Folks, Bloomberg View columnist Eli Lake is mad that President Obama is scaring people about the Iran deal. Yes, that’s right, Eli Lake took time out from his busy schedule of scaring people about Saddam Hussein’s WMD, Al-Qaeda’s conference calls, and, uh, the Iran deal, to criticize somebody else for exploiting the “Politics of Fear”:
This kind of dog whistling from Obama does a disservice to his supporters. He’s exploiting his base’s deep fear of all things neoconservative. It’s true that neocons in 2002 and 2003 supported and argued for the Iraq war. Some of them helped plan the war. But many Democrats also supported the Iraq war, including Obama’s first secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. And yet in 2015 many prominent progressives still obsess about the out-of-power neocons, and darkly imply that they undermine the national interest on behalf of Israel.
For Obama’s base, the neocons were not just policy intellectuals on the wrong side of an unpopular war, but were instead agents that pulled off a kind of coup d’etat and foisted a war on an unsuspecting public. Most serious people don’t believe this anymore. But it’s nonetheless a popular fable among the net-roots to this day. What a terrifying world! Every election brings with it the prospect that our republic will fall under the power of a bunch of disloyal bureaucrats eager to shed American blood for Israel.
Oh my stars, what kind of monster would remind his audience that the people who are unhappy with the Iran deal are the same people who were so catastrophically wrong about the Iraq War (Eli included!) that you might want to take anything they have to say with a grain of salt? Only Barack Obama, that’s who!
Oh, and Eli? The neocons weren’t “on the wrong side” of the Iraq War. The hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who were killed, injured, or suffered the loss of loved ones in that war were the ones “on the wrong side” of it. You and your fellow neocons were at most mildly inconvenienced by the whole thing, as demonstrated by the fact that somehow people are still paying most of you to share your deep insights about American foreign policy in the Middle East.
President Obama has played to people’s fears about the nuclear deal. I shared my findings over at LobeLog:
Certainly it was wrong for President Obama to write in the Washington Times that the Iran deal “will be dangerous for America and the West — and, yes, life-threatening for Israel.”
CORRECTION: Wait, that was actually Clifford May, president of the anti-Iran deal Foundation for Defense of Democracies, back in March. Fact-checking this stuff is hard!
President Obama definitely should not have told a crowd at the Hudson Institute last week that the JCPOA “gives Iran nuclear weapons capability, laying out an R&D roadmap for it to become a nuclear threshold state in barely a decade.” Talk about fear-mongering!
CORRECTION: Actually that was another deal opponent, Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR), who said that to his Hudson Institute audience. We regret these several errors.
Undoubtedly, President Obama was wrong to say that the terms of the JCPOA would make his administration “the world’s leading financier of radical Islamic terrorism.” That statement is too ridiculous to even be called “hyperbole,” and even Obama’s 2012 opponent, Mitt Romney, called it “over the line.”
CORRECTION: After looking it up, we found out that Cotton’s fellow Senator (and a current GOP presidential candidate) Ted Cruz (R-TX) was the person who said this, in a press event on July 28. We can only offer our continued apologies for these errors.
It was indefensible for President Obama to call the Iran deal “a nightmare for the region, our national security and eventually the world at large,” and to call it “akin to declaring war on Israel and the Sunni Arabs.”
CORRECTION: Oh, apparently another Senator (and presidential hopeful), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), also a staunch deal opponent, said that.
OK, there were some holes in my initial research, but I think the general point comes across well enough.
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