Rancor over a possible Iran nuclear deal reached a new level this week with a letter from Senate Republicans, initiated by freshman Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, telling Iran that a future U.S. government would not necessarily abide by such a deal. While it’s good that many Republicans have now recognized that the letter was a pretty dumb stunt, it’s worth taking a step back and considering the issue that has everyone so worked up.

Let’s take a breath on Iran, everybody.

Here’s where we are: The U.S. and its partners in the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany) have been negotiating a deal with Iran that would limit Iran’s nuclear program and place it under intrusive inspections for at least a decade. Critics of the deal insist that this is insufficient, and that any deal that leaves open the possibility of Iran someday obtaining a nuclear weapon is too dangerous. Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress last week to make the latter case.

In a recent piece on the controversy over Netanyahu’s speech to Congress, and the policy differences at its core, I suggested the comparison of Democrats inviting French President Jacques Chirac to deliver a speech in 2003 against the impending Iraq invasion. I think it’s pretty obvious that supporters of the Bush administration would have flipped out over it. The same people who praised the Netanyahu speech, and who are now praising the Cotton letter, would have been screaming “TREASON!” from Washington’s rooftops.

Clearly, such a speech would have been a violation of political norms, just as were the Netanyahu speech and the Cotton letter. But, as Brian Beutler asks in a smart piece on the Cotton contretemps, wouldn’t such a violation have been worth it for the chance of the US avoiding such a huge mistake in Iraq?

To be sure, there’s a bit of the comical in the plaintive cries from Senate hawks that they just want to “have a role” in Iran policy. The reality is that the Obama administration has actually spent a considerable amount of time engaging with Congress on the issue of Iran. And no one can seriously deny that opposition to a deal with Iran is at least partly rooted in opposition to, and hatred of, Obama himself. Conservatives have said since the first days of his administration that their overriding concern was to make sure his presidency was a failed one.

Furthermore, many Congressional critics of the deal have been quite clear that they are opposed to diplomacy with Iran, period. Sen. Cotton has made no secret of his view that the goal of new sanctions is not to get a better deal, as so many sanctions supporters have insisted, but to scuttle the deal entirely.

So Obama has some valid reasons for wanting to minimize Congress’s role in the negotiations.

Still, the legislative branch does have an important role to play in interrogating the executive’s foreign policy initiatives, especially one as potentially far-reaching as an Iranian nuclear deal. If they’re interested in playing that role in a serious and responsible way, and not simply using it as opportunity for grandstanding, they should be able to play it. And, given how lax Congress’s oversight of foreign policy in general has been in recent years, Americans should welcome it. And so should President Obama.

In many ways, Obama’s Iran policy is the mirror image of Bush’s Iraq policy, offering a very different vision of the use of American power, one that advances American security through diplomacy and the cultivation of international consensus rather than invasion and occupation. Rather than spin intelligence, cobble together a “coalition of the willing” and then go in guns blazing (literally), as Bush did in Iraq, with Iran Obama has carefully articulated and executed a two-track policy of economic sanctions pressure and negotiations. It was only when the former began to bite that the latter came into seriously play. But it’s also true that the offer of the latter acted as an important force multiplier for the former. While the president and his team have explained this approach many, many times over the past years, including in front of various Congressional committees, I think our country would benefit from hearing from them more.

Barack Obama was correct in opposing the Iraq war. He was correct in conceiving an Iran policy that is, in many ways, its opposite. But part of that has to be a willingness to engage in the open and rigorous debate that we never got on Iraq. If an Iran deal is the anti-Iraq war, let’s have it be that in every way, including the time we spend discussing it. Given the significant impact that an Iran nuclear deal could have on U.S. security and that of our partners, I think President Obama owes the American people that discussion, just as his Congressional critics owe the American people more than attention-getting stunts.