by VIJAY PRASHAD
Noam Chomsky ca. 2000 PHOTO/CORBIS/The Telegraph
ON September 2, the United States’ support for the Iran nuclear deal was secured. President Barack Obama’s team negotiated the deal along with other countries of the P5+1 (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, the U.S. and Germany). The Republicans in the U.S. Congress had threatened to pass a resolution that would block Obama’s signature on such a deal. Obama had said he would veto any Bill that constrained his hand to sign that deal. He needed 34 Senators to back him in order to secure his veto. When Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland said she would support the President, the deal was safe.
Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., told me that Barbara Mikulski’s vote was “a big relief”. She said that the Iran deal was “a huge victory for diplomacy over the real threat of war with Iran”. Trita Parsi and Reza Marashi of the National Iranian American Council agreed. Obama, they said, “has proven to the U.S. that security is better achieved through diplomacy than through militarism”. Emad Kiyaei of the American Iranian Council told me just after Barbara Mikulski’s announcement: “There is no ‘better’ deal and the opposition has not introduced a viable alternative, except more coercive policies that to date have not slowed—rather accelerated—Iran’s nuclear programme.”
In late August, Obama suggested that those who agreed with him were “the crazies”. This suggested the strong push the White House had made to get the deal through. No wonder that the American Enterprise Institute’s Danielle Pletka told me that Obama was more belligerent with the Congress than the Iranian negotiators. “I only wish the President had brought the same tenacity and purpose to the Iran talks,” she told me, “than he brought to bludgeoning the representatives of the American people.”
To get the wider context of the Iranian deal, I spoke to Professor Noam Chomsky, who laid out the geopolitical and historical context for this important agreement.
Professor Chomsky, how would you characterise the Republican Party’s reaction to the Iran nuclear deal?
The Republicans are almost unanimously opposed to the nuclear deal. The current Republican primaries illustrate the proclaimed reasons. Ted Cruz, considered one of the intellectuals of the group, warned that Iran may still be able to produce nuclear weapons, and it could use one to set off an electromagnetic pulse that “would take down the electrical grid of the entire eastern seaboard” of the U.S., killing “tens of millions of Americans”. The two most likely winners of the primary, Jeb Bush and Scott Walker, are battling over whether to bomb Iran immediately after being elected or after the first Cabinet meeting. The one candidate with some foreign policy experience, Lindsey Graham, described the deal as “a death sentence for the State of Israel,” which came as a surprise to Israeli intelligence and strategic analysts—and which Graham too knows to be utter nonsense, raising immediate questions about actual motives.
It is important to bear in mind that the Republicans have long abandoned the pretence of functioning as a normal parliamentary party. Rather, they have become a “radical insurgency” that scarcely seeks to participate in normal parliamentary politics, as observed by the respected conservative political commentator Norman Ornstein of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute. Since Ronald Reagan, the leadership has plunged so far into the pockets of the very rich and the corporate sector that they can attract votes only by mobilising sectors of the population that have not previously been an organised political force, among them extremist evangelical Christians, now probably the majority of Republican voters; remnants of the former slave-holding States; nativists who are terrified that “they” are taking our white Christian Anglo-Saxon country away from us; and others who turn the Republican primaries into spectacles remote from the mainstream of modern society—though not the mainstream of the most powerful country in world history.
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