That assumes the Iranian people see much of that money. Hezbollah’s probably going to be living better than your average Iranian.
Why do you think that? Rhouhani’s interest has been to get the economy of Iran going again. That’s the whole reason he wanted to pursue the talks. If they get this deal, and all the $59-something billion in sanctions relief gets sent out of the country, the man in the street is going to be pissed. You think nobody is going to notice if sanctions are lifted and the economy doesn’t recover?
This so reminds me of when I was talking to Israeli leftists during the Gaza withdrawal. “Why would they attack us? - we would not be occupying them anymore!”
Tell us more ways of how Iran reminds you of the Gaza strip. Please do.
That’s funny. Your arguments in the other thread reminds me of those who thought weapons inspectors in Iraq were a waste of time, because Saddam was clever enough to hide anything incriminating, so war ought to be accelerated.
Whose analogy is more apt?
Rhouhani may mean well, but he’s not the one calling the shots in Iran. As people here were happy to remind us back in Achmadinajad’s day, the President of Iran has very little real power.
I totally agree. But it is absolutely clear that Rhouhani has been given enough rope to hang himself: even entering these negotiations was clearly his initiative, not the Supreme Leader’s, even if the Supreme Leader had to be okay with them proceeding.
Rhouhani’s motivation is clearly to lift the sanctions and get Iran’s economy back on track. If the Supreme Leader is giving him a little space to run with the ball, one would expect that economic priorities would probably be toward the top of the list of what to focus on when sanctions are lifted. Now, if the deal craters or Rhouhani ends up with egg on his face for some other reason, his leash is going to be snapped and who knows what happens after that – certainly nothing good.
I am not saying that Iran’s nefarious activities will see no benefit. But there are lots of zealots in the press who are basically speculating, if not predicting, that all or the vast, vast majority of the sanctions relief is going to go to Hizbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, etc. I think that’s basically McCarthyist scare tactics.
Robert Farley over at the Lawyers, Guns & Money blog argues persuasively that nukes are a red herring in the whole debate over Iranian nukes.
Not a bad question, that: How will Iran spend its new-found riches?
Upgrading the country’s oil industry is apparently priority number one:
They’ll spend another fortune on upgrading their civilian air fleet:
That same article also mentions Iran getting ready to buy a fuck-ton of European cars.
The country will also be “optimizing and modernizing” their railroads in Tehran, Mashhad and Qom; this, too, will presumably cost billions. By the way: I myself took the train from Tehran to Mashhad back in 2004 - felt like some straight-up Alfred Hitchcock / Agatha Christie shit, the kind of train Lawrence Of Arabia would blow to bits… Very “colonial” style… Except that they showed Dolph Lundgren’s “Universal Soldier” dubbed into Persian on a cruddy old VHS… Quite surreal. But anyway.
As for Iran-affiliated non-state actors such as Hezbollah, they’ll most likely receive millions rather than billions:
Syria is already receiving “an estimated $6 billion a year, in cash, oil and other aid.” That number might will increase, but even so there can be no doubt that the vast majority of Iran’s new cash will be used to improve Iran itself, and so will certainly benefit the Iranian people at large.
It means that we should try to keep whatever we have in place but if we need to roll those back, we have to decide if whatever benefit we will get for rolling them back is greater than the harm we have been preventing with them (so how effective have those Clinton era sanctions been at stopping or even slowing down Irans’s sponsorship of terrorism?).
Some people think that the USSR was toppled by their inability to keep up (technologically) with the US in the arms race.
Some people think it was purely a matter of economic growth rates.
Others say it was the fall of oil prices.
I think it was the introduction of MTV.
Its appeasement. You know who else was an appeaser, don’t you?
I just saw a TV ad for $10 “endless appeasers” at TGI Fridays. Is that what you’re talking about?
If there’s no tomato sauce is it appeaser or is it cheesy bread?
If this is true at least it casts some of the opposition to the deal as rational, if quite dishonest.
As celebrated in the NY Post, which has been trolling Sen. Schumer for the last couple weeks to hound him into opposing the Iran deal, Rep. Grace Meng, a Democratic Congresswoman from Queens, has said she will vote against the Iran deal.
From her statement on her website:
Forget about whether a better deal could have been or should have been negotiated by the P5+1 during the course of the talks. The only question going forward is whether a better deal than this one can be negotiated if the current deal is scrapped, over the protests of our negotiating partners who are perfectly happy with the deal we got.
If the US pulls out of the deal, it’s beyond me how Rep. Meng thinks we’ll have any credibility left with our allies to muster a strong enough sanctions regime to bring Iran back to the table, especially as Rouhani will have been totally humiliated and the Iranian hardliners vindicated in their view that the US can’t be trusted to negotiate in good faith. Maybe–I don’t believe so, but maybe–a better deal could have been negotiated prior to the conclusion of talks. But the idea that some better deal can be had by going back to square one is fantasy. Unilaterally blowing up the deal would be the worst possible outcome from the perspective of US national interest and one that guarantees no deal, or a worse deal. In that situation, the US may then be faced with the choice of war or acquiescing in Iran having nukes.
I can understand the political reasons that Republican congressmen and presidential candidates have for opposing the deal. Hell, I can almost forgive them for it. What I don’t understand and can’t forgive is a Democratic representative taking a stance that is so devoid of substantive merit with no political upside to herself. It just doesn’t make sense. I can only conclude that she’s a) stupid or b) beholden to some special interest despite representing a district that went 85%+ for Obama and probably overwhelmingly supports the deal.
Ok, I can see the political calculus for her.
It would be nice, though, if the NY Post didn’t resort to absurdities like chalking up her position to wisdom, grit, or leadership.
She wouldn’t be allowed to get away with this here. It wouldn’t be whether or not “Cite?” hits the page, it would be a matter of how many seconds would tick away before it happened.
Are these “nuclear experts” on a par with the universally acclaimed experts who offer relentless and unfounded skepticism on the issue of climate change? Is there any acknowledgement that our Secretary of Energy, Ernest Moniz is “a professor emeritus of physics at MIT, where he served as the head of the physics department and directed the Bates Linear Accelerator Center.” Is he not some degree of an expert? Have we some reason to believe that he is in cahoots with Iran, gnawing away at our nation’s security? Or that he is some sort of scientific naif, outfoxed by Iranian nuke scientists who can do the math?
Our enemies make great use of a Big Lie: that we are at war with Islam, that we seek to destroy the religion of roughly a sixth of our planet’s people. Worse, they get support from some of our very own, who would like that lie to be true. A sincere effort to make a peaceful resolution with a prominent enemy would go a long way to countering that Lie.
Our fretting is like an alt-history scenario, wherein our Old West cavalry is equipped with several armored divisions, and we are desperately worried that the Cheyenne and the Sioux might gain access to a Gatling gun. A Gatling gun, one.
Stupid kills. Let us make every effort not to be stupid. Give peace a chance, or at the very least, a fair hearing.
MTV didn’t begin broadcasts in the former Soviet states until 1998. You could probably have received MTV Europe broadcasts via satellite in a small area of the western Soviet Union from 1987 to 1991, in the unlikely event you had the appropriate receiving equipment and decoder.
It takes wisdom, grit and leadership to register a symbolic protest vote to appears your constituents, you know.
ETA: I just realized she doesn’t get a vote. So… a symbolic protest press release, I guess.
By way of our good friends at Crooks and Liars, the esteemed Eric Bolling:
Eric Bolling Wonders Aloud If War With Iran Wouldn’t Be A Good Idea
Jesus Wept. And I know why.