Even Michael Gerson finds the Senate GOP’s Iran letter embarrassing, but still can’t avoid making ridiculous claims of his own:

The alternative to a bad nuclear deal is not war; it is strong sanctions and covert actions to limit Iranian capacities until the regime falls (as it came close to doing in 2009) [bold mine-DL] or demonstrates behavior change in a variety of areas.

It’s true that the U.S. can continue imposing sanctions and engaging in sabotage attempts “until the regime falls” or significantly changes its behavior, but that will most likely have to continue for a very long time and the outcome will be much worse than anything that could come from a compromise now. There is not much reason to expect the regime to fall or to change its behavior dramatically in the foreseeable future, so the alternative Gerson describes here is one that will define U.S.-Iranian relations for years and decades to come. That might not lead to war right away, but it makes armed conflict much more likely than it would otherwise be. One reason to assume that war becomes more likely if negotiations fail is that Iran hawks can’t stop talking about how ready they are to use force against Iran to “prevent” it from getting nuclear weapons.

The U.S. has used coercive means to try to force Iran to make concessions on the nuclear issue, and in the last decade this approach has utterly failed. The idea that there is some better deal out there for the asking is an illusion. The U.S. could have had a much better deal ten years ago, but the previous administration insisted on a maximalist goal and lost an opportunity to limit Iran’s nuclear program when it was much smaller and less sophisticated than it is now. Jeffrey Lewis reminds of this in a recent article:

One of the most frustrating things about following the past decade of negotiations is watching the West make one concession after another — but only after the Iranians had moved so far forward that the concession had no value. The people arguing now for a “better” deal at some later date are the same people who in 2006 said 164 centrifuges was way too many and, that if we just held out long enough, we’d haggle the Iranians down to zero. Look what that got us.

This is a fantasy, a unicorn, the futile pursuit of which ends with a half-assed airstrike against Iran, a region in flames, and eventually an Iranian nuclear weapon.

Gerson also asserts that the regime was “close” to falling in 2009, but that simply isn’t true. Most of the protesters weren’t seeking the overthrow of the regime, and they were in no danger of toppling the current leadership in any case. Iran hawks have been misinterpreting the 2009-10 protests from the start, and they continue to misunderstand what the protesters were seeking and what they were likely to be able to get. This is another example of how Iran hawks convince themselves of things they want to believe are true. They assume that the regime is fragile and poised to fall with just a little more time and some more pressure, but like everything else they say about Iran it is just wishful thinking and shouldn’t be taken seriously.

Later on, Gerson says this:

The Cotton letter creates the impression that Senate Republicans are rooting for negotiations to fail

Of course it creates this “impression,” because that is the message it was meant to convey. Gerson faults the signers of the letter for throwing it together too quickly without sufficient thought, but on reflection there don’t seem to be any senators that regret having signed it. Most of these senators are rooting for the negotiations to fail, and some of them have done a very poor job of concealing this desire. Cotton has explicitly said that he wants Congress to derail the negotiations, and it is not a stretch to assume that most of his hawkish colleagues agree with him. Gerson derides Cotton’s letter as “half-baked,” but the problem for Iran hawks is that it shows their loathing for diplomacy to be just as intense as the rest of us have assumed it to be.