You don’t get it. When I talk about Kissinger’s record, I’m talking about crimes, not blunders.
Hey, Allah was playing with nuclear fission reactors on Earth before the rise of multicellular organisms on land (there is also some evidence He was playing with nuclear fusion reactors before that, about 150 million km from us)
He should hang for Chile alone, and that’s not the worst thing on the list.
Why not just as easily frame it as the Iranians who’ve “folded,” as they’re now talking about putting curbs on their program prior to all sanctions being lifted?
Or, perhaps, could it be that each side is giving up some of what it wants in order to reach an equilibrium constrained by each side’s best alternative to an agreement, also known as a negotiation?
Because there is no “prior”.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/04/19/obama-suggests-possible-compromise-on-iran-sanctions/
President Obama suggested on Friday that Iran could receive significant economic relief immediately after concluding a deal to curb its nuclear program, a gesture towards one of Tehran’s key demands.
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Later, seeking to clarify the president’s comments, a White House official said Obama “will not accept a deal without phased sanctions” relief.
So - is it “immediately” or is it “phased”? How much do you want to bet me that it will be "immediately?
Unclear from the context, but I like my odds. Obama may have implicitly meant “immediately, conditional on Iran immediately curbing some of its activities.” The subsequent clarification from the White House suggests that, in fact, he did intend something to that effect.
Folding quicker than a tent in a hurricane…
That’s the pending Iran nuclear deal: The Iranians will pretend they’re not building nukes, and President Obama will pretend he’s stopping them.
One sign of this: The White House is now insisting that the truly vital part of the deal is the provision for “snapback sanctions.”
The idea is that, should Tehran get caught cheating, US and UN sanctions would immediately “snap back” into place.
Yet “snapback sanctions” are just like “shovel ready jobs”: figments of Professor Obama’s imagination.
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Ask for details on “snap back,” and you get vague promises that they’re working out the procedures. Yet there’s no way to get anything “snapping” rapidly when the United Nations is involved.
And why is the White House touting “snap back”? Because Obama’s already retreating on what he initially called the deal’s key provisions: 1) a slow, “phased” ending of sanctions as Iran proves it’s behaving; and 2) unprecedented go-anywhere-anytime access for arms inspectors.
First, Obama is now talking about unlocking perhaps $50 billion of Iran’s now-frozen assets on Day One. That’s in the ballpark of what sanctions cost Tehran in a year — making “snap back” irrelevant even if it worked.
The unfreezing of assets is a sensible part of any deal, but there’s a Dealmaking 101 thing that our side needs to remember: never exchange anything concrete for mere promises. If they get something right now, we get something right now.
The final agreement should be evaluated based on whether it satisfies US interests better than the alternative. It’s silly to measure the final agreement against the yardstick of statements Obama or others on the US side may have made in the past. Negotiations don’t work if the other party feels like it’s given up a lot without getting any concessions in return. One way to create concessions to give away is by staking out untenably hardline positions in early rounds, and relaxing them later.
There is no reason to think that an agreement in which no sanctions are released until Iran has complied 100% with all restrictions represents an equilibrium. It’s not a reasonable position for the US to take. Iran knows that. Iran knows the US won’t go to war in order to gain the necessary leverage to impose such an agreement. The equilibrium is we get something and they get something.
The New York Post has not once put forth a realistic alternative to Obama’s Iran policy, which is why they resort to infantile taunts like calling him “Professor Obama.”
Is Iran’s statement of what they will accept grounds for a reasonable deal? Immediate lifting of sanctions and no inspections of certain nuclear sites? Because even OUR version was at best plausible, not ideal. IF we’re not even getting what the President said we were getting, then we got taken.
In my mind it depends on what the rest of the P5+1 and participants in the sanctions regime view as reasonable. A recurring theme among critics of this process is that they don’t seem to grasp that it’s a multilateral one. The deal we can realistically achieve is constrained by how much China, Russia, and other countries like India and South Korea are willing to go along with the sanctions regime, which is our main source of leverage AFAICT.
The best deal we can get is the one where if Iran asked for one more concession, China, Russia et al would be willing to return to sanctions. This may produce a final deal that’s worse than what Obama has advertized. That doesn’t make it a bad deal necessarily.
I think this is one of the main disconnects of the R vs. L thing in America. The left wants the best deal that is practical. The right wants a symbol. They want their enemy on their knees groveling, sobbing, with snot bubbles and tears, mumbling about how wrong they were, how grand the US is, and what fools they were to stand in its way.
Anything less than that is capitulation. :rolleyes:
A deal involves us getting something in return for something. If we get nothing substantial in return for something(like $50 billion) then we got taken.
Donald Rump’s rhetoric seems like groundwork for defending the worst possible outcome, frankly.
We get something baseline. We don’t have to go to war. Any agreement includes that outcome. Now, the trouble is, some of the dimmer bulbs on the GOP like war. Because, as I said, war is a symbol. It’s not planeloads of corpses and shattered men limping back into society.
The GOP, and the Neocons in particular want this because they want the pageantry and glory, and are willing to pay for it with other men’s children.
Us attacking Iran should be a method of last resort, because it will make them hate us. It will inflame passions around the Muslim world. And that is a negative thing.
So be sure, in your detailed assessment of this negotiation, which I may add, you have next to no information about, and are second guessing regardless, put Avoid War in Iran in the agreement column.
No, your and Terr’s rhetoric is a precursor to throwing up your hands and shouting, “What a weakling Obama is!” the second the deal is finalized, if ever.
There will be no “deal” wherein we get nothing substantial in return. Obama has consistently said the odds of a deal being struck are only 50-50. He’s a realist. He knows there may not be a deal that is acceptable to both us and Iran.
But here’s the thing. The alternatives to a deal–and correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe this list is exhaustive–are 1) war or 2) the status quo ante (pre-2010), where there is no robust international sanctions regime and the only obstacles to an Iranian nuclear weapon are unilateral US sanctions and the occasional cyberattack or murdered scientist. Those are both exceedingly crappy alternatives. That means the bar for a deal being “good” is actually pretty low. Our best alternatives to whatever deal Iran is willing to accept are both utter shit. In that light, the framework that Obama has extracted from the situation is unbelievably good.
“The bar” has to be whatever actually keeps Iran from getting a nuke during the entire timeframe of the deal. That means verification, which has almost always been nearly impossible with authoritarian regimes. That means getting rid of sanctions in stages, in return for such verification. It means a real mechanism for “snapback” should Iran simply renege or get caught cheating.
No one wants war, but neither should anyone want ANYTHING but war, including an Iranian nuke. It has long been US policy that an Iranian nuclear capability is out of the question and that we will use any means to prevent it. If that policy is changing, the President could at least be honest about it. If he won’t be, I’d expect Dopers to at least be honest about it. So tell us now, is that policy changing? Will we accept an Iranian nuke now, as in we won’t use force to stop it?
I’m not saying it’s off the table. I said war should be a last resort. Which includes war as an option. You appear to be arguing that no possible deal will satisfy you. Even to the point of advocating adding in distracting nonsense like state recognition of Israel.
Please argue against my actual position, and not the one that makes it easier for you to churn out gish-gallops.
I’m not only arguing against your position. I won’t say that NO deal with Iran would ever be acceptable. Just that given the concessions the President has already made, a good deal seems unlikely. That being said, the original framework as spun by the administration sure looks good enough after the latest reporting. And I see that liberal Dopers aren’t standing by that spin as the basis of a minimally good deal. Apparently we can make even more concessions, with no corresponding concessions on the part of the Iranians. That’s known as negotiating from a position of weakness. Are we negotiating from a position of weakness?