Some days, A Robert Byrd Senate speech is fun to lampoon because of his advancing age, rhetorical style, and subject matter that has little to do with anything. Today, however, Byrd was all business in a ten minute address regarding our policy towards the menace in Iran, and Byrd must be challenged on his views not just because he's dead wrong, but because he is the chairman of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, and he is three heartbeats away from the presidency. Here's some of the key excerpts:
Mr. President, last week the Senate voted on an amendment to the Defense Authorization bill that designated a portion of the Iranian armed forces as a terrorist organization. I joined 21 of my illustrious colleagues in voting against that amendment. It was a dangerous, unnecessary provocation that is escalating the confrontational rhetoric between the United States and Iran. In response to the passage of that amendment, the Iranian parliament on Saturday designated the U.S. Armed Forces and the Central Intelligence Agency as terrorist organizations. Would someone please explain to me what has been achieved by this exchange of international verbal spitballs?
Not that I have any expectation that he'll read this and understand, but what has been achieved is a monetary victory. Senator Byrd, as Chairman of Approps, should realize this. By classifying that part of the Iranian Army as a terrorist organization, which of course is a perfectly appropriate moniker to a wing of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard that trains radical extremists to become terrorists, that gives the U.S. government more lattitude in seizing assets internationally to try and defund them. Iran's economy is not a stable one. They do not have unlimited resources like many of their other Middle East neighbors. If we can seize the assets of companies that deal internationally with the Iranian regime, and therefore weaken Iranian military capabilities, that's a good start. Robert Byrd doesn't see it that way. He likes Iran just the way they are.
I am no apologist for the Iranian regime any more than I was for Saddam Hussein. But I fear that we may become entangled in another bloody quagmire.
If you have to spend time on the Senate floor to explain that you are not an apologist for the Iranian regime, the bulk of what you're saying must be being perceived as apologizing for the Iranian regime.
Four and a half years ago, Secretary of State Colin Powell made a speech before the United Nations Security Council claiming to have evidence that proves Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and was an imminent threat to U.S. and international security.
Legacy of Ashes author Tim Weiner, a man of the left and a reporter with the New York Times, wrote, "This was not a selective use of intelligence. It was not cherry-picking. It was not fixing the facts to fit the war plans. It was what the intelligence said - the best intelligence the Agency had to offer. Colin Powell had spent days and nights with George Tenet, checking and rechecking the CIA’s reporting. Tenet looked him in the eye and told him it was rock solid." As for the imminent threat part, President Bush himself said that the reason for action in Iraq was precisely because he did not want Iraq to become an imminent threat on his watch. Byrd's staffers who clearly wrote this speech are misleading the American people in order to perpetuate the myth that George Bush misled us to war.
The proponents of war compared Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler, warning ominously of the dangers of Chamberlain-like appeasement. That is a seductive analogy, but it is a dangerously specious one. Every foreign adversary is not the devil incarnate.
True, not every adversary is the devil incarnate. But when they propose genocide and seek nuclear weaponry in order to make that fantasy a reality, they become the devil incarnate. Saddam Hussein was trying to achieve nuclear capabilities, as Christopher Hitchens has frequently documented. He also sought to wipe out Israel, and then, weapon technology permitting, eventually desiring to hit us. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called for the destruction of Israel, and is trying to achieve the nuclear capacity to make that happen. Even French President Sarkozy understands this.
The intelligence that suggested he was an imminent threat was flat wrong. Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. Saddam Hussein had not attacked our country. Saddam Hussein was a ruthless tyrant, but he was not an imminent threat to national security.
More perpetuation of the same lie. The Hussein threat was growing, not imminent. We didn't want it to become imminent. That's what the preemption doctrine was all about. He did have weapons of mass destruction. Ask the Kurds, where thousands were slaughtered at the hands of Hussein chemical weapons. Saddam didn't attack our country, just like Germany hadn't attacked our country in 1941.
While there may be some superficial similarities between Hitler and Ahmadinejad, it does not mean that our only option is to start World War III.
World War III was the Cold War, Senator. We're on number four now. Try to keep up.
Every day it seems that the confrontational rhetoric between the United States and Iran escalates. We hear shadowy claims about Iran’s destabilizing actions in Iraq with little direct evidence offered to back it up.
Shadowy claims? This is where he is reflecting widespread Democratic opinion that the American military is populated with generals who are all liars. Members of the Quds force, the foreign terrorism wing of the Revolutionary Guard, have been captured trying to kill American troops in Iraq. IED's that have killed American troops have Iranian signature characteristics. Generals Abizaid, Casey, Pace, Myers, Simmons and Petraeus have detailed the existence of Iranian interference in Iraq. Byrd saying there's little evidence is akin to looking skyward and saying there's little evidence the sky is blue. All he has to do is look.
The President telegraphs his desire to designate a large segment of the Iranian Army as a terrorist organization. And instead of counseling prudence, the United States Senate rushes ahead to do it for him. I hope that we can stop this war of words before it becomes a war of bombs. We have seen the result when the U.S. Senate gives this administration the benefit of the doubt.
The Dinner Jacket just said to the attentive youth at Columbia recently that there is no meddling by Iran in Iraq. Robert Byrd seems quite content to take him at his word, yet he's unwilling to give the benefit of the doubt to either our own military commanders or our President.
We need to talk directly to the government of Iran without preconditions or artificial restrictions, and indicate that regime change is not our goal. Unfortunately, the President seems unwilling to take that step.
Michael Ledeen, AEI scholar and author of The Iranian Time Bomb, just said on the program yesterday this about the folly of our government the last few decades trying to negotiate with these people:
HH: Carter began it, and he tried, and this came as a surprise to me, he armed the Mullahs and pleaded with the Mullahs, rather than resisting the Mullahs.
ML: Yeah, well, he wanted, he had various reasons. First, he was completely misled on the nature of Khomeini. Nobody in the American government at that time understood what a monster Khomeini was, and how terrible this regime was going to be. Secondly, he desperately wanted to show that he had not lost Iran, because if it turned out that Iran had fallen into the hands of these evil people, they were afraid in Washington that they were going to be blamed for it. And so in a lot of the cables back and forth, you find people saying you see, we haven’t lost Iran after all, we can make an agreement with these people, these people are reasonable, we can work with them, etc. And then as time passed, and it became more and more urgent to deal with the Iranian threat in one way or another, all the diplomats argued that anything can be negotiated, and we can negotiate it with these people too, just have patience.
HH: Even after the hostage crisis and the embarrassment of Carter, and the freeing of the hostages on the first day of the Reagan administration, one would have thought that Reagan and Bill Casey and George Schultz and the rest of them would have been on guard against this, but as you recount, Reagan fell for it, too. Can you tell our audience how?
ML: Well, Reagan was sucked into the Iranian matter by the hostage crisis. The various Americans were taken hostage by Hezbollah, which is to say by Iran, and the it became possible to negotiate with the Iranians to ransom out some of the hostages. And so they got involved with that, and once they were involved in talking to them, then they said well, now we’re talking to these people, we can talk about broader things. And in fact, from the very beginning, the Iranians kept on saying, you know, let’s reach some kind of modus vivendi, because we don’t have to hate one another. Remember, there was still a Soviet empire then, and the Iranians were very active against the Soviet empire. And there were actually things on which there was convergence of interest between the United States and Iran, namely the Soviet business.
HH: But after the interregnum that is Bush 41, and after Iran-Contra, everyone leaves it along, arrives Bill Clinton, and again, falls for it hard, for the temptation of the Iranian thing. And why the Albright apology? It’s one thing to hope for something, but it’s another thing to embarrass yourself in the quest for that which isn’t being delivered.
ML: Well, you see, what happened was that in the meantime, Khatami, the so-called great moderate, had become president. And so all the experts in the State Department and the intelligence community went to Clinton and Albright and said everything’s changed, Iran is now a moderate country, now is the time to go all out to normalize relations. And so we did all these terrible things. We enabled the Russians to sell nuclear technology to Iran, and to sell weapons to them. In open violation of American law, we permitted the Iranians to smuggle weapons into the Balkans, which made it possible for them to set up their terrorist network there, and to expand it. And then you know, we let the Iranian wrestling team into the country, the usual symbolic gestures, we eased some of the banking restrictions and so forth. And Khamani spit in our faces. And my grandmother always used to say when somebody spits in your face, don’t pretend it’s raining.
HH: (laughing)
ML: But once we were committed to that negotiating track, we just plowed on. And Mrs. Albright even apologized for things we hadn’t done, let alone things we had done. She said she apologized, for example, for helping Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war, when the first assistance we gave went to Iran, not to Iraq. And I think that on balance, we helped the Iranians more than the Iraqis.
Ledeen, of course, is spot on. Byrd is 180 degrees off. Imagine the line about how regime change in Iran is not our goal being broadcast to the 50 million Iranians who would love to have something positive to hang onto to reclaim control of their government, and how dispiriting something like that will be.
And yet, Byrd is not all by himself on his foreign policy views. His desire to talk with Iran directly is straight out of the Barack Obama playbook. His version of history about the beginning of the Iraq war sounds like a Hillary Clinton stump speech. 21 other Senators voted with him against the amendment naming the Quds force a terrorist organization. A fifth of the Senate cannot seem to recognize a threat when it's presented to them.
Keep that in mind as the election cycle starts to ramp up. Are Democrats really the ones you want in charge of the Congress and the White House?