You don’t make arms agreements with your friends. You make them with your enemies.

Support for the Iran Nuclear Arms Agreement, the “Deal”, comes from a set of basic principles, or should. Many of these principles have been articulated by known conservatives and hawks, which might surprise some of the opponents of this deal.

The first principle is:

“You don’t make peace with your friends. You make peace with your enemies”.
This was not articulated by some new age liberal, it was said by the famous Israeli General Moshe Dayan.

The same can be said of Arms Deals. Reagan, it might be remembered, was compared with Chamberlain at Munich (sound familiar) when he negotiated extensive reduction in US arms with the Soviet Union in exchange for comparable reductions in theirs. At the time, no one thought Gorbachev was Reagan’s “friend”. He called them an “Evil Empire”.

No one is trying to limit Israel’s centrifuges. That is because they are our friend.

The largest proportion of criticism for the proposed agreement seems to be in the form of “They are evil, they call for ‘Death to America and Israel’, they held our hostages and send money to bad guys!”. All true. Iran is not our friend.

If Iran were our friend, we wouldn’t be trying to get an arms reduction deal.

You don’t make peace, or, for that matter, arms deals with your friends. You make them with your enemies.

All the rhetoric about how evil the Iranian empire is, just like all the rhetoric about how evil the Soviet empire was should just push us more into getting an arms reduction agreement.

We aren’t friends. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make arms control agreements. It is the very reason we should.