David Brooks offers the fanatic’s view of the nuclear deal:

By this standard the U.S. and its allies lost the war against Iran, but we were able to negotiate terms that gave only our partial surrender, which forces Iran to at least delay its victory.

Brooks’ complaint is that a negotiation did not result in Iran’s total capitulation. In other words, he faults a process that requires compromise for producing a compromise. He uses this rhetoric about “war against Iran” to make this seem slightly less unhinged than it is, but even in most wars total victory is usually too costly to be worth pursuing. Despite the fact that Iran is the party yielding the most to outside demands on the nuclear issue, Brooks turns things upside down by pretending that failing to obtain maximalist, unreachable goals is equivalent to “partial surrender.”

The reality is that the U.S. doesn’t have to give up anything except its punitive measures on Iran related to this issue. Acknowledging that earlier goals were unrealistic or unobtainable is the sort of necessary adjustment that one should be able to make in diplomacy and war, but doing that clashes with the all-or-nothing mentality that hawks usually possess. Thus a major diplomatic success for the U.S. and its allies that comes at remarkably low cost for us is classed as a “strategic defeat” by some of the same people that urged the U.S. to launch a ruinous, costly war that also happened to be the biggest strategic blunder of the last forty years. Brooks’ argument is full of tendentious and faulty analysis, which is just what we would expect from someone that enthusiastically endorsed the Iraq war.