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Perry’s Iran Folly

If we wanted to embitter another generation of Iranians against our government, we would do exactly as Perry wished.
Rick Perry

Josh Rogin talks to Rick Perry about his rejection of a nuclear deal with Iran:

I asked Perry what he would do as president after scuttling the deal. With no agreement, no negotiations and no inspections on Iran’s many nuclear facilities, how would a President Perry propose to stop Iran from getting the bomb?

He said he would seek to further cripple Iran’s economy, undermine the Iranian regime by increasing support for its internal opposition, and then rely on military strikes to take out Iran’s nuclear facilities if necessary.

Perry’s answer is typical for an Iran hawk. He is committed to scrapping an agreement with Iran, and he doesn’t have much of a backup plan. His position in practice is that he favors removing the restrictions currently in place on Iran’s nuclear program, and he supports reducing the current level of international pressure on Iran. That is what scuttling a deal would actually do. Then he proposes falling back on the same dead-end coercive measures that have been tried for the last decade while Iran’s nuclear program continued to expand. Perry might as well say that he endorses taking useless and counterproductive action simply so that he can maintain the pretense that he is “tough” on Iran.

Perry would be hard-pressed to “further cripple” Iran’s economy once all of the other countries participating in sanctions go back to doing business with Iran. If the U.S. reneges on its part of the deal, most other nations will see no reason to keep refusing to do business with Iran. Blowing up a multilateral agreement that most other nations welcome is a good way to ensure that the U.S. will be increasingly isolated in its desire to use punitive measures against Iran on the nuclear issue. The Iranian opposition presumably wouldn’t want support from any American administration, but it certainly wouldn’t want to be associated with an administration that made the renunciation of a nuclear deal one of its first acts. Many Iranians greeted the news of the framework agreement with enormous enthusiasm, because they understandably see it as a way to begin removing sanctions that have done so much harm to the civilian population. The surest way to earn the distrust and enmity of most Iranians is to pile on additional sanctions in an attempt to coerce Iran to give up even more than it already has. The only thing that would cause the U.S. to be more deeply loathed by most Iranians is to launch illegal military strikes on their country.

None of the things Perry wants to do would prevent Iran from being able to develop a nuclear weapon if their government decided to do so. Attacking Iran would all but guarantee that Iran’s leaders would make that decision. If we wanted to embitter another generation of Iranians against our government and cause their leaders to never trust ours under any circumstances, we would do exactly as Perry wished. Perry and the other deal-rejecting candidates may think they’re showing off how “strong” their foreign policy would be, but all that they’re proving is that they should never be trusted with the powers of the presidency.

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