I am no fan of Obama-far from it. But I think this agreement has the chance to set up Iran as a new player in the sordid world of ME politics. I like the idea of Iran fighting ISIS-let them have the job, Plus, Israel has warned Iran (in no uncertain terms) that any expanded aid to Hezbollah will be met with devastating retaliation. We now (as the result of Iran emerging as a player), have more leverage over Saudi Arabia.
Iran will find that getting involved in the Syrian war will have a lot of consequences for them-great-I wish them a ton of misery. It may be that such a war will weaken the regime, and set off reaction in their own non-shia population. Iran is very welcome to get into an endless war-good luck to them.
Even more to the point, it is far from clear how much the US even wants Iran to stop funding Shi’ite militants, who are after all the most significant anti-ISIS force in Iraq right now (outstripping the official Iraqi government).
Again, to my mind, the basic issue of US (and Western) policy generally in the region is a fundamental ambivalence over who they wish to support.
They have no love for any of the main sides (a lack of love that is reciprocated in spades), but their desire to avoid a triumphant ISIS is currently overshadowing a desire to avoid a triumphant “greater Iran” Shi’ite sphere of influence.
Frankly, I can’t think of anything better for ME stability than a strong Shi’ite sphere of influence. They’ll be a regional counterbalance to the Sunni states, whose people are unfriendly to us even if their governments aren’t.
I’m of two minds on this.
On the one hand, without a Shi’ite counterbalance, what we are likely to get right now is an ISIS wasteland covering the heart of Syria-Iraq seeking to expand and a bunch of frightened mostly-Sunni states on the one hand, an isolated Iran on the other, and a few oddballs like Israel and Lebanon.
On the other, boosting the Shi’ite sphere will certainly lead to an intensification of the current war, and may undermine Sunni resistance to ISIS - leading to a wider Sunni-Shi’ite civil war, in which all of the little regional conflicts currently underway link up. This could prove a very bloody proposition, and such conflicts have a terrible tendency to expand and suck in others.
This I see as a “worst case” scenario arising from the current deal - not Iran getting the bomb and nuking people (it was always likely Iran would eventually get the bomb, and always unlikely that they would nuke anyone with it), but an intensification of the current sectarian conflict into something worse, arising from Sunni reaction to Shi’ite assertions of strength, funded by Iran.
If that happens, we will all look back nostalgically on the good old days when some people in the West truly though that Israel-Palestinian business was the major ME conflict!
Israel will be safer if the Islamic powers are busying eyeing each other across disputed borders. And it’s probably high time for some of those borders to be redrawn, and ISIS is accomplishing that in a very unpleasant way. Perhaps, when the dust settles, the survivors will be where they want to be and they won’t need to fight over anything.
Looks like Matt Bai is reading my posts on this MB. 
What about that time I posted about this old guy following me into the bathroom and taking the next stall even though he could have chosen one farther away?
Which pretty much describes what has been going on since the Yom Kipper War and the Camp David accords. Without Egypt as the main base, no full-up military attack against Israel is feasible; the worst you have is the occasional rocket barrage from the Gaza Strip or Hizbollah kidnapping a military person or firing a missile or two. But nothing that could threaten the existence of the Israeli State with a full-on military defeat. Not without Egypt, and even when the Muslim Brotherhood was in power, there was no major interest in moving forces to attack Israel.
So from 1976 onwards, most Mid-east violence had been Sunni-Shitie-Kurdish(Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Iraq) as borders and power influences get sorted out. Israel, despite the cyclical uprisings in the West bank and Gaza and the brief conflict(s) it has fought with Hezbollah in Lebanaon and Syria, has not faced a major armed conflict such as Lebanon (with the multi-sided Civil war), Iran (with the Iraq war and the purported millions of casulities), Iraq (nuff said), and Syria, now slowing dissolving as a nation-state.
In my most humble opinion, I think this is becoming closer and closer to the Arab version of the 30-Years War(1618-1648), with Syria and Iraq taking the place of the German states, Iraq as the Holy Roman Empire/Spain and the Gulf States as the Swedes and French, using their proxies to gain power and influence while laying waste to the battleground.
That makes Europe and America the Mughals or China, powerful but distant from this conflict. Except today distances are not as great as they used to be, so it is much harder for us to be aloof as to what is going on. Or to stay out of it.
My apologies if this is a bit rambling. IMHO as always. YMMV.
That was the 2nd smartest thing. 
So people legitimately think inspectors will be incompetent or easily bamboozled and Iran will secretly start a nuclear weapons program without any Western intelligence agencies noticing, using fissile material from…somewhere. I’ve seen this movie before.
The good news is that Iran doesn’t mind endless war. In the West we get impatient after six months. In that part of the world they have no problem fighting and dying for centuries or millenia.
That’s a profoundly silly comment.
Really? War fatigue is entirely a modern concept, at least to the extent that anything is actually done about it. Europe fought pretty much non-stop for two thousand years and that part of the world has been consistently in conflict for even longer. Hard to be tired of the way things have always been.
That’s a little like saying that Chicago has been on fire non-stop for the past hundred years. Yes, there is, somewhere in Chicago, a house fire pretty much every day. And, sure, there have been wars somewhere in Europe, nearly every decade, for a damn long time.
But “Europe Has Been At War” perhaps four times: 1750s, 1800s, 1910s, and 1940s. Other than that, it’s always been regional, not continental.
You said Iran wouldn’t get tired. When has Iran been at war for thousands of years? Are they some other species, these Persians? Robotically stoic in the face of death and privation?
The comment is stupid. Don’t try to defend it. Newsflash: Muslims love their kids too.
No one wants endless war. That’s cartoonish, childish thinking, reducing a people to a bunch of snarling rabid dogs. Most fathers in Iran want their sons and daughters to grow up and get a good job and produce some fat grandbabies. They aren’t eyeing them as grist for the war-mill.
No, not really. Quite a few of us, actually.
But enough do see their kids as grist for the war mill to keep it going.
Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.-Golda Meir
I REALLY hope that we didn’t make a deal on the assumption that “they are just like us!”
Yeah, that’s the cartoonish attitude I was talking about.
One of the loveliest consequences of this deal will be the world of pain it’ll inflict on ISIS, assuming that more money to Iran means more money to Iran’s proxies, allies and friends.
Of course, Hezbollah already did a very fine anti-ISIS job in Qalamoun, but the Iraqi Shi’ite militias could sure use some niftier equipment - and the same is true for the Iran-supported Kurds.
Over on his blog, Juan Cole rightly points out that:
Here’s hoping the process continues - and that it is sped up by this deal.
You know, we could have just given $150 billion to the Kurds and gotten a better result.