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A Good Bad Deal?

(New York Times) Thomas L. Friedman - You'd never know that "Iran is the one hemorrhaging hundreds of billions of dollars due to sanctions, tens of billions because of fallen oil prices and billions sustaining the Assad regime in Syria," said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment. And "it's Ali Khamenei, not John Kerry, who presides over a population desperate to see sanctions relief." Yet, for the past year every time there is a sticking point, it keeps feeling as if it's always our side looking to accommodate Iran's needs. Johns Hopkins University foreign policy specialist Michael Mandelbaum says: "In the current negotiations...the United States is far stronger than Iran, yet it is the United States that has made major concessions." "After beginning the negotiations by insisting that the Tehran regime relinquish all its suspect enrichment facilities and cease all its nuclear activities relevant to making a bomb, the Obama administration has ended by permitting Iran to keep virtually all of those facilities and continue some of those activities." An Iran that is unshackled from sanctions and gets an injection of over $100 billion in cash will be even more superior in power than all of its Arab neighbors. Therefore, the U.S. needs to take the lead in initiating a modus vivendi between Sunni Arabs and Persian Shiites and curb Iran's belligerence toward Israel. If we can't help defuse those conflicts, a good bad deal could very easily fuel a wider regional war.
2015-07-02 00:00:00
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