There are no pictures in which he doesn't, so we're all stuck with it.
I know of no nation in history that has agreed to guarantee that the means of its own destruction will be in the hands of another nation, particularly one that is hostile. What President Obama is asking the United States Congress to do is unique—historically and dangerously unique. The results may be catastrophic.That's hyperbolic even for Disaster Boy. I'm thinking this speech may have been written by Bill Kristol.
[I]t guarantees that in less time than has passed since 9/11, a regime with “Death to America” as a pillar of its national policy, will have the ability and material to produce an arsenal of nuclear weapons. And at that point what is to prevent them from doing so? Well, President Obama tells us, they promise they won’t. We are asked to rely on the word of a country that has cheated on every nuclear agreement to which they have been a party that once they have the means in place to become a nuclear power, they won’t do it.Well, there's an inspection regime involved as well, but we all know what Dick Cheney thinks of inspection regimes. If an inspection regime doesn't turn up the weapons Dick Cheney wants them to find it's just proof that the weapons are so advanced that they've been made invisible.
The Iranians are reputed to be excellent negotiators, [...]He heard that from Donald Trump, I guess. Our newest right-wing racial trope is that them-thar Persian types are super-duper negotiators.
All right, all in all it was a gigantic nothingburger, a speech in which the interruptions are garnering more press than the things America's top not-prosecuted torture-endorsing war criminal dribbled out his word hole. It wasn't a speech meant to sway anyone, it was a speech from one of the chief architects and proponents of the single most catastrophic American foreign policy disaster since the Vietnam War to the rest of the true believers, so that they can all pretend that they are still very, very smart and that none of the things that happened under their watch, under their direction, were actually their fault.
Perhaps the negotiated nonproliferation deal between Iran and the rest of the world will hold. Perhaps it will not. American foreign policy for forty years has served to drum one and only one lesson into the heads of America-wary states: If you do not want to be bombed into submission by the United States, you had better damn well get yourself membership in the nuclear club post-haste. We will go to war in Afghanistan with little debate; a terrorist-riddled Pakistan we treat with a far lighter touch. We will bomb Iraq, depose their government and disband their armies; the far more vicious regime of North Korea, though, may only rate passing mention in a Dick Cheney speech. A nation would have to be comprised entirely of idiots not to internalize the message.
So yes, Mr. Cheney, it is going to be difficult indeed to convince the frustratingly sovereign nation of Iran that they should give up the only method of deterrence that would possibly keep the Dick Cheneys of the world from carpet bombing them until they agreed to more forthrightly do whatever the Dick Cheney of the moment demands of them. That is indeed a problem. It can be solved two ways—by attempting to negotiate with them a settlement that would momentarily stall their ability to become a nuclear power, or by removing their capability to become a nuclear power via military action so necessarily massive that would make the Iraq and Afghanistan wars look like cakewalks in comparison—and you will forgive us all for wanting to try the first thing for the time being even though you personally would really, really like to have all America's children have a go at the second. Again.