How Obama defeated AIPAC on Iran
PETER
BEINART Sep 02, 2015 3:04 PM
It’s
now virtually
certain that the Iran
nuclear deal will survive congressional challenge. If opponents pass a
bill rejecting the agreement, supporters have the votes to sustain U.S.
President Barack Obama’s veto in the House of Representatives. In the
Senate, a bill condemning the deal may not even garner enough votes to pass in
the first place.
The
interesting question is why.
The
first, and most obvious, answer is that when a president really wants something
in foreign policy, he’s hard to stop. After World War II, when America
established a de facto global empire, the balance of power between the
president and Congress tipped. The executive branch now contains a vast,
semi-secret national security bureaucracy that makes split-second decisions —
for instance, whether to launch a drone strike halfway across the world —
without ever asking Congress. Members of Congress have become accustomed to
deferring to presidents overseas in a way they don’t at home. Even when the
Iraq War grew politically toxic, Congress never cut off its funding. Congress
still refuses to vote on Obama’s war against ISIS; they’d rather leave it to
him.
The
Iran deal is unusual in that members of one party — the GOP — are refusing to
show that deference. In fact, opposing the president on Iran has become a way
for Republicans to rally their political base. But that merely brings us to
reason number two that the deal is almost certain to pass: The more partisan
the opposition to it becomes, the more Democrats rally behind Obama in
response.
This
is a huge problem for AIPAC. For years, the organization has worked to ensure
that both Democrats and Republicans provide the Israeli government unquestioning
support. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, by embracing Mitt Romney in
2012, colluding with Republicans to organize a speech to Congress behind
Obama’s back this spring and making Ron Dermer, a former GOP operative, his top
representative in Washington, has made AIPAC’s work harder.
AIPAC
itself has also changed. In the 1980s, when it was led by Tom Dine, a former
staffer to Ted Kennedy, Democrats comprised a larger share of its membership.
But over the decades, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush have made hawkish Jews
more comfortable in the GOP. Others have left the Democratic
Party because of Barack Obama. Orthodox Jews, who vote overwhelmingly
Republican, also play a larger role in AIPAC than they did a few decades ago.
As
a result, while AIPAC remains immensely powerful, the distribution of its power
has changed. Last year, the organization’s problems attracting liberal Democrats even led it to appoint a
director for progressive engagement.
AIPAC’s
power doesn’t come from its staff in Washington. It comes from its ability to
mobilize influential people in a state or district, people who know their
member of Congress well. But if fewer of the AIPAC activists in a given state
or city are Democrats, their Iran views carry less weight with Democratic
members of Congress. In the words of one Jewish official who has spent time
discussing the Iran deal on Capitol Hill, “Members have commented on how
AIPAC’s membership has changed. They say that when they walk into an AIPAC
meeting, it feels to them like they’re walking into a conservative, Republican
space.” Why should Democrats listen to Republican AIPAC activists who
will oppose them no matter what?
But
there’s a third reason Obama is going to win on Iran. By framing a vote against
the deal as a vote for war, he’s effectively harnessed the legacy of the Iraq
war. Before Iraq, ambitious Democrats considered hawkishness the politically
safer bet. That had been the lesson of the 1991 Gulf War. Only ten senate
Democrats had voted to authorize it. And after the war proved a triumph, two of
them, Al Gore and Joe Lieberman, were rewarded with spots atop their party’s
presidential ticket in 2000.
The
politics of the Iraq War proved exactly the opposite. It was his opposition to
the war that led Howard Dean to come from nowhere to almost win the Democratic
nomination in 2004. Opposing the war helped Obama beat Hillary Clinton in 2008.
Opposing the Iraq War also helped make MoveOn.org
a force inside the Democratic Party, and it is MoveOn, more than any other
single group, that Democrats fear crossing if they vote against the Iran deal
today. Most senators fantasize about being on a presidential ticket one day.
And as the Jewish official notes, Democratic senators are “keenly aware that
there’s no candidate for president today running on their record of the support
of the Iraq War.”
Barack
Obama ran for president, in part, to change the politics of national security;
to give Democrats the confidence to do what they believed was right. As he said in Iowa in late 2007, “I don’t want to see more
American lives put at risk because no one had the judgment or the courage to
stand up against a misguided war before we sent our troops into fight.”
Now,
as Obama’s presidency enters its twilight, it is clear that he has succeeded.
Republicans may be as hawkish as ever. But Democrats no longer feel the need to
keep pace. They no longer worry as much that by supporting diplomacy, they look
weak or soft.
On
national security, Obama has changed the terms of debate. And there is nothing
Benjamin Netanyahu or AIPAC can do about it.
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"The
master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought
the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while
the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially
their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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