What's At Stake With The Iran Deal

++President Obama said that the vote on the iran deal will be the most important foreign policy vote since the 2003 vote for war in Iraq. Notice he didn't say since the Start Treaty he negotiated with Russia.

++He went on to say that the deal built on the series of negotiations we concluded that won the Cold War, citing both JFK and Ronald Reagan.

++He said that no deal would mean war with Iran, not today or in the next three months but soon.

++He threw down the gauntlet to the neoconservative project, which lies dead in the sand of Iraq. 

++The nuclear deal means an end to the neoconservative view that we can wage pre-emptive war. Consider the arguments for bombing Iran. They don't have a nuclear weapon but they might seek to build a weapon. Before the argument was that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction but he didn't. This time we would not have any pretext. A country thinks evil thoughts--Bomb them.

++How the American people have been conditioned to this type of thinking is horrendous and one of the reasons our defense budget has increased 38%, while our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan has dwindled. 

++The Bush administration overthrew our long-term defense strategy by arguing for pre-emptive wars. The fact that hasn't been challenged overtly by our military and strategic thinkers is unbelievable.

++President Obama's statement that the whole world agrees with the deal, except Israel, should flash a warning sign to how isolated we will be if we don't live up to the bargain we negotiated. That is why President Obama mentioned the critics support of the Iraq War.

++Israel has other strategic requirements but it also doesn't have the clout in NATO and the United Nations. Israel has a preemptive strategy out of necessity but that, too, is conditioned on proportionality. 

++If the United States is isolated,then how could we be the country to negotiate a two-state solution in Israel or any other major agreement?

++Since this administration more than most has waged intensive diplomatic wars for Israel's national interests, how could we be effective in doing that for the foreseeable future.

++President Obama is right, "Bibi Netanyahu is wrong." But truly wrong even from Israel's national security interests.

++ Israel can't go it alone as their own press agrees that efforts to disinvest have already hurt them tremendously. Without the diplomatic shield of the United States, Israel will lose in international fora --one after another.

++At home,we have already seen the bankruptcy of the neoconservative agenda and Dick Cheney's energy empire. The stakes in the Middle East are simply not high anymore with the change in the energy equation.

++The neoconservative foreign policy still is alive and well in the Republican Party but it has failed to explain where the rest of Planet Earth comes in.

++A no deal leads us down a rabbit hole we really don't want to go.