Senator Coons, Too Many Cooks In the Iran Kitchen

Filed in National by on December 28, 2013

Well, maybe living in a Blue state is not all its cracked up to be after all.  I now read that Senator Coons has signed onto the Menendez bill with some of the worst the Republican party has to offer to mess with the Iran peace/nuke disarmament recipe.

I was taught that Congress has an advice and consent role with foreign policy, not a micro-management involvement.  Yes, he’s a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee.  But after President Obama and Secretary Kerry have come up with the first potential breakthrough in our troubled relationship with Iran, he feels they need extra help?  Come on now, they’ve done amazing work here after years of “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran”  refrains emitted from the mouths of the all too meddling Republican party.

Let the Administration do its work.  Let them play out this welcomed initiative before you and your kitchen mates foul up the recipe.  Those of us who served our country in the military don’t need this ill timed coupe you’re engaged in to cause the new regime in Iran to wonder who is in charge of negotiations from the U.S.A, empowering our own war mongers to go for a kill here.

Iranians have plenty of evidence of historical confusion about U.S. policy with them.  They well remember our CIA’s role in the 50’s in overthrowing their hard earned first attempts at democracy.  Again in the 70’s they remember our invitation to the Shah and his court who pillaged Iran’s  coffers, to live out his last days in the U.S. after being ousted.  And again in the 80’s when Republicans sabotaged  President Carter’s peaceful efforts to retrieve our hostages for Reagan to win the U.S. Presidency.  Not also to forget the Iran/Contra crime by the Reagan administration.  Not a great track record, eh?  They really are wondering who is running the kitchen here and now you and your R buddies are about to screw it up again.

The sanctions we have going there, relaxed a bit for these breakthrough negotiations,  are for policy change aims in Iran, not punishment.  Menendez wants to reduce further Iranian oil sales with a global oil boycott in 2015.  And, institute bans in engineering, mining and construction industries, all of which is fuel for the modernization of their economy.   Tell me this, Senator Coons.  What do international oil politics have to do with these proposed sanctions?  You are well aware of Iran’s designs for gas pipelines across the middle east in competition with Bush’s buddies, the Saudis.

Also other trade politics figure in here including Iran’s enhancing its relationship with India and Iraq.  Iran can be positioned through a peace/nuke disarmament deal to become a much bigger power in the middle east and Af/Pak region, further diminishing the house of Saud.

Or is it AIPAC’s and Israel’s justified paranoia about Iranian nuclear weapon’s development ?  It appears your President and Secretary of State have a pretty good handle on stemming that threat through these negotiations.  And certainly Israel’s paranoia is informed by their own undisclosed nuclear weapons stockpile, somehow being exempt from the world’s nuke disarmament movement.

So, Senator, give us the real rationale behind your recipe for spoiling the Iranian peace broth.

Tags:

About the Author ()

Comments (21)

Trackback URL | Comments RSS Feed

  1. Patrick says:

    You are insane if you wish to see Iran become a bigger player in the middle east. Iraq and India have no love for Iran and would not be negotiating with them if liberals were not destroying every good relationship we have had in the middle east. No part of the middle east wishes to see the radical government of Iran get nuclear weapons. Your dabbling in gun running in Mexico was a complete failure. Your covert attempts in Benghazi were a complete failure just as Jimmy Carter’s attempt at rescuing the hostages in Iran was a complete failure. Your takeover of healthcare in America, Obama’s biggest goal is fast on its way of showing itself as a complete failure. Your rambling about things you don’t even understand is a complete failure.

  2. Geezer says:

    “Your rambling about things you don’t even understand is a complete failure.”

    Right back atcha, sport.

  3. cassandra m says:

    There’s no real reason to try to shut down the current round of negotiations — and make no mistake, that is exactly what this is meant to do — unless there is a constituency that really wants that. That constituency wouldn’t the Americans Coons is meant to represent — who want to give this diplomacy a change by large margins. This diplomatic effort doesn’t have great odds of succeeding, but should be given its 6 month window to try to work. You’d think that after what we’ve gone through in Iraq and Afghanistan that we’d be eager to let diplomacy have a chance. Well, it seems that Americans want diplomacy to have a chance, but Congress — clearly NOT representing the people who vote for them — won’t have it.

    What I want to ask people to do when they have a chance to speak to Coons is to ask him how a new war with Iran will get paid for.

  4. Chris says:

    I don’t think they care how the war w/ Iran gets paid for. They are bought and paid for by either the house of saud or AIPAC; and they want no peace with Iran. Hopefully the American people can turn the congress like they did with the “war” on syria. One can only hope.

  5. Steve Newton says:

    Sadly, sometime in the past decade we reached the point at which we departed from the traditional American position that war was to be the last resort when all other political means failed (and that the use of military force represented a failure on our part as well), and have moved to the old Prussian standard that war is merely to be considered politics conducted by other means–an acceptable tactic to get what we want.

    Shorter: moving from James Madison to Karl von Clausewitz.

  6. Truth Teller says:

    Look Coons is an accident senator if it wasn’t for the witch he wouldn’t be there at least we will know who to blame when Iran walks out on the talks because of this grandstanding and gets the bomb then we will have to put boots on the ground to save Be Be’s ass.

  7. Dana says:

    Somehow it seems a bit odd that a man styling himself the “Progressive Populist” would so strongly favor an autocratic approach to foreign policy. 🙂 Does he think that the Congress has no role here?

    Of course, part of the problem is that too many Presidents have tried to sidestep the Congress by signing treaties but never submitting them to the Senate for a ratification vote. The last President to submit a controversial treaty to the Senate for ratification was Jimmy Carter, with the Panama Canal Treaty, and even he declined to submit the SALT II agreement, because he knew it would fail in the Senate. NAFTA bypassed the Constitutional requirement for a 2/3 ratification vote in the Senate with the device of putting it in the form of simple legislation, passing by a bare majority in the House, and a larger, but still less than 2/3, majority in the Senate. President Clinton declined to send the Kyoto Accords to the Senate, where he knew they would fail, and President Bush, who opposed the Kyoto agreement, and could have sent Kyoto to the Senate for a certain rejection, instead simply withdrew our signature.

  8. Dana says:

    An obvious question: Who here believes that Iran will actually cease attempting to build atomic weapons even if they do sign some sort of agreement which says that they will not?

  9. stan merriman says:

    Kerry:
    “A final nuclear deal with Iran is “not a question of trust,” Secretary of State John Kerry said Sunday, but of verification that the Iranians are giving up on the prospect of nuclear weapons.

    Kerry spoke as the negotiators who crafted a six-month deal with Iran over the weekend exulted while Israel, Persian Gulf states and members of Congress criticized the accord for giving Iran too much.

    Kerry hit Sunday morning talk shows across the dial Sunday, telling audiences that without verification, there can be no real deal. Appearing on CNN’s State of the Union, Kerry said, “Verification is the key,” adding that the United States enters into more negotiations with Iran “with eyes absolutely wide open. We have no illusions.”

  10. Dana says:

    Mr Merriman: would you have expected Mr Kerry to have said anything else? Let’s see what is actually produced, if anything.

  11. Geezer says:

    “Who here believes that Iran will actually cease attempting to build atomic weapons even if they do sign some sort of agreement which says that they will not?”

    I don’t care if Iran builds a nuclear weapon. Did we check with the rest of the world before we built ours? Did any of the nuclear nations? Did Israel?

    No nation that has nuclear weapons has ever been attacked — indeed, unless you count the India-Pakistan squabbles over Kashmir, nuclear weapons are unassailable defense against such attacks, and even in that case nobody has ever threatened using nukes.

    If war-mongering Israelis want to go to war over this, good luck to them. We need not get involved. Given our track record of backing certain regimes only to attack them a decade later, I would hope you would agree.

  12. Dana says:

    Mr Geezer wrote:

    I don’t care if Iran builds a nuclear weapon. Did we check with the rest of the world before we built ours? Did any of the nuclear nations? Did Israel?

    Really? You don’t care if a nation led by the mullahs builds an atomic bomb?

  13. Tom McKenney says:

    The Bush administration let North Korea build a bomb. Iran will eventually dump the mullahs and probably have a pro-western tilt.

  14. Geezer says:

    “Really? You don’t care if a nation led by the mullahs builds an atomic bomb?”

    Nope. Not even a tiny bit.

  15. cassandra m says:

    and even he declined to submit the SALT II agreement, because he knew it would fail in the Senate.

    This is wrong. Jimmy Carter did submit this treaty to the Senate shortly after he and Breshnev signed it. Carter withdrew the treaty from the Senate after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan.

    NAFTA bypassed the Constitutional requirement for a 2/3 ratification vote in the Senate with the device of putting it in the form of simple legislation, passing by a bare majority in the House, and a larger, but still less than 2/3, majority in the Senate

    NAFTA is not a treaty under US law but a congressional-executive agreement. Congress gave GHW Bush authority to negotiate this agreement, which he did, leaving Bill Clinton to get it through Congress with basic majorities to approve it. The direction for basic majorities comes directly from the authorization from Congress to enter into these trade negotiations.

    President Clinton declined to send the Kyoto Accords to the Senate, where he knew they would fail, and President Bush, who opposed the Kyoto agreement, and could have sent Kyoto to the Senate for a certain rejection, instead simply withdrew our signature.

    Before the Accords were completed, the Senate ratified a resolution that pretty much undermined the entire rationale for the Accords. So even though Clinton singed it, it never went to the Senate because the Accords did not comply with that resolution. GW Bush didn’t send Kyoto to the Senate either and while they looked for a legal way to withdraw the signature, just stopped engaging with the Kyoto process. As you might expect someone bought and paid for by the energy industry to do.

    Never fail to check Dana’s homework when he shows up here with some lecture on how it wasn’t done before. It is a good bet he’s wrong.

  16. Change Iran Now says:

    Just more micro inspection of side issues while ignoring the real larger macro problem. Iran is quite simply a religious theocracy with Khamenei as its religious and secular head. Religiously supervised government is by its very nature irrational since the decision making process rests on an interpretation of divine will. Similarly, if the head of the Conference of Baptist Churches had veto power over Congress and the President, I’m sure virtually everyone would be soiling their pants. So we are faced with a dilemma. We are negotiating with a nation who’s religious outlook has brought it into conflict with other Muslims, Christians, Jewish and Hindus. Probably Wiccans as well.

    This spiritually motivated belief in its “rightness” guides it to the position that Iran has a “right” to nuclear enrichment, just as it has a “right” to make war on Sunnis and treat women as non-humans in many cases.

    It is this behavior pattern ever since 1979 that makes frankly any rational person freak out over the idea of Iran possessing nuclear weapons. Any doctoral candidate in physics can explain the simplicity of constructing a weapon, but when national assets are used, the task becomes simply a question of “when” not “if.”

  17. Geezer says:

    “It is this behavior pattern ever since 1979 that makes frankly any rational person freak out over the idea of Iran possessing nuclear weapons.”

    A rational person doesn’t “freak out” over anything. A rational person wouldn’t defend his position by citing a clutch of fears.

    If you’re going to condemn the idea of a theocracy, let’s start with Israel — you know, that chosen people of god business isn’t exactly a rational basis for civic government either.

  18. cassandra m says:

    While we’re speaking about rational, Iran is a signatory to the NPT. The Israelis — who definitely do have nuclear weapons — are not.

  19. stan merriman says:

    Change Iran now, is it your thesis that theocracies, which I deplore by the way, should be blown off the face of the earth? I deplore that as a solution. Change Iran now, why not include Saudi Arabia and the Vatican as well as Pakistan, who has nukes and is very close to a theocracy in influence by their mullahs. I’d be careful here, because this could boomerang on the USA; studies out there suggest between 20-30% of our population, mostly evangelicals/fundamentalists are advocating theocratic government here. What do you intend to do with them?

  20. stan merriman says:

    This is an amazing link to see what real Iranian people feel about diplomacy vs. being slaughtered.
    http://letters.netformance.org/janejohn?lan=en

  21. June says:

    Geezer, everytime you commented I wanted to cheer! Iran would never use a nuclear bomb, and who the heck are we, the USofA to say who can have one? Remind me how many we have!! Remind me how many wars we’ve started in my lifetime.

    All the arguments about Iran aside, Chris Coons is such a disappointment. What the heck happened to him when he went to DC? Siding with right-wing conservatives on Iran? Not exactly a Democrat from a Blue State. Even Tom Carper joined other senators in sending a letter to Harry Reid telling him NOT to bring this bill up for a vote.

    This stand, along with Coons voting AGAINST an amendment back in May to restore $4B to the food stamps program, sure is an incentive to have a real liberal Democrat primary him this year.