So 47 Republican Senators from the, well, Senate of the United States bravely sent a letter to the leaders of Iran, explaining to them how our government works with respect to treaties and other foreign policy decisions. The letter is related to ongoing talks between the Obama administration and the Iranians over its nuclear program, and, no surprise here, it contains basic misinformation about the process of ratifying a treaty.
It's pretty goddamned insulting, too. Eleven members of the Iranian government's cabinet were educated in the United States. You can be pretty sure they know more than most of the constituents of the senators about how you negotiate an agreement with the U.S. And the senators got to see the back of Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Zarif's pimp hand in response: "I should bring one important point to the attention of the authors and that is, the world is not the United States, and the conduct of inter-state relations is governed by international law, and not by US domestic law. The authors may not fully understand that in international law, governments represent the entirety of their respective states, are responsible for the conduct of foreign affairs, are required to fulfil the obligations they undertake with other states and may not invoke their internal law as justification for failure to perform their international obligations." When the Iranian government dismisses your political propaganda as propaganda, you've failed mighty fuckin' badly.
But let's look at the letter in another way. Because not once in it do the senators, led by freshman ass-licker Tom Cotton of Arkansas, say that the end result of this should be that Iran shouldn't build a nuclear defense program. Oh, no. In fact, what the letter does is tell Iran, "Fuck it. You better build some nukes fast or we're gonna bomb your ass."
Or maybe Israel will. You can't really tell the difference between Likud and the GOP on this matter.
Here's one of the final paragraphs of the epistle of doom: "What these two constitutional provisions mean is that we will consider any agreement regarding your nuclear-weapons program that is not approved by the Congress as nothing more than an executive agreement between President Obama and Ayatollah Khamenei. The next president could revoke such an executive agreement with the stroke of a pen and future Congresses could modify the terms of the agreement at any time."
President Obama responded to the missive for missiles, "I think it's somewhat ironic to see some members for Congress wanting to make common cause with the hard-liners in Iran. It's an unusual coalition." He didn't, but he could have added, "Jesus, how much longer do I have to work with these fucking mentally-challenged skid marks?"
Imagine you're one of those hard-liners reading this letter in Tehran, with its implicit threat, as well as its undermining of the Negro president. Everything you believed about Americans would be contained in it: that you can't trust us, that you would be giving up your own safety, that America's ultimate goal is to remake Iran with the same gusto it remade Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya and... Yeah, you'd build a fuckin' nuclear bomb post-haste.
Let's put aside the overheated talk of treason. Let's not go down the rabbit hole of wondering what would have happened if a group of Democrats had done something like this to Bush. Instead, let's say that a group of Republican elected officials from the United States did the impossible: they made the repressive, fundamentalist government of Iran look like the reasonable ones.
