Here’s how hawks are trying to foil America’s negotiations with Iran

Here’s something you don’t see every day: Senator John McCain and Iran’s most crotchety ayatollahs in agreement.

McCain, the soon-to-be chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, opposes the president’s recent overtures to Iran, calling them “immoral and shameful.” Iran’s Islamic fundamentalists hate them too; the hard-line newspaper Kayhan recently dismissed a deal over its country’s alleged nuclear program as “an illusion from the very beginning.”

Republicans took control of the Senate earlier this month with a crop of hawkish candidates who, like McCain, are dead-set against a deal. Of course President Obama and Iran haven’t actually reached a deal yet, but no matter. Republicans are planning to pass a bill that would reinstate any sanctions on Iran that the president cancels. And with the hawkish Senator Bob Menendez whipping his fellow Democrats, there just might be enough votes to override a presidential veto.

Last week Dave Weigel took stock and found that Rand Paul was the only GOP senator open to an Iran deal. Twenty months after Paul’s galvanizing filibuster the hawks are back in control.

Let’s stipulate the obvious: the Obama administration’s motives for negotiating aren’t exactly pure. Flopping and gasping around in search of a more consequential legacy than “the guy who hired Jonathan Gruber,” Obama decided that “Nixon opened China” has a nice ring to it and is now striving to be the president who opened Iran. His motives are selfish. When are they not?

But that doesn’t mean his neoconservative critics are right either. Iran is not the Mordor to America’s Rivendell, an evil hellscape beyond redemption. The two nations have taken multiple stabs at diplomacy over the years and have occasionally even allied against common enemies.

The first President Bush asked the Iranians to help free American hostages captured by Hezbollah, which they successfully did. President Clinton found a counterpart in Iran’s new moderate president, Mohammad Khatami, and for the first time an American wrestling team was sent to Iran to compete on the anniversary of the Islamic Revolution. George W. Bush worked with Khatami after 9/11 to snuff out the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Then Iran’s name came up in the Axis of Evil. Khatami pressed on anyways, and in 2003 proposed an extraordinary “grand bargain” that would have settled both countries’ grievances. The White House, high on its recent “victory” over Saddam Hussein, never sent a reply.

On the other side of the ledger, Iran has sponsored terrorism, including death squads in Iraq, is suspected of involvement in the Khobar Towers bombing that killed 19 American airmen, and elected the vulgarly anti-American Mahmoud Ahmadinejad president for eight years.

American diplomacy with Iran, then, has had more false starts than a Division III football team. But if Obama is an appeaser for talking with Iran, as some hawks claim, then so is every president since Reagan—and two of them were willing to give Iran something in return. “Goodwill begets goodwill,” as George H.W. Bush put it.

The United States isn’t a faultless actor here. Key to understanding modern Iran is the Iraq-Iran War, which killed a million people and left an indelible imprint on the Iranian psyche. Iraq, having invaded Iran, was unquestionably the aggressor and went on to use chemical weapons with malevolent abandon, something Iran never did. Yet America, with full knowledge that Saddam Hussein was deploying sarin gas, sided with Iraq. That still rankles Iranians to this day.

Now we have perhaps our best opportunity yet to drain some of the poison out of the American-Iranian well. Iran is deeply invested in the fight against ISIS. It’s ordered its Quds forces to leave Americans alone in Iraq and has been coordinating with the United States via Iraqi go-betweens. Given all this, Obama’s recent correspondence with the Ayatollah Khomeini, derided by neoconservatives, was a logical and productive step.

America also has Iran against a financial wall. Iran’s economy, anachronistic and centrally planned, is largely reliant on oil revenues. Thanks to fracking across the United States, oil prices have been plummeting (sneering liberals take note: the “drill, baby, drill” crowd was right and you were wrong), which has slowed Iran’s recovery and thrown its budget into chaos. This in turn has applied pressure on its negotiators to strike a deal ending America’s economic sanctions.

Many hawks contend that sanctions can’t be weakened unless Iran wholly shutters its nuclear centrifuges. That’s never going to happen, and anyways the CIA doesn’t believe the centrifuges are for bomb-making purposes. Khomeini himself once ordered a prohibition on nuclear weapons. There’s also little reason to think that Iran would use any nuclear warhead, since it would guarantee Tehran’s destruction. Pakistan, a far more unstable country than Iran, has had the bomb since 1998.

What is known is that our economic sanctions against Iran, like most of our other economic sanctions, have served only to breed anti-Western sentiments and empower tyrannical elements. John Allen Gay notes that Iran’s moderates, led by its president Hassan Rouhani, ran for office promising an economic recovery. If they don’t achieve one, the country’s Islamist mullahs could grab more power in Iran’s 2016 election.

As Azadeh Moaveni writes: “Hard-liners would depict this rejection as more evidence of Western disrespect, even contempt, for Iran, and would try to exploit any sense of renewed tension to push their oppressive agenda.”

“I hope he fails,” declared Rush Limbaugh of Barack Obama in 2009. But the president has a unique opportunity to begin mending relations with one of America’s oldest enemies—and avoid the alternative, a costly and devastating war.

Sorry Rush, but when it comes to Iran, I hope he succeeds.