Comning soon to a primary season near you -- 1968 II

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The Iran agreement and the Versailles Treaty

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Demogoguery in Times of Crisis

In the fall of 1971, I entered graduate school in history and began writing my first seminar paper, about the U.S. Congress and foreign policy from late 1944 until early 1947.  The research involved going through virtually the entire Congressional Record for those years, but, it quickly became a labor of love.  What struck me most about the debates was the enormous spread of opinions within the Congress and the violence with which they were expressed.   At 24, I had already been a political junkie for about ten years, and the 1960s were not among the quietest eras of American political history, yet I had literally never heard anything like what I was reading.  The spectrum ran all the way from left-wingers with Communist associations (and in a couple of cases, an actual Communist past) on one side, to avowed racists and anti-Semites like Congressman John Rankin and Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi on the other.  One exchange, between liberal Democrat Burton Wheeler of Montana and Bilbo, has always stuck in my mind.  When Bilbo referred to “the voters of my state,” Wheeler immediately asked him what percentage of the people in his state voted (the answer was about 10%.)  Bilbo replied that all the qualified people voted.   The two men repeated the exact same exchange about three times, whereupon Wheeler took it a step further. “That is why the state of Mississippi has such excellent representatives,” he said.  “That’s right,” Bilbo replied—“we get the cream of the crop in Mississippi.”

Another dramatic exchange occurred on February 22, 1945, when Rankin accused Congressman Frank Hook of Michigan, a left-wing Democrat elected with labor support, of having been “mixed up with” the Communist Party.  “You are a god damned liar, Hook replied, whereupon Rankin, 62 and frail, attacked Hook, a former middleweight boxer in his 50s, with fists flailing.  Other members separated them.  The Chicago Tribune, a right-wing paper that reported the incident in thrilling detail, ran full-length photos of the two men and all their body measurements, just as they would for any boxing match.  Under the rules of the House, Hook was silenced for the rest of the day for his personal attack upon Rankin.

I know now that we now live, once again, in an age like that.  Last Friday evening, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who is trying to win the Republican nomination by taking the most extreme positions among all the candidates, took to the Senate floor to call another Senator a liar.  But in a bizarre twist, his target was not Bernie Sanders, Al Franken, Elizabeth Warren, or Kirsten Gillenbrand—four of the tiny minority of Senators whose views are remotely similar to those of a mainstream progressive in 1945.  Instead, Cruz called his own majority leader, Senator Mitch McConnell, a liar, because McConnell was not going to allow a vote on the continuation of the Export-Import Bank, an agency right wing Republicans are determined to kill, after having told a Republican group of Senators (Cruz claimed) that he would not do so.  And while I am not about to attack McConnell for failing to cross the Senate floor to engage Cruz in fisticuffs, it seems that there was no move to silence Cruz on the floor, and indeed, McConnell declined any comment

The Republican reaction shows that the Republican right feels just as embattled and just as desperate as it did after twelve years of the New Deal.  It is similar to the Republican reaction to another demagogue, Senator Joseph McCarthy (to whom Cruz is often compared, not least because of their noticeable physical resemblance) in 1950-53.  “Tea Party groups, the Heritage Foundation’s political arm, and Charles G. and David H. Koch’s Freedom Partners,” the New York Tines reports, “immediately rushed to Mr. Cruz’s defense.”  Since McConnell is not a former POW and a war hero, it seems unlikely that any of Cruz’s fellow presidential candidates will stand up for him, either.  Like the battle against Joe McCarthy in its second and decisive phase (1953-4), the battle against Cruz, Donald Trump and their ilk will take place primarily within the Republican Party.   Clearly Jeb Bush would prefer to avoid a confrontation with the right wing, but, like President Eisenhower, he may have no choice. Meanwhile, Cruz, the conservative media, and other Republican politicians have reduced American political discourse to levels of demagoguery and hatred that can be compared only to the periods of the Civil War and the New Deal.  I do not know how long it will take to emerge from our new swamp.

The Meaning of the Iran agreement

Yesterday, in Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings, the Republican chairman, Senator Robert Corker, accused Secretary of State John Kerry of moving from a situation in which Iran was a pariah to one in which Congress was a pariah.  There was more than a grain of truth in that statement--but in fact, what is at stake is much, much bigger, even though the real issue is being treated rather quietly by both sides.

"Congress," today, means the Republican Party, whose successful long-term offensive has given it majorities in both houses and left the Republicans just one election away from completely transforming the United States.  But with regard to Iran, the Republicans stand for two things.  To begin with, they stand for the neoconservative doctrines put into effect by George W. Bush, that give the United States the right and the duty to rule the world and to apply force as necessary against any state perceived to be seeking nuclear weapons.  But equally importantly today is the rock-solid alliance, unprecedented in American history, between the Congressional Republicans and the Israeli government.  The Israeli Ambassador, Ron Dermer--who, like his predecessor Michael Oren, was born and grew uip in the United States--has been having Republicans-only meetings on Capitol Hill.  Meanwhile, AIPAC, the leading U.S. organization advocating on behalf of the Israeli government, is apparently throwing all its enormous political capital  into the scales against the agreement, with the result that many Democrats are reluctant, as  yet, to endorse it.  (One notable exception is Democratic whip Charles Schumer of New York.)  Those wishing to reacquaint themselves with AIPAC's tactics and power should review this post, and the Michael Massing article in The New York Review of Books upon which it was based.  To stop the deal--or rather, to keep the US out of the deal--AIPAC needs 2/3 majorities to override a presidential veto in both Houses.  I do not think it is impossible that they might get them.

It was inevitable that the Republican Party, in its utterly single-minded drive to regain power and undo the Progressive era, the New Deal, and the Great Society, would make an ironclad alliance with a powerful lobby that does not care in the least about American domestic politics but only foreign policy.  Equally determined  Republicans made a comparable alliance 70 years ago with the "China lobby" on behalf of Chiang Kai-Shek's doomed regime in China, and kept a stranglehold on U.S. China policy until Richard Nixon turned apostate, courageously, in 1971.  Until Barack Obama, Democratic legislators and Presidents had been nearly as beholden to the Israeli lobby as Republican ones, and despite all the bitter rhetoric between Obama and Netanyahu over the past few years, this is the first time that Obama has actually done something directly contrary to Israeli policy.  The issue is quite simple:  the Israelis have tried to insist that the US treat as a pariah state any nation that has openly called for their destruction, to put maximum pressure upon it, and in certain circumstances, to go to war with it.  The second Iraq war as a triumph for Israel, and Benjamin Netanyahu joined George W. Bush in proclaiming that it would lead to a new era of peace and reconciliation in the Middle East.  This Israeli policy--along with the continuing, if clearly unsuccessful, attempt to replace the Palestinian population of Jerusalem and the West Bank with an Israeli one--has isolated Israel within the world community for some time.  That is why the veto power of the U.S. has repeatedly protected Israel against Security Council resolutions condemning various Israeli policies.  The Iran agreement terrifies Netanyahu, I think, not simply because he thinks Iran might get a nuclear weapon, but because it marks the end of the era in which the United States would diplomatically protect Israel.

President Obama's defense of the agreement has been provocative, sophisticated, and effective, although typically, as in the case of  the Obama doctrine, he has not enunciated it in a major speech, the way that Roosevelt, Kennedy, or Nixon would have.  It rests on a frank recognition that the United States must live alongside many states that do not share our interests and values, but with whom we can make useful agreements.  As Obama told Jon Stewart the other night, if we could make such agreements with the Soviet Union when it had 10,000 nuclear warheads pointed at us, surely we can make agreements with Iran to keep them from having any.   The President pledged to continue opposing Iranian support for militant groups in certain countries (he did not really answer Stewart's question as to why we were with Iran in Syria and Iraq, but against them in Yemen), and, to my sorrow, he forswore re-opening diplomatic relations with Teheran.  But the broader point he is making, with typical, maddening restraint, is true. Neither Russia nor China, as well as Iran, shares our values or wants the kind of world that we do.  We have proven that military force cannot transform the Middle East according to our wishes, and a military conflict with Russia or China would be a disaster we cannot imagine.  American diplomacy now faces unprecedented challenges, requiring a realistic, sophisticated view of other nations and regions, their values, their aspirations, and the ways in which we can live together in the same world.  We barely survived that situation during the Cold War, and we disposed of a far more educated elite then than we do now.  But Obama and Kerry are headed in the right direction.

The alternative, clearly, is the for the US to remain tightly allied with Israel in opposition to every other major power in the world, including Britain, France, and Germany.  That has been the goal of Israel and AIPAC for years, and under George W. Bush they achieved it regarding Iraq--with disastrous results. That policy is not, we must keep in mind, supported by all Israelis, and its opponents include not only Israeli doves, who are increasingly isolated, but former heads of Mossad, at least one of whom has endorsed the agreement.  Republican rhetoric of "American exceptionalism" also militates in favor of that outcome.   Obama has in fact paid shockingly little attention to our traditional allies, but John Kerry has now created a new situation.  The Iran agreement is an important step in the right direction for the United States.

Race, two novels, and Atticus Finch

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