Lindsey Graham reminds us why he and many other Iran hawks should be ignored:

Graham was unequivocal about the Iranian regime and the U.S.-led negotiations over its nuclear program. “I think these guys are religious Nazis with an end-of-days view of their religion and that they’re dangerous as hell,” he said. He attacked the Obama administration for “sitting down and talking to people who’re nuts as if they’re not nuts.” An Iranian nuclear weapon, he said, would be shared with a terrorist organization “at a minimum,” and might be used by Iran itself. “Do they want to kill a lot of us?” he asked. “I think they do.”

Almost everything about Graham’s “analysis” is wrong or very misleading. Many hawks routinely portray other regimes to be more fanatically ideological than they are to make them seem impossible to deter, and they also routinely assume that certain leaders of other regimes are so mad that they would invite their own annihilation. Every time hawks have made this claim, they have been proven wrong. It was once taken for granted by some hard-line anticommunists the Soviets were so committed to their cause that they would invite their own destruction, and then they believed the same thing about Mao’s China when the USSR had demonstrated that it did not desire to commit nuclear suicide. Then it turned out that the Chinese government wasn’t intent on destroying itself, either. It was fairly common in the 1990s and early 2000s to describe Hussein as a “madman” who could not be deterred, and this nonsense was an important part of the Bush administration’s shoddy case for attacking Iraq. Each time these hawks were certain that the other regime was “nuts,” and each time they were just engaged in baseless fear-mongering. All of the regimes that hard-liners have assumed to be so bent on destruction that they could not be deterred have, in fact, been far more concerned with self-preservation and survival.

Graham takes for granted that an Iranian nuclear weapon would be shared with a terrorist organization, but no nuclear-weapons state that has gone to the enormous expense and trouble of building such a weapon would just give one away to a third party that it can’t control. This is especially true since Iran would be blamed for an attack once the weapon was traced back to it. Never mind that a post-deal Iran won’t have a nuclear weapon that it can give away to anyone. Even if Iran acquired such a weapon, it wouldn’t be giving it away. The idea that terrorists would be provided with a nuclear weapon by a pariah regime is one of the more common fears that hawks encourage when talking about proliferation by “rogue” regimes, but it is also one of the most fantastical and least likely to happen. The fact that Graham thinks it is very likely should tell us all we need to know about his grasp of the relevant issues.

It is quite common among Iran hawks to endorse the “martyr-state myth” about Iran’s willingness to usher in its own destruction. That’s a crazy idea, and one for which there is no supporting evidence. It ought to discredit them and undermine their arguments against the nuclear deal, but that never seems to happen.