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A Deal with Iran Must Not Come at Any Price
(Telegraph-UK) Editorial - Sadly, the straws in the wind suggest that a bad deal on Iran's nuclear ambitions is a real possibility. A leak to the Associated Press raises the possibility that America would phase out all sanctions if Iran were to accept temporary constraints on its nuclear program for the next 10 or 15 years. If the West lifts sanctions and allows Iran's leaders to fill their coffers with oil revenues, in return for graciously agreeing to defer their ambition to be a nuclear threshold state until somewhere between 2025 and 2030, then that would not be good enough. The whole point of this immense diplomatic effort was to remove the threat posed by a nuclear-armed Iran for the foreseeable future. Simply deferring that possibility by a decade or so - and then leaving the future leaders of the West to deal with the consequences - would be cowardly and unconscionable. That is particularly true when Iran's own difficulties are weighed in the balance. Sanctions and a collapsing oil price have combined to crush the Iranian economy. The result is that Iran's morally bankrupt "Supreme Leader," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, needs a nuclear deal far more than we do. Now is exactly the moment for the West to show more steel.