Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) accused his Republican colleagues of scheduling Friday votes on the Iran nuclear agreement to “exploit” the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Doggett said the timing of the ultimately symbolic procedures—the 14th anniversary of the attacks–only lends credence to the idea that conservatives are glaringly bereft of credibility when it comes to issues involving weapons of mass destruction and the Middle East.
“The justifiable fear of another terrorist attack and the justifiable outrage about the terrorist attacks of 9/11 have been exploited before today,” he remarked from the House floor. “They were exploited to justify the disastrous invasion of Iraq.”
Doggett was referring to a speech that directly preceded his. Just before the Texas Democrat took the floor, Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.) stood in front of a blown-up photo array of the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath to speak against the deal.
Kelly implicitly tied the events of the day fourteen years ago to the Iranian government by mentioning slogans promoted by hardliners in Tehran—ones often cited by conservatives as reasons to oppose the Iran nuclear agreement.
“My friends, as we let our eyes fill with tears over the great loss that day, and as our ears picked up on the message from our enemies in the East – ‘Death to Israel!’ ‘Death to the Great Satan!’ ‘Death to America!’ – let us resound with love and strength and say: ‘Listen! Never Again! Never Again! Never Again!’” Kelly said. “Let those words echo forever and ever. Not only in your ears but in your hearts.”
As Doggett pointed out, “few Americans will recall that actually, after 9/11, there was some early support in Iran against al-Qaeda terrorism.”
Iran’s then-reformist government denounced the attacks. In November 2001, Colin Powell, President George W. Bush’s then-UN Ambassador, made the first official US contact with an Iranian diplomat since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, when he shook hands with Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi after a meeting at the UN.
“Iran and the United States were momentary allies,” New Yorker magazine noted in 2002. “The Iranians had always opposed the Taliban; they were longtime supporters of the Northern Alliance rebels, especially the warlord Ismail Khan, whose territory, around the city of Herat, is close to Iran’s eastern border.”
But Iran was included in Bush’s “Axis of Evil” during his now completed-discredited 2002 State of the Union speech, and any hopes of a detente between Washington and Tehran were shattered.
In 2003, Iran even gave the White House a chance to redeem its ill-fated invasion of Iraq when its reformist government “offered full cooperation on nuclear programs, acceptance of Israel and the termination of Iranian support for Palestinian militant groups.” Tehran had been “frightened…because US forces had routed in three weeks an army that Iran had failed to defeat during a bloody eight-year war,” according to Trita Parsi, an Iranian-American scholar who was given copies of the proposal by sources in Iran. The Bush administration, however, didn’t even consider the offer and “belittled” it, The Washington Post reported, because high-ranking officials were “convinced the Iranian government was on the verge of collapse.”
Shortly after the floor debate, the House voted down a resolution approving the deal.
The day before, however, Senate Democrats blocked the advancement of a resolution disapproving of the agreement—one that never seemed likely to gain enough support to override the Presidential veto that was threatened this summer by the White House, after Congressional review of the multilateral agreement started.
While House Republicans held the vote Friday, in the words of The New York Times, “to undermine the president and embarrass Democrats,” House Democrats did hand the White House and their Congressional leaders a symbolic victory, when the resolution of approval did not fail by a veto-proof supermajority.
