Via the Examiner, there’s an uncharitable answer to that question but I’ll stick with the more charitable one. Namely, these people have always been willing to take Iran’s professions of peaceful intent seriously. After all, why would they believe a warmongering fanatic like Ted Cruz when they could believe the Ayatollah Khamenei? In fact, didn’t Khamenei say just this past week that there’s a fatwa in place that bars Iran from building nuclear weapons? Granted, that fatwa may not actually exist, and even if it does, Iranian clerics have been known to revist fatwas as political circumstances require. And of course it’s contradicted by plenty of evidence gathered by international nuclear inspectors. But again: Why would you take Ted Cruz’s word about Iran’s intentions, notwithstanding the many American soldiers killed in Iraq by Iranian-made IEDs, when the Iranians are telling you otherwise?

What this actually is, whether Medea Benjamin and Code Pink are aware of it or not, is the Law of Merited Impossibility at work. That’s a term coined by Rod Dreher in the context of the gay-marriage debate to describe the attitude of many SSM supporters to religious liberty. First they scoff at their opponents’ doomsday scenarios (“it’s ridiculous to think business owners will be forced to cater gay weddings despite their religious objections”); then, when doomsday comes to pass, they rationalize the outcome as a matter of simple justice (“you anti-gay Christians had it coming”). You’ll see something similar eventually from hardcore Iran doves. Right now we’re in the “impossibility” stage, where it’s ludicrous for Ted Cruz to parade all of these horribles to defeat a deal that will prevent war by keeping a bomb out of Iran’s hands. Later, after Iran’s spent a chunk of its $100 billion windfall on expanding Shiite terror across the region and has finally gotten caught working on a nuke, we’ll be told that their behavior was not only inevitable but understandable and even just as a response to American imperialism. There are no such things as foreign belligerents, no matter how many “death to America” chants they’re guilty of. There are only peaceful nations who have been alienated by U.S. aggression. The next time Code Pink debates Cruz, they’ll tell him that the deal would have worked if not for all the wingnut saber-rattling.

It was nice of Cruz not to antagonize the Europeans, though, by telling Benjamin that the reason they’re so excited about the deal is precisely because they want money to start flowing to Iran again. This was an economic negotiation for them more so than a national-security one. Exit quotation from Noah Pollak: “Entertaining to hear Dems who’ve spent 10 yrs citing Iraq war intel failures say they support Iran deal b/c we have great intel.”