A more confident leader wouldn’t tar opponents as stooges
and idiots.
By BRET
STEPHENS
In a withering 1957 review of Ayn
Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” for National Review, Whittaker Chambers
wrote that he could “recall no other book in which a tone of overriding
arrogance was so implacably sustained.” Of the author’s mentality, he observed:
“It supposes itself to be the bringer of a final
revelation. Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because
disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or just humanly fallible.
Dissent from revelation so final (because, the author would say, so reasonable)
can only be willfully wicked.”
Which brings me to Barack Obama and his case for the Iran nuclear deal.
Who is it, according to the president, who supports the
deal? It is, he said in his speech last week at American University, the
unanimous U.N. Security Council, the majority of “arms control and
non-proliferation experts,” “over 100 former ambassadors” and “every nation in
the world that has commented publicly”—with one lone exception.
In sum, the forces of good, the children of light, the
99%.
And who’s against the deal? A “virulent” majority of
Republicans. Lobbyists funding a multimillion-dollar advertising effort to
oppose the deal. Partisans and pundits. Warmongers. The people who were wrong
about Iraq. Hard-liners in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps. And one
stiff-necked nation, Israel, which doesn’t have the wit to see how terrific
this deal is for them.
In other words, fools or knaves, the benighted or the
willfully wicked, fighting a deal whose intrinsic benefits should be as
self-evident as Bran Flakes or a good night’s rest.
Much has now been written on the merits and demerits of
the Iran deal. Not enough has been said about the bald certitude of its
principal sponsor, or the naked condescending disdain with which he treats his
opponents. Mr. Obama has the swagger of a man who never seems to have
encountered a contrary point of view he respected, or come to grips with the
limits of his own intelligence, or figured out that facile arguments tend to be
weak ones, if for no other reason than that the world is a complicated place, information
is never complete and truth is rarely more than partial.
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the
mouth,” says Mike Tyson, who knows whereof he speaks. Mr. Obama talks
about his Iran deal the way Howard Cosell talked about a fight.
One might have thought that, by now, the president and
his advisers would be chastened by experience. Al Qaeda is “on a path to defeat” (2012). Bashar Assad’s “days are numbered”
(2011). “If you like your current insurance, you
can keep that insurance. Period, end of story” (2009). Russia and the U.S. “are
not simply resetting our
relationship but also broadening it” (2010). Yemen is an example of a
counterterrorist strategy “we have successfully pursued .
. . for years” (2014).
And so on—a record of prediction as striking for the
boldness of its initial claims as it is for the consistency of its failures.
Doesn’t Mr. Obama get this? Haven’t his advisers figured out that they have a
credibility issue?
Apparently not. Apparently, the president figures that
the politics work better when he projects Olympian confidence about his
diplomacy than when he acknowledges some measure of uncertainty. Apparently, he
thinks it’s wiser to tar opponents of the deal as partisans or idiots or paid
stooges than to engage them as sincere, thoughtful people who came to their own
conclusions. Apparently, he thinks there’s nothing amiss in suggesting that the
only thing standing between the present moment and the broad, sunlit uplands of
a denuclearized Iran is the Jewish state and its warmongering Beltway
lobbyists.
That slur in particular was the loudest dog whistle heard
in Washington since Pat Buchanan said in 1990 that the Gulf War —advocated by
columnists like Abe Rosenthal and Charles Krauthammer—would be
fought by “American kids with names like McAllister, Murphy, Gonzales and Leroy
Brown.” Then again, Mr. Buchanan wasn’t the president.
It says something about the crassness of Mr. Obama’s
approach that the New York Times noted that allies of the
president fear he “has gone overboard in criticizing” opponents of the deal.
But it also says something about the weakness of his deal. Right behind Mr.
Obama’s salesmanship is a battalion of apologists who admit that the deal is a
stinker but the realistic alternatives may be worse—particularly when there’s
no hope of Mr. Obama’s punishing Iran should it sprint toward a bomb in the
wake of the deal’s collapse.
Expressions of certitude typically betray deeper
insecurities. A more confident president would conciliate his critics. My
suggestion: Transfer to Israel surplus B-52s plus a stockpile of Massive
Ordnance Penetrator bombs, and supplement the agreement with a congressional
pre-authorization of airstrikes should Iran fail to open suspected nuclear
sites to snap inspections.
That would show that the president means to honor both
his promises and his threats. I won’t hold my breath.
