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| Democrats, Republicans and Mushroom Clouds |
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By Mona Charen
Wednesday, September 09 2015 |
The Democratic Party has been weak-minded on defense for decades, but with the Iran capitulation, they've achieved a new threshold of cowardice and treachery. While it's true that an honorable handful of Democrats have resisted the president's pressure, the overwhelming majority have chosen to go over the cliff with Barack Obama, a president who never met an enemy he didn't wish to conciliate or an ally he didn't seek to betray. Democrats have long tended toward appeasement of aggressors. Throughout the Cold War, they scared themselves (and everyone else) silly conjuring specters of nuclear holocaust. Then-Sen. John Kerry was one of many prominent Democrats who endorsed the "nuclear freeze." It wasn't America's enemies that we should fear, the Democrats argued, but the weapons themselves. Democrats rejected the insight of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and others that the surest way to prevent war was "peace through strength." Reagan was regularly accused of courting Armageddon because he described the Soviets accurately (something liberals were too intimidated to do) and because he declined unilaterally to disarm. The dumbfounding reality is that the Democrats have never acknowledged that Reagan's approach succeeded. Instead, with Iran as our chief enemy now, they hope to replay the Cold War so that this time, we fully surrender. At least the Soviets made it easy for them, playing up the "peace" angle at every opportunity and investing heavily in organizations with names like the "World Peace Council" and the "International Institute for Peace." Soviet leaders and propagandists of the 1970s and 1980s spoke silkily of their desire for "peaceful coexistence" with the West even as, behind the curtain, they were engaged in every form of subversion, terror, espionage and violence. Iran, by contrast, doesn't bother to disguise its hatred for our country. There is no disingenuous talk of coexistence. "Death to America" is their motto, and the Supreme Leader (not some mythical "hardliners" in the background) has repeated it with grinning audacity even as his negotiators sat across from Kerry in Vienna. No regime on Earth has been as diligent in executing attacks on Americans since 1979 as Iran. By itself or through proxies, the Islamic Republic took Americans hostage, bombed our embassy and the Marine barracks in Beirut, bombed our embassy in Kuwait, and destroyed the Khobar Towers complex in Saudi Arabia housing U.S. servicemen. Hezbollah's tentacles extend far beyond the Middle East, with a flourishing branch in the tri-border area (Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil) of South America. During the Iraq War, Iran's IEDs accounted for up to a quarter of the 4,400 casualties we suffered there. Even members of the Obama administration acknowledge that Iran has an ongoing cooperative arrangement with al-Qaida -- though the administration declines to publish the extended evidence discovered at Osama bin Laden's bunker. The world's leading terror state is expanding its hegemony and contributing, through its brutal support of Syria's Assad, to the horrific refugee crisis now swamping Europe. Even the grotesque Sunni extremist group ISIS owes part of its success to Iran, which has so frightened the Sunnis that some have been willing to support such monsters of their own sect. And the Islamic Republic has threatened, unabashedly and consistently, to annihilate the state of Israel. This is the regime the Obama Democrats propose to enrich, to grant international legitimacy to as a nuclear threshold state, and to invite to monitor its own nuclear sites. No other signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty is permitted to enrich uranium. This is beyond naïveté -- it is sheer lunacy. The Democratic Party has forfeited any claim to national leadership. Republicans cannot simply shrug and announce that they lack the votes to stop this catastrophe. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has a reputation as a shrewd inside player. He has many possible options. 1) Pass a rule by simple majority declaring that the filibuster cannot be used for grave matters of national security. 2) Announce, as David Rivkin and Rep. Mike Pompeo have proposed, that because the president is not in compliance with the Corker/Menendez legislation (which requires that all side deals be submitted to Congress), the 60-day review period has not yet begun. 3) Decide (as Andy McCarthy has suggested) that this agreement -- so crucial to the security of the nation and the world -- is clearly a treaty and can only be considered by Congress as such, requiring a two-thirds vote in both chambers for passage. If this is not a time for considering every possible congressional strategy, what is? The Democrats trashed the filibuster for some second-tier appointments. Republicans can revive it to prevent terrorists from getting the bomb. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mona Charen is a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. |
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