In his public defense of the Iran deal, President Obama has repeatedly played on left-wing bile toward neoconservatives, as Eli Lake writes:
It’s true that neoconservatives in 2002 and 2003 supported and argued for the Iraq war. Some of them helped plan the war. But many Democrats also supported the Iraq war. . . . And yet in 2015 many prominent progressives still obsess about the out-of-power neoconservatives, and darkly imply that they undermine the national interest on behalf of Israel.
For Obama’s base, the neoconservatives were not just policy intellectuals on the wrong side of an unpopular war, but were instead agents that pulled off a kind of coup d’état and foisted a war on an unsuspecting public. . . . What a terrifying world! Every election brings with it the prospect that our republic will fall under the power of a bunch of disloyal bureaucrats eager to shed American blood for Israel.
Suggesting that another disastrous war in the Middle East is just a few op-ed columns away, the president can activate progressive bloggers, volunteers, and activists who themselves should be disappointed by Obama’s foreign policy.
Read more on Bloomberg: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-08-03/obama-plays-politics-of-fear-to-get-his-iran-deal