All The President's Rhetoric

CBS News carries a news brief each half hour on many stations carrying conservative talk radio. The message is always partisan Democrat. Which is understandable, since the president of CBS News is David Rhodes. His brother, Ben Rhodes, is Deputy National Security Adviser serving President Obama. The afternoon news brief chirped about how "Obama's Iran deal got a thumbs up at the United Nations."

The 15-0 vote at the U.N. Security Council is a preemptive usurpation of United States sovereignty. It was conducted to allow Obama to appeal to authority as he seeks congressional approval. That the vote was unanimous allows Obama an additional appeal to popularity. President Obama believes in the power of his own personal persuasion, but he constantly deploys logical fallacies.

Libertarians and conservatives reject the authority of the United Nations over that of the United States. It was apparent even before his election that Obama was an Internationalist, who would bind the United States to laws drafted by the U.N. and other international bodies. Candidate Obama telegraphed his intentions by declaring himself "a citizen of the world."

Obama repeatedly asserts that the Iran nuclear deal is good because he presents the issue as a choice between diplomacy or war. "Either the issue of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon is resolved diplomatically, through a negotiation, or it's resolved through force, through war," he said. The straw man fallacy is Obama's rhetorical tic. The military option frightens some people, and the speaker assumes that the listener is eager to do anything to avoid war.

Iran certainly does not desire all-out war, not yet. They have been waging proxy war against the West for thirty-five years. The negotiations served as a temporary truce, or hudna, for Iran. A hudna is always temporary, and not for a duration of more than ten years (it is no coincidence that the current agreement expires in eight years). The hudna is a tactical truce, arrived at during times of relative Muslim weakness.

Another logical fallacy that keeps getting repeated by the President's flacks is the fact that Nixon went to China, and Reagan negotiated arms control agreements with the Soviets. This is a false equivalence. The Soviet Union was a rational regime. They were officially atheist, and were not seeking an afterlife in paradise. Iran is not a rational regime. Iran is an annihilationist regime praying for the return of the 12th Imam, who will usher in Armageddon.

At the United Nations today, Ambassador Samantha Power tried to pretend she's a hardliner. She said the United States nevertheless has "profound concern about human rights violations committed by the Iranian government [and] about the instability Iran fuels beyond its nuclear program, from its support for terrorist proxies to repeated threats against Israel to its other destabilizing activities in the region." The queen of the Internationalists really wants to believe that being nice to Iran will inspire a virtuous circle, and cause them to change their behavior.

Like everything else about Obama, it is about the triumph of hope over experience and reason.