Joe Conason: Iran’s Best Friends on Capitol Hill

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/irans_best_friends_on_capitol_hill_20101128/

Iran’s Best Friends on Capitol Hill

Posted on Nov 28, 2010

By Joe Conason


Nuclear weapons treaties are like currency exchange rates—always vitally important to the national interest but often stunningly dull, not to say impenetrable. Yet Washington has suddenly been jolted awake by Republican threats to stall if not kill the Obama administration’s New START treaty.

The irony is that by doing so, they would do little to protect American security while providing moral support to Iran, North Korea and any other rogue regime seeking to arm itself with nukes.

snip//

So why would Republicans and conservatives adopt a stance against New START that so plainly benefits Iran—when they are constantly warning about the danger posed by the mullahs and their nuclear ambitions? The most cynical explanation is that, as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has publicly admitted, their chief concern is to make sure that President Barack Obama serves only a single term. If that is their sole priority, then anything that improves his standing must be stopped or stalled, even if it is in the national security interest of the United States.

But there is an alternative explanation for their stance: pure diplomatic ineptitude. It is worth remembering that the opponents of this treaty are by and large the same geniuses who assured us that we had to invade Iraq to disarm Saddam Hussein, that doing so would tame Iran and that it would cost us nothing. The result was that we wasted trillions of dollars and thousands of lives to discover that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction—and that our blundering strengthened Tehran immensely.

Richard Burt, the Reagan administration’s chief negotiator for the original START treaty, has noted that “there are only two governments in the world that wouldn’t like to see this treaty ratified—the government in Tehran and the government in North Korea.” To that list may be added the obstructionist leaders of the GOP, whose motives are as questionable as their competence.

This is so wrong and harmful. They are definitely acting like traitors and putting their allegiance to something other than the constitution and the country.