Mitt Romney, the man President Obama mocked with a flip "the eighties called and they want their foreign policy back" in a 2012 presidential debate, has a must-read piece in today's Wall Street Journal explaining why Obama's Iran deal is a catastrophe for future generations.
Romney's somber oped is is markedly less flippant than President Obama in the debate and more recently promoting the Iran deal on Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show" by mocking former vice president Dick Cheney, a man who has been out of office for nearly seven years:
When giving Moses the Ten Commandments, God says that he will “visit the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.” Of course, God doesn’t have to punish these later generations himself; rather, the perils that follow are the natural course of events. Bad actions or bad choices made by one generation lead inevitably to consequences for future generations.
The generational calamity that will result from President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran will last a very long time indeed. This can be said with perfect confidence because of two undeniable facts.
First, Iran is led by suicidal, apocalypse-seeking, America-hating, Israel-denying theocratic fanatics. If these ayatollahs have nuclear weapons, they will use them, someday, somewhere. Iran is a major, longtime state sponsor of terrorism; its leaders are entirely bereft of restraint, decency and respect for human life.
Second, the Obama deal prescribes a pathway for Iran to develop nuclear weapons. The agreement’s defenders contend that it will delay Iran’s nuclear program by 10 to 15 years (about one half of a generation). Perhaps. But no one can say that the deal will prevent Iran from getting the bomb.
President Obama once promised that he would eliminate economic sanctions on Iran only if Tehran eliminated its nuclear program. Then he caved. Iran keeps its Fordow nuclear facility (President Obama had said it existed solely to develop nuclear-weapon technology); Iran keeps centrifuges; Iran is permitted to construct new and advanced IR-6 and IR-8 centrifuges in eight years, and is authorized under the deal to reprocess spent nuclear fuel in 15 years. So let us be honest: The deal leaves Iran on the path to a nuclear weapon.
Yes, the path is technically 10 or 15 years long—unless Iran cheats. Like North Korea cheated. Like Russia cheated.
…
These Americans will still be paying interest on the trillions of dollars of Obama debt; carrying the burdens of the millions of illegal immigrants he welcomed; agonizing over the scourge and human tragedy of generational poverty that this president refused to address; and lamenting the millions of children who grew into adulthood without a competitive education because he bowed to the teachers unions. But among all these iniquities, the Iran deal will stand out. Iran will be a nuclear monster.
Some day the world will call and say that it wants back what was can be loosely described as a Pax Americana, which did not preclude smaller and indeed quite violent wars but might one day come to seem idyllic.
I urge you to read the entire piece.