Monday, March 30, 2015

Time for a nice quiet sleep? The countdown to a nuclear Iran deal

...Everything we have seen about the Iran nuclear talks screams "catastrophically bad deal". Most people tune conclusions like that out. So we are reprinting here three exceptionally articulate and clear opinion pieces, all from the past 24 hours, as our contribution to keeping readers awake at night, at least tonight.


Arnold/Frimet Roth..
This Ongoing War..
30 March '15..

The negotiations for an agreement that will curb (in some sense) Iran's nuclear program and free Iran (in some sense) from international sanctions that have squeezed its economy are, by general consensus, in their final 24 hours.

The pressure-cooker atmosphere stems from a March 31 "soft" deadline that Iran and the P5+1 group imposed on themselves in November 2014 to achieve (in some sense) a general agreement. The more detailed terms (in some sense) are to be signed off by June 2015.

No one would purchase an apartment with this degree of uncertainty and flexibility about what was agreed. It's bizarre, and that's before we take the cataclysmic scale of the dangers into account.

Today it got meaningfully worse. The Iranians pulled what one commentator we respect calls "a last minute bait-and-switch". The background is in today's New York Times ["Iran Backs Away From Key Detail in Nuclear Deal"], but Omri Ceren sums it up better than they do. The Iranians, in his words:

bargained up their centrifuge numbers for months by saying that they'd ship out whatever material they enriched, the assumption being that who cares how much uranium they enrich to 3.5% as long as they don't have it physically available to enrich further. Now that they've ratcheted up the number of centrifuges to over 6,000, they're saying they won't ship out the material... it looks like the administration got outplayed by Persian negotiators… again.

(Continue Reading)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter
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