Quote (fender @ Jan 3 2020 03:29pm)
the question is: what do you base that on, in order to come to your conclusion the deal wasn't even decent? what we know, from both the expectations prior to the negotiations as well as its reception after being signed, is that it was celebrated by the international community and foreign policy experts as a diplomatic masterpiece, and that iran's concessions were so extensive that they drew severe criticism, even death threats, from iranian hardliners. the people that are criticising it from the other side are mostly israeli and american hawks, who would rather see a military conflict than a reasonable diplomatic solution - that's why i was surprised to see you share that take, and wondered where you were coming from. my guess that it's simply an easy sacrifice to make in order to appear 'centrist' is really the most charitable interpretation i could come up with given the context.
so if your argument, that a deal isn't even decent if someone doesn't get "literally every last bit of concession humanly possible" (which obama actually might have achieved in this case, at the very least he was damn close), is just an exercise so you won't have to admit you're wrong on this, all i can say is that it's petty and entirely unnecessary - at the end of the day, you can always call it a matter of opinion, which makes it technically impossible to be wrong on this. all i'm saying is that you haven't provided any reasonably convincing arguments to back that up - at least from my perspective. at the end of the day, facts should be more important than ego - especially considering what trump's confrontational diplomacy with iran has lead us towards.
concerning the second part, the iaea is not the "intel community", and the signing of the treaty just started their regular controls and diligent supervision of iran, so let's please not act like this was purely based on trust and empty words.
imo, there is no deal that can 100% prevent a dirty bomb from being set off - what it can do, however, is put a de facto hold to a country's nuclear arms program (which it did), incentivise cooperation and de-escalation (which it did) and thus lead to a normalisation of relations that would significantly decrease the likelihood of state sponsored dirty bombs being set off in random cities (which it would have). and again, keep in mind that we're talking about realistically achievable outcomes that require all parties to cooperate, not wishful thinking, in which NO country (including america) has (dirty) bombs and commits atrocities in other countries.
except of course you assume that all the smart people on the table simply completely forgot about the possibility of that, and forgot to include a provision that would have eliminated that possibility - in that case i would agree that the deal was objectively bad...
just as a general observation i find it interesting that a word like "decent" can spiral into fair long winded conversations with you. like i realize that there's more in this back and forth, but you keep circling back to "decent", when i was just speaking off the cuff.
anyways, im logging off for the weekend. hopefully we're not overly committed with troops by monday when i return.