liners. On the Senate floor, Sen. Debbie Stabenow accused him of standing “on the side of the ayatollahs and the most extreme voices in Iran.” Fred Kaplan of Slate asked, “Do the senators think they’ll score points by cozying up to Ayatollah Khamenei?”

This is a hilarious plaint after Obama went out of his way in 2009 to say nothing when the Iranian regime was crushing the country’s true moderates who were out in the streets in the short-lived Green Revolution. Do Cotton’s antagonists not realize that Iranian nuclear negotiator Mohammad Javad Zarif works for Khamenei and that if there is any deal, the Supreme Leader will have to sign off on it? It is Obama who has been wooing — cozying up to, in Kaplan’s phrase — the most powerful hard-liner in Iran, unless we are supposed to believe that Khamenei himself is now a moderate.

The contents of Cotton’s letter shouldn’t have been news to anyone. If the mullahs weren’t already aware that there is bipartisan opposition in Congress to any likely deal and the agreement won’t have the force of a treaty, they need to watch more C-SPAN and read up on the U.S. Constitution.

It is inarguable that as a matter of domestic law a subsequent president can get out of the agreement at will — this would be true even if it were a treaty — and Congress can pass laws in contravention of the agreement, if a president will sign them. If these are things the Iranians don’t know, and John Kerry hasn’t let them in on the joke in Geneva, shouldn’t someone tell them?

Whenever there is contention over U.S. foreign policy, the hoary cliché is trotted out that politics once stopped at the water’s edge. But a golden age of consensus in U.S. foreign policy never existed, except perhaps immediately after World War II. Anyone who thinks otherwise missed the Quasi-War of the 1790s, the Mexican-American War of the 1840s, the League of Nations debate of 1919-1920, the Vietnam War of the 1970s and the Iraq War of the 2000s — among other divisive and poisonously political foreign policy questions throughout American history.

What is notable about the foreign policy debate in the Age of Obama is that it represents the world turned upside down. In the president’s transposition of the norms of American foreign policy, inviting the leader of a close ally to address Congress is an affront and forging a — to put it gently — highly generous deal with an enemy is such an urgent necessity that no one should say a discouraging word. A more confident administration would have brushed off Speaker John Boehner’s invitation to Bibi Netanyahu, as well as the Cotton letter. The Obama administration is so defensive because it has a lot to be defensive about.

It has been outnegotiated by the Iranians, who have steadily moved the terms of a deal in their direction. Once, we wanted to prevent Iran from having a nuclear-weapons capability. Once, we wanted zero enrichment and zero centrifuges, and so did the United Nations. Those goals have long since been abandoned by an Obama administration desperate for a deal, any deal, so it can include an opening to Iran among the president’s legacy achievements. So, here is my own seditious foray into directly interfering with the conduct of U.S. foreign policy — if I really want to skirt the Logan Act, I will write it on a postcard, put a stamp on it and drop it in the corner mailbox:

To Whom It May Concern in Tehran,

You are unlikely to ever encounter someone this weak and credulous again in the Oval Office.

Sincerely,

Rich Lowry

The president used to say that no deal is better than a bad deal. Now, that line is inoperative. It’s any deal is better than no deal, and woe to anyone who dares say otherwise.

Rich Lowry is editor of National Review.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/03/tom-cottons-truth-bomb-116007.html#ixzz3UBsvbdQh