The “Bomb Bomb Iran” network got a little smaller on Monday, when the anti-Iran deal group United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) fired parted ways with (but really fired) their president, Gary Samore. Samore is a veteran non-proliferation expert who served as Barack Obama’s first-term “Coordinator for WMD Counter-Terrorism and Arms Control,” so you’d think his presence at the head of a major anti-deal organization would buy that organization some serious cover against charges of partisanship and/or war-mongering. You’d think that, except that Samore came out in favor of the deal after the Lausanne Framework was announced in April. Oops.
Now, for some organizations, you might think that having their subject-matter expert and hand-picked president declare his opposition to the stated objective of the organization might cause the board of that organization to maybe rethink that objective. But not UANI. Obviously they need to continue opposing the Iran deal, facts and/or endorsements be damned, and so instead of rethinking their objective they rethought their president. Samore needed to go, and he needed to be replaced by someone who could be relied on to stick to the script, for Christ’s sake. Somebody who routinely says terrible things about Iran anyway, and who will happily do so on your behalf provided that your check clears. But where to find such a person?
Yes, UANI traded in their non-proliferation expert president for an expert in how much he’d love to bomb the shit out of Iran, former Senator Joe Lieberman, who was named chairman of the organization (former UANI executive director David Ibsen took Samore’s job as president, but Lieberman is now the public face of the organization). Lieberman, whose pledge to never become a lobbyist lasted less than a year after he left the Senate and is still good and buried today, already serves in some capacity for just about every neocon and/or anti-deal organization in DC, so UANI definitely brought itself back into the fold in a big way with this move. To be completely fair, Samore remains on UANI’s board at the moment.
A list of Lieberman’s transgressions against reality and basic human decency would take too long, but suffice it to say that his chummy relationship with Mujahideen-e Khalq and his charter membership in the Committee for the Utter Destruction Liberation of Iraq will put him right at home running a group that has previously advocated against companies doing legal trade in basic humanitarian goods with Iran.
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