The Democrats Own Iran
The Iran nuclear deal is all theirs—lock, stock and smoking centrifuges.
A poster at the suburban Tehran mausoleum of Islamic Republic founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini shows him, left, with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. PHOTO: AFP/GETTY IMAGES
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The Democrats now own Iran—lock, stock and smoking centrifuges.
It isn’t just the Senate compromise on the Corker bill that made the Iran nuclear deal the party’s exclusive political property. The Democrats own Iran’s entire penetration in the region—Yemen, the Gulf of Aden, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon—pretty much anywhere Ayatollah Ali Khamenei wants to take them.
Senate Democrats, attempting a magical illusion on American voters, say the Iran nuclear threat and the Iran terror threat are separate realities.
Before the Senate’s recent “compromise” vote on Sen. Bob Corker’s Iran review bill, Delaware Sen. Chris Coons and other Senate Democrats, at the White House’s insistence, said while they abhorred Iran’s support for terrorism, it had to be separated from the historic arms deal.
Meanwhile Ayatollah Khamenei, a more unitary thinker, has been surging Iran’s military across the Middle East. With the U.S. on the doorstep of a presidential election, Iran is beginning to look like the Democrats’ Bermuda Triangle. The last time the party’s fortunes went missing in Iran was during what history generally describes as “ Jimmy Carter’s hostage crisis.”
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Wonder Land Columnist Dan Henninger on political parallels with Jimmy Carter’s administration. Photo: Getty Images
After the Iranian hostage crisis had ground through the news for nearly a year, with 52 Americans held in Tehran, Mr. Carter’s competence as president became a campaign issue, which naturally Ronald Reagan exploited. Reagan won 489 electoral votes to President Carter’s 49 in 1980.
A Who’s Who of famous Senate Democrats got wiped out: George McGovern, Frank Church, Herman Talmadge, Mike Gravel, Birch Bayh, Gaylord Nelson, Warren Magnuson.
Let it be noted that the Iran hostage analogy is unfair to Jimmy Carter. Back then, the Iranians grabbed the Americans. This time, the U.S., or at least its president, has grabbed the Iranians and won’t let them go.
Until recently, the Democrats at least could argue that because Mr. Obama ended George Bush’s war in Iraq, he immunized them from direct political blame for the region’s troubles. That the decision to reduce the U.S.’s postwar presence in Iraq to zero allowed Islamic State to metastasize unimpeded was a morass they could push off into the ethers of the “hopeless” Middle East.
Except that the Democratic president erected a steel cable connecting himself directly to Tehran. This being Barack Obama, history had ordained that only he could take on Planet Iran and persuade its population of fanatic Shiite ayatollahs to change their worldview. In the years since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini presided over the American hostages, taking down a U.S. presidency, Iran’s Islamic Republic has had just one other Supreme Leader—today’s Ayatollah Khamenei, the man at the other end of the steel cable tethered to the White House.
It is now generally understood that completing a major nuclear-arms agreement with Iran was an obsession of Mr. Obama’s from early in his presidency. Up to a point, the Democrats’ normal instincts for self-preservation prevailed. Sufficient numbers of Senate Democrats—Mr. Coons, Bob Menendez, Ben Cardin, Tim Kaine, Chuck Schumer—raised enough questions of substance about the deal to credibly put space between them and a president assembling a major arms-control agreement out of his own head. The risks for Democrats were obvious.
But starting about two weeks ago, the Democrats’ Iran hedge collapsed. The compromise on the Corker bill virtually ensures that whatever agreement John Kerry outputs in Switzerland—a deal that increasingly looks built on sand—will pass unimpeded through the Senate. It looks a lot like ObamaCare, with congressional Democrats once again doing a pass-it-to-find-out-what’s-in-it for another Obama legacy.
But Saudi Arabia isn’t the American Hospital Association, and Quds Force Commander Qasem Soleimani isn’t Nancy Pelosi. The religious and military forces in motion in the Middle East now are powerful and volatile. Vladimir Putin’s decision amid all this to ship the sophisticated S-300 air-defense system to Iran was a thunderclap event. The ever-omniscient president dismissed it as no surprise.
We assume Barack Obama and John Kerry are telling Senate Democrats that if something blows, they’ll handle it, the way Mr. Obama could command Kathleen Sebelius and HHS to “fix” the ObamaCare glitches. The Iran framework’s fix is the assurance of “snapback” sanctions, a word with no meaning whatsoever.
The Senate Democrats’ initial hedge on Iran was smart politics. As was letting New Jersey Democrat Bob Menendez run point for them. Mr. Obama’s implicit charge in January at the Senate’s Maryland retreat that their Jewish donors had too much influence should have convinced them they needed political cover from the president’s overreaching on the nuclear deal.
But now the Holder Justice Department has indicted Sen. Menendez into oblivion. And now the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt and the guided missile cruiser USS Normandy are in the Gulf of Aden, cat-and-mousing with an Iranian naval flotilla.
The Democrats have no inoculation anymore. The party’s calculation that Hillary Clinton’s candidacy would bring home the presidency and Senate control after defeating vulnerable Republicans has a big fly in the goo: For the next 19 months, Iran is theirs.
Write to henninger@wsj.com
Write to Daniel Henninger at henninger@wsj.com
