Leading pro-Israel Democrat: It will be ‘difficult’ to stop the Iran deal(Engel)

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By Greg Sargent
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2015/07/27/leading-pro-israel-democrat-it-will-be-difficult-to-stop-the-iran-deal/

If you want a sense of whether Congress will or won’t stop the Iran deal from going forward, a good place to start is with Dem Rep. Eliot Engel of New York. As one of the most pro-Israel members of Congress and a well-respected voice on foreign affairs, he is one of a small number of House Dems who will be lobbied hard by supporters and opponents of the accord — and will be closely watched for clues as to whether enough House Dems will stick with Obama to sustain his veto of the expected GOP measure.

In an interview today, Rep. Engel said he thinks it will be “difficult” to stop the deal from going forward, though he said he didn’t think it was impossible. Engel noted he has serious concerns about the accord — but also indicated he was giving serious consideration to the administration’s case for it, which suggests there may be more political space for more moderate Dems to support it than previously thought.

“I think it’s difficult,” Engel told me, in a reference to whether opponents of the deal would be able to muster two-thirds of both Congressional chambers to over-ride Obama’s expected veto of a GOP measure disapproving of it. “There will be pressure on Democrats to sustain the president’s veto.”

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1. He misses the point.

Even if one manages to get the Congress to muster the necessary super-majority to reject it, that only means we get left out, everybody else is going to start doing business with Iran, except the Sauds and Israel and perhaps a few others. Sanctions only work if everybody pays attention to them.

This is much the same problem as with the sanctions on Russia, people are not going to stop doing business with Russia to appease us. China won't. India won't. Latin America won't. Africa won't. Only parts of Europe will.

And this is why the loss of the US' legitimacy and respect under Bush the Lesser, due to the obvious failures of the Bush/Cheney regime, is of real consequence going forward, we've lost a lot of clout, of influence.

Bullshit will only take you so far.

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3. he gets the point. that crowd wants regime change in Tehran. It's no small coincidence that the

same assholes who trusted Bush to make war are also the same ones unwilling to trust Obama to make peace.

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4. OK, he's being disingenuous then, pretending what the Congress does matters.

But they all do that, especially when soliciting donations or trying to influence opinions.

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5. What Congress does can matter here, Congress can make war inevitable

by overriding Obama's veto.

Regime change in Tehran is the only way the AIPAC crowd and Israel get their demands satisfied. It's been very clear all along that, by demanding a 0.0% chance that a nation with oil wealth would be unable to replicate 1940's technology, and that the same nation abandon its core foreign policy objectives, that their only interest in a diplomatic solution was preventing one.

Same pigs who made the Iraq war possible. Same rightwing warmongers on the right, and their loathsome enablers inside the Democratic party.

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6. Before there was AIPAC, there was the War Party.

I've been watching them most of my adult life. The fact that Israel has a War Party too, and they collude with ours, is Israel's problem.

I am skeptical that, at this point, the Congress can still take the country to war, without the consent of the MIC and executive branch, short of impeachment and conviction. It would be an interesting test.

I know who they are:

Then why was it done and why is Obama so pleased? He is not, as some would have it, stupid, nor as others would have it, is he incompetent. He is pleased because the deal goes a long way towards the accomplishment of his actual motivations for engaging in the negotiations and signing the deal, to wit:

1. Obama is anti-American and is and always has been motivated by the belief inculcated in him by his mother, his wife, and all his best friends and colleagues, that the United States is and always has been a wicked country and has used its great wealth and power mostly for evil. The list of exhibits is long. Slavery, slaughter of the Indians, race discrimination, seizing half of Mexico, overthrowing the Hawaiian monarchy, oppressing the people of Cuba, the Philippines and many others, as well as the domestic sins of savage capitalism, which are legion and so on and so forth. It must be punished for all that, just as he was told over and over again by the 1960s-style radicals by whom he has always been surrounded.

2. Having grown up in the country in the largest Muslim country in the world in an atmosphere saturated with Muslim culture, Obama is pro-Islam. He demonstrated that almost immediately after his inauguration in his speech in Cairo, and he has never ever changed his tune or even his terminology. Islamic terrorism does not exist in his lexicon, only Western, US and Israeli provocations. Islamic State, The Muslim Brotherhood, murderers screaming “Allahu-Akbar” as they slaughter people, are not Muslims. Islam is a religion of peace.

In this light the Iran deal is perfectly understandable. It furthers in a very major way, both of these motivations. His task, as he sees it, is now almost complete; I submit that there is no other way to explain his behavior. This explanation will do very well and fits perfectly all the facts on the ground. In other words, the man who has been president of the United States for six and a half years and will be for another year and a half is both anti-American and pro-Islam. That is, unless the Congress does the only thing it can do at this point that would make any difference,, namely impeach and convict him and throw him out of office for treason.

http://atimes.com/2015/07/norman-bailey-on-the-iran-nuclear-deal/

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7. Congress can't take us to war with this President.

It can lay the groundwork that makes war under the next president* all but inevitable.

*probably Bernie Sanders would resist, but Clinton and Bush/Walker/Rubio will definitely start a war with Iran if this deal falls apart.

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8. The next President matters, for sure, but the public is sick of war.

And I have doubts that any of the Republicans can get himself elected.

And any President who does take us to war again has to know it's his or her ass on the line too.

Which is not to say the risks you mention are not real.

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9. the public wants us to send ground troops ... into Iraq. Again.

the American public never loses its bloodlust. it just sometimes lacks an adequately hyped enemy.

the US has already committed itself to never allowing a nuclear-armed Iran. If the deal gets rejected by Congress, there's only one way forward on that front.

Every candidate with a non-trivial chance of winning in 2016 is a militarist. Clinton was known as Mama Warbucks when in the Senate.

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10. I doubt that.

Maybe some stupid poll says that, you can make a poll say anything, and they do.

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11. that's the Republican base for you. they especially want war escalation if Obama

is against it.

violence is as American as apple pie, after all

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12. Them I believe it about, but they are tools, so they matter only in the aggregate,

and they don't aggregate to enough anymore.

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2. By whom is Engel respected?

150+ Democrats have already signed a letter indicating they'll support an Iran agreement.

http://schakowsky.house.gov/press-releases/schakowsky-doggett-price-send-letter-to-president-in-support-of-iran-negotiations-signed-by-150-members/

There's no way Engel will vote yes. He voted for the Iraq war, pom-poms in hand, and he hasn't changed his stripes since then.