Myer on the Iran agreement
Agreeing with Huckabee without mentioning his name
This morning's Michael Myer's column is about how the recent nuclear weapons pact is "Sending Wrong Message to Iran" and half of the column follows the frequently-used conservative argument that the Iran deal is just like the 1938 Munich agreement. Here's Myer:
Obama's strategy has been compared to the 1938 Munich arrangement, in which Britain and France agreed to allow Adolf Hitler's Germany to destroy Czechoslovakia. Upon returning home from Munich, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain said the pact meant "peace in our time."
The "strategy has been compared" by whom? Yes, the right wing has been using this analogy since the nuclear pact was first proposed and now some of the Republican candidates for president are embracing it. It's interesting that for whatever reason, Myer doesn't cite Mike Huckabee who, referencing the pact, said that the deal will "take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven." As Simon Maloy writes in Salon, comparisons to Munich are just a more subtle way of making the same point as Huckabee:
An invocation of the Munich Pact is no less a reference to the Holocaust than what Huckabee said – the immediate consequence of the Munich agreement was thousands of Czech Jews being rounded up by the SS and shipped to concentration camps. Referencing Munich 1938 is the more polite way to condemn a nuclear weapons pact by connecting it to the 20th century’s most horrific campaign of mass murder. Huckabee’s getting headlines because he put a bit more edge on his Godwinning of the Iran debate than we’re used to seeing.
Not unlike the rest of the critics, Myer doesn't suggest any alternative to the pact. As James Fallows writes in the Atlantic:
. . .opponents had not then (and have not now) met President Obama’s challenge to propose a better real-world alternative to the negotiated terms. Better means one that would make it less attractive for Iran to pursue a bomb, over a longer period of time. Real world means not the standard “Obama should have been tougher” carping but a specific demand that the other countries on “our” side, notably including Russia and China, would have joined in insisting on, and that the Iranians would have accepted.
My hunch is that Myer, his fellow "keyboard commandos," and a number of the Republican presidential candidates would simply like for us to go to war with Iran. For this group it doesn't matter how many previous times you've been wrong about war as a solution - it's the only solution.