Chuck Schumer has unsurprisingly become every right-winger’s favorite Democrat since he declared last week that he’s voting against the Iran deal. Nothing wrong with that, I guess, although it seems an odd place to find a guy who thinks he’s going to be the next Democratic leader in the Senate. You gotta do what you gotta do, I guess, even when “what you gotta do” involves making a disastrously stupid decision on an important issue. But for anybody (particularly anybody, say, in Congress) who’s thinking about following Schumer’s lead here, ask yourself who you think has a better perspective on the quality of this deal: actual experts on nuclear and arms control issues, or a guy who managed to get elected to the Senate in New York?
Here, for example, is a genuine arms control expert, Jeffrey Lewis of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, explaining that, when it comes to the Iran deal, Chuck Schumer “has got the facts all wrong”:
On Thursday evening, right in the middle of the first GOP debate, Schumer reached back, took aim, and heaved a large one. He penned a long piece for Medium that some anonymous hack described as “thoughtful and deliberate.” Uh, ok. Maybe compared to Mike Huckabee’s outrage about “oven doors,” but good grief our standards for political discourse have fallen. Schumer’s missive came across a bit like your crazy uncle who gets his opinions from talk radio and wants to set you straight at Thanksgiving.
(I’m probably not the only one who thinks so. But then, I don’t have to pretend Schumer is some great statesman lest he put a hold on some future appointment or nomination.)
Consider how Schumer describes the inspections regime in the Iran deal.
Schumer starts by repeating the claim that “inspections are not ‘anywhere, anytime’; the 24-day delay before we can inspect is troubling.” This would be very troubling if it were true. It isn’t. The claim that inspections occur with a 24-day delay is the equivalent of Obamacare “death panels.” Remember those? A minor detail has been twisted into a bizarre caricature and repeated over and over until it becomes “true.”
Lewis explains in considerable detail why the “24 day” bogeyman is fundamentally dishonest. Schumer is parroting disinformation, either because he doesn’t understand what he’s talking about or because he’s actively participating in an effort to misinform the public about the nature of the deal.
But I hear what you’re saying; Lewis is just one expert, he could be biased or just plain wrong. So in addition to Lewis’s piece, take this letter from 29 leading US scientists (including six Nobel laureates, a guy who helped design the hydrogen bomb, a former director of the Los Alamos weapons laboratory, and several former government advisers on nuclear and arms control issues) to Barack Obama, in which they not only praise the Iran deal as a “good deal,” but suggest that it’s so good that it could “serve as a guidepost for future non-proliferation agreements.” Contrary to Schumer’s concerns, the letter reserves some of its highest praise for that “24 day” dispute resolution period and the deal’s other verification mechanisms:
Concerns about clandestine activities in Iran are greatly mitigated by the dispute resolution mechanism built into the agreement. The 24-day cap on any delay to access is unprecedented, and will allow effective challenge inspection for the suspected activities of greatest concern: clandestine enrichment, construction of reprocessing or reconversion facilities, and implosion tests using uranium. The approach to resolving “Possible Military Dimensions” is innovative as well: the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) must be satisfied that it is fully informed about any previous activities, in order to guide its future verification plans, but Iran need not be publicly shamed. This agreement, also for the first time, explicitly bans nuclear weapons R&D, rather than only their manufacture as specified in the text of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
But, hey, I’m sure Chuck Schumer’s thinking on this stuff is also top-notch.
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