Redoubling Your Efforts When You Have Forgotten Your Aim

James Taranto’s post yesterday about John Kerry’s remarks on the incipient deal with Iran:

This morning Goldberg published an interview with Secretary of State John Kerry on Iran. Here is the most alarming bit:

Kerry warned that if Congress rejects the Iran deal, it will confirm the anti-U.S. suspicions harbored by the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and eliminate any chance of a peaceful solution to the nuclear conundrum:
“The ayatollah constantly believed that we are untrustworthy, that you can’t negotiate with us, that we will screw them,” Kerry said. “This”—a congressional rejection—“will be the ultimate screwing.” He went on to argue that “the United States Congress will prove the ayatollah’s suspicion, and there’s no way he’s ever coming back. He will not come back to negotiate. Out of dignity, out of a suspicion that you can’t trust America. America is not going to negotiate in good faith. It didn’t negotiate in good faith now, would be his point.”

Goldberg’s headline is “John Kerry on the Risk of Congress ‘Screwing’ the Ayatollah.” We write for a family newspaper, so we went with something a bit more delicate.

To put this as politely as possible—and believe us, we’re straining to do so—Kerry’s tender concern for the ayatollah’s “dignity” is perverse. It’s true that a degree of mutual trust is necessary for a negotiation to succeed, but Kerry ignores the “mutual” part. His analysis is one-sided, and on the wrong side. The main question for Congress—as it should have been for the administration—is whether America can trust Iran.

That reminded me a good deal of a remark made by an Illinois official in response to a question about a proposal to eliminate tolls on Illinois expressways. His response was that he thought it was a bad idea “because then we couldn’t use iPass” (iPass is Illinois’s automatic toll payment system).

I read Sec. Kerry’s remarks a bit more kindly than Mr. Taranto does. I think that the phenomenon of government officials becoming so absorbed in the process of what they’re doing that they forget what they’re supposed to be accomplishing.

To reiterate my own position, I’m not opposed to the deal with the Iranians so much as puzzled by the self-contradictory nature of the arguments its proponents are making. I’d like to be convinced that it’s in the U. S.’s best interests rather than browbeaten into accepting it which appears to be President Obama’s strategy, not a particularly effective strategy in persuading me of anything let alone U. S. senators who are notoriously thin-skinned and jealous of their prerogatives.

10 comments… add one
  • ... Link

    Senators used to be jealous of their prerogatives, but anymore I think they want to abrogate any and all responsibility and replace that with endless kvetching for fundraising purposes.

  • ... Link

    As evidence I cite the Reid Senate, which mostly worked to prevent anything from being done even when Dems controlled the House, and the McConnell Senate which has mostly acquiesced to Obama’s executive actions instead of opposing them as promised. Both have engaged in endless bitching about the other guys, though there’s been some notable infighting amongst Republican Senators.

  • steve Link

    You, like conservatives, still give no reasons why it is bad that we would have daily access to all of Iran’s nuclear sites and monitor all of its mines. Why is it bad they they get rid of their plutonium and their HEU? Trust? Who trusted the USSR when we made a deal with them? I pretty much trust the Brits, and oddly enough, we don’t appear to have a nuclear deal with them.

    If there is any other party to trust here, it would be the other parties in the deal. If Germany, France and the UK really thought this would lead to Iran getting nukes, I don’t see them going for it. Given the Russia and China even joined the sanctions, still surprising, I assume they don’t really want Iran to have them either.

    Steve

  • You, like conservatives, still give no reasons why it is bad that we would have daily access to all of Iran’s nuclear sites and monitor all of its mines.

    You are engaging in a logical fallacy called “burden shifting”, making a claim and then demanding that I disprove it. The burden of proof that the Iran deal is a good one is on its advocates. From my standpoint to reach that standard advocates must either prove that we know the locations of all Iranian nuclear development sites, that inspectors will have access to all of them, and that the inspectors are capable of determining the status of Iran’s nuclear development program based on that OR that we are better off if the sanctions are lifted sooner rather than later regardless of the actual state of Iran’s nuclear development program. I wish you the best of luck.

  • steve Link

    So if we don’t get a perfect deal, you don’t want one? Sigh. Anyway, it is not burden shifting to ask you to comment upon what is wrong with what is actually in the deal. (You are claiming it is a bad deal and you have not said why. You avoid doing so.) I know you won’t since you would have to admit that most of it is pretty good. I have listed some of the above items in the deal which I think are pretty good. I can go through the whole deal on an item by item basis, and I still find it pretty good. Not perfect, but pretty good. After all of what is in the deal, after we have been in the country confirming everything, could they still have some secret undisclosed site? Sure, but we are way down in probabilities to well below 1%. We know what happens when we make foreign policy based upon the 1% rule, we get the Iraq War.

    What we do know, based upon historical precedent and experience, that inspections are pretty successful. The inspectors in Iraq were correct. We have had a treaty with Russia/USSR for many years and it has been successful.

    Steve

  • So if we don’t get a perfect deal, you don’t want one?

    No. If we benefit no more from the deal as from no deal, we shouldn’t conclude a deal.

    Anyway, it is not burden shifting to ask you to comment upon what is wrong with what is actually in the deal.

    That’s exactly what it is. You don’t feel able to articulate an affirmative case only a negative one.

    You are claiming it is a bad deal

    Nope. I’m just saying I don’t see much benefit to us from it and there is downside risk.

    After all of what is in the deal, after we have been in the country confirming everything, could they still have some secret undisclosed site? Sure, but we are way down in probabilities to well below 1%.

    Basically, that’s BS. You don’t know whether it’s 1% or 99%. Unless you know all of their development sites already you can’t quantify that way. Our present human intelligence is not great enough to make that assessment.

  • Andy Link

    “The burden of proof that the Iran deal is a good one is on its advocates.”

    I agree with that.

    “From my standpoint to reach that standard advocates must either prove that we know the locations of all Iranian nuclear development sites, that inspectors will have access to all of them, and that the inspectors are capable of determining the status of Iran’s nuclear development program based on that OR that we are better off if the sanctions are lifted sooner rather than later regardless of the actual state of Iran’s nuclear development program. I wish you the best of luck.”

    Since we’re discussing fallacies, you’re using the Nirvana Fallacy here. While it’s true that advocates have the primary burden of proof, critics don’t get free rein to define the burden that advocates must satisfy, particularly one that is completely unrealistic and has never happened with any arms control agreement.

    “You don’t know whether it’s 1% or 99%. Unless you know all of their development sites already you can’t quantify that way. Our present human intelligence is not great enough to make that assessment.”

    We’ll never know about all their development sites without inspections and verification, which is what we get with this agreement. If you’re saying we have to know about all their sites before an agreement then that’s another fallacy and one that misunderstands how arms control agreements work in practice.

    “I’m not opposed to the deal with the Iranians so much as puzzled by the self-contradictory nature of the arguments its proponents are making.”

    I don’t see how they are self-contradictory, particularly compared to the arguments of opponents.

  • steve Link

    “That’s exactly what it is. You don’t feel able to articulate an affirmative case only a negative one.”

    I have made almost exclusively an affirmative argument. As I said, I like the details in the agreement. Daily inspections at facilities. Monitoring all mines and then monitoring their products until they get to the treatment facilities. Sanctions aren’t lifted until they are compliant with all of the inspections. We get to go anywhere we want, but we have to give 24 days notice. I like or can accept all of those. What more of an affirmative argument do you want?

    “Basically, that’s BS. You don’t know whether it’s 1% or 99%.”

    Nope. Our intel people have signed off on the deal. Even better, opponents of the deal who have access to the intel, i.e. Congressional Republicans, aren’t using that argument. As I said, we have historical precedent. We didn’t know for sure that we had identified every site the USSR had at the time. We did our best and acted upon our best findings. If you don’t want to go ahead because there is that tiny, tiny bit of uncertainty, then you never make a deal about anything. And you start needless wars, and that is not idle BS. That is in fact what we have done, and will do again.

    “Our present human intelligence is not great enough to make that assessment.”

    It was in Iraq. The inspectors were correct. Why is this different with Iran? (I assume you realize there are already inspectors in Iran doing daily inspections.)

    Steve

  • Since we’re discussing fallacies, you’re using the Nirvana Fallacy here.

    Not at all. I’m not insisting on a perfect solution. I’m trying to consider the net costs and benefits. I think that the benefits depend almost entirely on extremely weak assumptions while the costs are reasonably certain.

    I’ll try and see if I can articulate this a little more clearly in another post because I’m obvious that I’m not getting my point across.

    If you’re saying we have to know about all their sites before an agreement then that’s another fallacy

    No, I’m saying that to quantify how much of whatever problem exists the agreement might solve you’d need to know that. I didn’t make a quantitative claim; steve did.

    Our intel people have signed off on the deal.

    Our human intelligence in Iran is notoriously poor.

    My bottom line at this point is that I’m not hearing anything that convinces me or is even intended to. What I’m hearing is declarations of fealty. As I said above, I’ll try to come up with a way of explaining my thoughts in terms of assumptions, outcomes, costs, and benefits. I think it will be clearer that way.

  • steve Link

    In your explanation please compare this with the treaties we made with the USSR. Using your standards, we should never have made a deal with them either. Actually, using your standards I don’t think we can have a deal with anyone. How can you ever be 100% certain some country isn’t hiding something?

    Steve

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