This past Thursday, June 25, Peter Roskam spoke on the House floor in favor of an ammendment to H.R. 2647, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010. The text of Roskam’s press release is here.
First off, I think Dan Conston got mixed up about what Roskam had to say:
“This is an Administration that has said that Iran has legitimate nuclear ambitions, no they don’t. There is no legitimate pursuit of nuclear power in Iran. It is all for an evil and despicable purpose. This is an Administration that got it wrong on the Iranian dissonance and has, sort of, back peddled over the past several days and recast their support of the dissonance when they really missed the mark.
…[Iran] is an aggressive regime that ought not to be coddled. This is an effort to make sure that all of us are safe, and this is a sacred duty.
I’m pretty sure we heard Peter talking about dissidents in the video, but I could be wrong.
More importantly, I think this kind of overblown rhetoric is decidedly unhelpful. The President didn’t get it wrong. Bush and Cheney and Roskam and their neo-con faction did. Their hostile rhetoric and their bungled invasion of Iraq put us into the dangerous position we are in relative to Iran today.
Roskam’s hostile language will not help Iranian dissidents. It only feeds the perception of an outside threat which helps Ahmadinejad maintain a precarious hold on power. Its terrific political theater for Republicans pandering for votes among a population that has largely rejected their platform but it is lousy foreign policy and can only make things more difficult for President Obama as he strives to deal with a very delicate situation. Roskam should shut up.
Nicholas Burns, who lead the Bush administration’s tardy efforts to negotiate with Iran on nuclear issues has praised President Obama’s handling of the Iran situation. Speaking in an interview on NPR’s Morning Edition on June 16, Burns had this to say (thanks to Greg Sargeant’s The Plum Line):
“President Ahmadinejad would like nothing better than to see a very aggressive series of statements by the United States that would try to put the U.S. in the center of this,” Burns said. “And I think President Obama is avoiding that quite rightly.”
“This is not a dispute for the U.S. to be the center of,” Burns said at another point. “It’s up to Iranians to decide who Iran’s future leaders will be. He said he respects Iran’s sovereignty. I think it was important to do that.”
Burns said that Obama was right to refrain from throwing the U.S.’s weight around while giving props to reformers. He praised Obama for being “low-key” while saying he’s concerned about the plight of reformers and inspired by them, which Burns called a “balancing act.”
Even creepy John Negroponte, Bush’s first ambassador to Iraq, has praised Obama for his conduct of foreign policy. Speaking at a review of foreign policy under Obama hosted by the French-America Foundation on June 23, Negroponte said that he had a “high level degree of confidence” in the Obama team, which got “an extremely good start to foreign policy.”
Roskam’s assertion that the President supports Iran’s nuclear ambitions is a gross distortion based on a much more nuanced remark Obama made this spring. Roskam has a bright future ahead as a commentator for Fox News once we replace him in 2010.
The ammendment that Roskam rose to speak for, and which bore his name failed. It’s point was to restore $1.2 billion in cuts to spending on missile defense over 2009 levels. Missile defense has been an article of religion for arch-conservatives like Roskam since Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative was launched. Programs have cost billions with limited success. The ground-based mid-course defense that Roskam’s ammendment refers to has failed 6 out of 14 intercept tests since 1999. This is a program that is a boon to defense contractors like Boeing, having cost over $30 billion to date, but offers no increased security to this country in the near term. Missile defense programs like these are certainly not a substitute for effective diplomacy in resolving what threat may be posed by Iran. Roskam should let the grown-ups manage foreign policy.
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