What's Wrong with the Iran Deal

What’s Wrong with the Iran Deal? Short answer: not much. The critics of the deal are blustering and posturing out of a deep seated need to oppose the President of the United States. Any real and genuine concerns about the deal were hammered out in negotiations. I admit I have not read the document, but what I understand from what I have read about it tells me that the deal is, as our President tells us, the best possible alternative. I see no one in Israel or our own Congress offering up something better. And I do not understand how an Iran no longer engaged upon or capable of producing a nuclear bomb is more dangerous to the world than the Iran we have now. I find it odd that the same politicians who clamored to support the latest trade bill (which the majority of Americans oppose) without debate, now wish to undermine a weapons-limiting deal (which the majority of Americans support) before fully understanding its ramifications. People like to compare the Iran deal with appeasing Hitler at Munich in 1938. The comparison does not stand up. Hitler had already taken several bits of foreign soil; the Allies weakly conceded those captures on the mere promise that Hitler would stop, without any method of monitoring him or real consequence in place. The threat of war was not real to him. Militarily, the Allies were weak and weary. The Iran deal is all about inspections and consequence. Sanctions lifted could easily and rapidly be put back in place at the first infraction. Bringing Iran back into the community of nations we call the World could lead to positive steps by their new regime down the line, but, regardless, keeping them from building a nuke has to be a good thing no matter the politics of the regime. I think the better comparison would be to Nixon going to China. China was seen (by us, at least) as a dangerous threat. Even after Nixon went and came back, we were cautious, but China gradually became both a major player on the world stage and a major trade partner of ours, and Asia is more stable than ever before. Iran is not Hitler’s Germany. Nor is it Nixon’s China. Iran is one powder keg in an incendiary region of the world. Instead of defusing it, our so-called patriots in Congress seem ready to light the fuse with American blood. If that is their viable alternative, if they truly believe that war with Iran is in the best interest of Corporate America’s bottom line, they ought to tell us so, and why. And if we elect one of those bozos to be our new President, then we are even more primitive than I thought. Remember, too, that the United States is only one of six nations involved in the negotiations with Iran. The others are Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China. You would never have seen that sort of unity in 1938. Thank you, Richard Nixon.