Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has told the U.S. Congress to reject the Iranian nuclear deal and the Israeli propaganda machine is fully in gear to back up his demands, but the deal’s opponents ignore the risks of their potential success, writes ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.
By Paul R. Pillar
The first few days of argumentation about the recently completed agreement to restrict Iran’s nuclear program have taken predictable directions – predictable not only because the shape of the deal was known well before all the drafting was finished in Vienna but also because the principal opposition to the agreement has little or nothing to do with the terms and instead is opposition to any dealing with Iran.
A recurring pattern in discourse about the agreement this past week has been reluctance by opponents to talk about the alternative of no agreement – again, unsurprising, given that the alternative is patently worse on nearly all the points (inspections, duration, limits on enrichment, etc.) on which the agreement gets criticized. This has meant, as Peter Beinart has noted, much evasiveness and changing of the subject when opponents are asked about the alternative.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The opposition approach has been dominated by two general lines of attack: shooting at provisions of the agreement as if the alternative were not the absence of an agreement but instead some perfect pact, notwithstanding the unattainability of that ideal; and reminding people of all the reasons they should dislike Iran, notwithstanding how far this gets from the nuclear nonproliferation objective that is what the agreement is all about.
Among the numerous obfuscating aspects of the public discourse on this subject are some more subtle ways in which the issue has gotten framed. One of these ways is to regard this agreement and its implementation as somehow riskier, or involving the taking of greater chances, than the alternative of no agreement.
For example, David Sanger of the New York Times, who has made into an art form the weaving of his evident disdain for the agreement into reporting on the subject for the nation’s premier newspaper of record, wrote…