Less Huck, more Cotton

Arkansas home to nuclear deal’s best, worst critics

Foes of the Iran deal need fewer Mike Huckabees and more Tom Cottons. I don’t know why our little rural state spawned two of the most avid critics of the proposed deal to curb Iran’s nuclear research. But our junior U.S. senator, Cotton, and former governor, Huckabee, represented the two ends of the opposition this week — the rational and the irrational.

I wouldn’t have said that as recently as March. This was right after Cotton’s famous “Dear Ayatollah” letter. That was a Valentine compared to Huckabee’s best headline yet, that this deal would “take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven.” He later made it clear that comment really was about another Holocaust.

Only if the Iranians want to walk into a bigger, hotter oven. Israel is a nuclear power. It’s an open secret the country keeps an arsenal estimated at 80 warheads. “In fact, a nuclear arms race has been under way in the Middle East for 65 years. Israel won it,” said Bruce Riedel, a writer on Middle Eastern affairs.

Having a weapon is one thing. Getting it where you want is another. Israel has missiles with a 3,000- mile range, a half- dozen Germanmade subs fully capable of launching cruise missiles, and the best air force man-perman in the world. Israel could reduce much of Iran to radioactive glass.

Cotton, meanwhile, was briefly allowed Wednesday to cross-examine some cabinet members in the Senate Armed Services Committee. In moments, he forced the secretaries of of State and of Energy to admit that, to their knowledge, no one in the the U.S. government’s seen two key parts of this deal.

The International Atomic Energy Agency will inspect the nuclear program research sites that Iran is supposed to close. The agency is supposed to ensure that the closed sites are really closed and stay closed.

The terms of the two agreements on that between the agency and Iran are secret. That’s not strange in itself. As Secretary of State John Kerry pointed out, nations with pacts with the IAEA don’t normally show other nations the specifics. Here’s the problem: President Barack Obama didn’t just promise to keep Congress informed of all aspects of this deal. He made that promise law. He had to agree to sign the Corker-Cardin agreement after the Senate Foreign Relations Committee recommended that bill in a very rare and very impressive unanimous vote. Then the full Senate passed it. The need for full disclosure of the Iran deal is one of the few things the U.S. Senate can agree on these days.

Worse, the administration didn’t tell Congress about these deals. Cotton and Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kan., found out about them last weekend. They had to go to Vienna to do that. That’s where they asked the IAEA detailed questions about a specific Iranian testing site, one slated to be closed.

Kerry promised members of Congress would be briefed in closed hearings sometime later. He couldn’t promise, however, that those members will get to see the IAEA agreements themselves. He said someone with his department — who may have read the agreements themselves but maybe not — will brief them.

So at best Congress will learn vital aspects of these deals second-hand. At worst, they’ll get a briefing from a State Department official who got a second-hand version.

“What Congress would like is the text of these agreements as required by U.S. law,” Cotton told Kerry. The IAEA is not bound by U.S. law, Kerry correctly replied. That’s fine and good — a fine and good loophole on a major aspect of the whole Iran deal.

I don’t expect that big package to hang up over this one issue. I expect the members of Congress who passed Corker-Cardin are as cynical as the administration who agreed to it. But I’m a supporter of the Iran deal who is given far more pause by Cotton’s brief point than by all the spittle-flecked demagoguery in the Republican presidential primary put together.

Cotton made a good point here. Well-informed fans of this deal were reduced to criticizing Cotton as a know- it- all rookie who doesn’t show due deference to his Washington elders. In other words, they’re grumbling because the new kid’s right.