And now they're likely to have a nuclear bomb ~10 years earlier, with worsening international relations.

This post was edited by Knoppie on Jun 10 2019 07:13am

The urge to destroy their economy comes from trying to stay in power within the supported powerblock in the middle east. It didn't work for NK to stop the progress and Iran already has the centrifuges they need. Even within more extreme forms of actions to destroy them, they'll just move them underground.

This post was edited by Knoppie on Jun 10 2019 07:39am

Iran's economy was under severe stress, and several large scale protests had broken out against the regime.

There should have been very little appetite on the Western side to make any deal, and certainly not one that wasn't on Western terms.

As is, the deal protects Iranian military sites from surprise inspections, when of course that's exactly where any rational observer would suspect covert nuclear activities are taking place.

Ignoring that, the deal is a 10-15 year moratorium before we accept Iran into the world as a nuclear armed terror state, after which we'll watch as the Saudi's and others pursue and obtain nuclear arms in response. When, inevitably, some of these authoritarian regimes fall, we'll have nuclear arms at large that will either 1) be used against us, or 2) will require an invasion to clean up.

The thesis behind the deal is that Iran is an aggrieved actor that will clean up its act and rejoin the civilized world if we just reach out to them and correct for historical wrongs.

Instead, we have an emboldened Iran that has used the additional funding to aggressively pursue military and political goals beyond its border.

There's no dichotomy between a bad deal and war. Maintaining sanctions was by far the better alternative.

Can't wait for the details



also still waiting to hear the awesome details on this

IMO, no matter how many ways or times one redefines Islamic beliefs, we still end up with... people who mix religion and state, aren't gonna turn out to be rational people.

hmmmm

I'm not sure how much the inspection clauses really matter. Iran could comply fully with the Iran deal up to its sunset clauses and not build any centrifuges... and they'd still be on the verge of very fast nuclear breakout. We let them develop missile tech, explosive lenses, the industrial base to assemble centrifuges, the reinforced military bases and silos and underground facilities. The whole deal amounted to just keeping them one batch of HEU short of a weapon while they put every other piece of the puzzle into place. And when they've got trillions of dollars unlocked in their access to western economies, they can easily afford the military spending without their domestic sphere imploding like it was.

So yeah, we wound up with the emboldened Iran that has used the additional funding to aggressively pursue military and political goals beyond its border. And the Russia-Iran alliance has been rapidly expanding their sphere of influence due to Obama's fuckups in Europe, Eastern Europe & the Middle East. Its like he managed to simultaneously cede geopolitical ground in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Ukraine, Poland and Germany. If diplomacy is a game of chess, Obama was getting fools mated by Putin. Just the very fact that Iran walks out of Syria better off then it started despite Israel bloodying their nose every few minutes is pathetic

THIS.


Also, if you look back at the topics and posts that occurred when Trump first talked about, then pulled out of the Iran deal, PaRD will notice that I said these exact things.
Moreover, I stated the the "group" doing the "inspecting" in Iran, was in many instances... just taking Iran's word on whether certain Iran deal "rules" were being followed.


I realize that this is an article from IsraelTimes...that just popped up when the UK is trying to find a replacement for May (so it might be political, or Israeli-centric), but it has the ring of truth as far as I'm concerned.
In fact... IMO the entire EU has been being very weird about the muslim immigration over the past 3-4 years, including but not limited to, being weird about gang rapes and rape cases in general.

As to Obama's involvement or lack of, with regards to his seeming to do a lot of looking the other way, and with regards to his NOT seeming to be making decisions in the best interest of the US... I have felt that that was occurring for almost 6- 8 years now. I believe I have mentioned this on multiple occasions.





All that aside... damn interesting article. Kind of has that... "so that's what's been going on" ring to it. Coffee anyone?

What's striking is that Obama should have been able to see how counterproductive the Iran Deal would be. Clinton was his obvious successor, and she was itching to dismantle it. The republicans would dismantle it if they won, didn't really matter who. So if you were in Obama's position and striking the deal, you should have reasonably been able to foresee that there's an extremely high likelihood any deal you make without the backing of congress, as a purely executive end run that could be instantly overturned by the next president- would get nuked. And that should have factored into the decision making process. Even if you think that a lasting Iran Deal was an acceptable pragmatic tradeoff and just bought Iran's nuclear delay in hopes of building peace with them by 2025- you'd have to weigh the utility of that theory against the theory of what would happen when your successor takes apart the deal and you've made it even worse. And Obama wasn't cynical enough to fit it with enough poison pill clauses, if such a thing could be done, so it was still rational for Trump/Clinton to dismantle it.

Obama had the knowledge at the time to make the calculation that the Iran Deal was a bad idea. Pragmatism doesn't get participation trophies. If you think really hard about the consequences and then make the wrong decision, it just makes you an idiot

I think he just wanted the good press that came from it.
Or perhaps he felt guilt for the Nobel Peace Prize that he had received without having done anything for it, and wanted to produce something to retroactively justify the prize.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jun 10 2019 11:23am