Leave it to Al Jazeera America to give a little lesson in international relations to the 47 asshats who signed the now infamous letter to Iran threatening to obviate any agreement on that country’s nuclear designs. It’s worth a read, since I haven’t seen a similar explainer in the capitol press corp’s output.
Here’s a sample:
Beyond the amusing inaccuracies about U.S. parliamentary order, it seems there are some features of the nuclear negotiations that the signatory senators don’t fully understand — not only on the terms of the deal, but also on who would be party to an agreement.
There are no negotiations on Iran’s “nuclear-weapons program” because the world’s intelligence agencies (including those of the U.S. and Israel) do not believe Iran is currently building nuclear weapons, nor has it made a strategic decision to use its civilian nuclear infrastructure to produce a bomb. An active Iranian nuclear-weapons program would render moot the current negotiations, because Iran would be in fundamental violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
The current negotiations are focused on strengthening verifiable safeguards against weaponization over-and-above those required by the NPT, yet the Republican-led Congress, egged on by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is warning that those goals are insufficient, and the terms and time-frame of the deal are unacceptable.
The key element missing from the GOP Senators’ letter, however, is that the deal is not being negotiated between Iran and the United States; it is being negotiated between Iran and the P5+1 group, in which the U.S. is joined by Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China. Even if the U.S. is the key player in that group, the deal being pursued reflects an international consensus — the same consensus that has made sanctions against Iran so effective.
The worse thing about the letter is not that it gave Iran an opportunity to ridicule the U.S. in the global press, but that it showed such a harsh light on the set of numb-nuts we have elected to our government’s “most deliberative” body.
And reading the polls it looks like Boehner and the republicans bombed when the invited Netanyahu to give a speech, ever since he did he has gone down in popularity
and has become quite unhinged. Obama was right, they should not interfere in another country’s election and wisely he stayed out of it.