A star is born. That’s my reaction to the extraordinary interview Sen. Tom Cotton has just given to The Atlantic in respect of President Obama’s appeasement of Iran.
It is a 5,000-word tour-de-force that deserves to be widely read.
The Senate just struck a deal under which Congress is going to get to review the president’s proposed framework for Iran and any deal that emerges from it.
Who, though, is going to lead the actual critique of any deal that is brought to the Congress for its review? Who has the combination of experience, intellect and vision to take on the president and his camarilla?
Enter the gentleman from Arkansas, a Harvard-educated lawyer who, at 37, is the youngest senator. He is a battle-tested ex-captain in the 101st Airborne Division, a veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan.
Cotton burst into the news in March by getting 46 of his Republican colleagues to sign a letter to the Iranians warning them not to take the Congress for granted.
The letter smoked out the mullahs into disclosing that their scheme is to trap America via the United Nations.
What comes out in the interview is that this was no accident. Cotton’s comments to The Atlantic’s ace, Jeffrey Goldberg, make clear that the senator is both a student of history and a strategic thinker.
Cotton’s main point is to dispute Obama’s suggestion that the choice before the country is this deal or war.
He reckons that a military strike against Iran would be more like Operation Desert Fox, the December 1998 air campaign in which President Clinton threw Tomahawks at military targets in Iraq.
The senator calls Obama “his own worst witness” against a military response to Iran.
The president, after all, is boasting that we have a military budget that is, at $600 billion, 20 times Iran’s. It gives us, he suggests, a capability to protect our Gulf allies “from any kind of retaliatory air or naval strikes.”
War, of course, can easily run off track.
But Cotton doesn’t see war as the only outcome of taking a hard line. When pressed whether he would prefer not to be engaged in this negotiation at all, Cotton reminds The Atlantic legman of the House sanctions vote.
The House, it turns out, voted two years ago — and by an overwhelming bipartisan majority — for stronger sanctions than anyone could get through what was then a Democratic-controlled Senate. Cotton said he wouldn’t have started down the road of granting concessions to Iran.
Now, as Cotton sketches it, we’ll have released to the Iranians billions of dollars just for sitting down at the table to talk with us. It is incredible — and a reminder that the very act of talking is the appeasement.
The Cotton Doctrine, as I’ve called it, holds that Americans are opposed not to war per se (our country was born from one) but to “losing wars.” He said: “I don’t think we have to win quickly necessarily, but we have to win.”
Cotton notes that by 2008 we had won in Iraq.
He argues that Americans would have supported a decision to keep a residual force in Iraq (we’ve kept them in Germany, Korea and Japan for generations).
The senator’s fidelity to the Iraq war will resonate for those of us of a certain age who were invested in Vietnam.
It is just galling that for the second time in our lifetime America is abandoning in the political arena a victory paid for in battle with American blood.
Cotton warns “if we choose to go down the path of this deal,” it is likely that a decade or two hence, we “could be facing nuclear war.” +He does not shy away from touching on the 1930s, when British and French appeasers let Hitler re-occupy the Rhineland and the betrayed Czechoslovakia at Munich.
“Wait,” asks Mr. Goldberg, “is this the 1930s to you?”
“It’s unfair to Neville Chamberlain to compare him to Barack Obama,” replies Cotton, in a reference to the British prime minister who tried to buy peace by appeasing Hitler.
Cotton points out that Chamberlain’s general staff was warning that Britain was weak, lacking the necessary military force at the time.
What excuse do we have?