Nuclear deal with Iran - good or bad?

[LoveBeingAMuslimah]

Again, that is just window dressing. It has nothing to do with the specifics of the actual deal.

It does have to do with the deal being made in the end, since it may have swayed public opinion enough to make this an incredibly unpopular move by more people, thus giving Obama more pause.

Iran had access to money before that. If there was no deal, they would still have money to give to Assad, but they would also be developing a nuclear weapon at the same time.

They would have access to less money (to the tune of $150b) which means less assistance to Assad's regime in its genocide which is an immediate threat to millions of Syrians.

More than likely, to keep promises to the hardliners within the Iran government that they wouldn't expose their participation in the talks. That's why these talks were done in private, so that Iranian officials could save face. Afterall, the hardliners are as dogmatic about talking to the US as some US officials are about talking to Iran.

1.) Regarding hardliners within the Iranian government:

"Leon Panetta, who was Obama’s head of the C.I.A. and secretary of defense and also enough of a product of a different culture to give honest answers to what he understands to be questions of consequence....I ask him about a crucial component of the administration’s public narrative on Iran: whether it was ever a salient feature of the C.I.A.’s analysis when he ran the agency that the Iranian regime was meaningfully divided between “hard-line” and “moderate” camps.

“No,” Panetta answers. “There was not much question that the Quds Force and the supreme leader ran that country with a strong arm, and there was not much question that this kind of opposing view could somehow gain any traction.”"

The "moderates" vs. "hardliners" were all picked by Khomeini.

2.) Why did Obama still say in 2015 when signing the deal that negotiations had taken place in the past 2 years (when it started before that)? Why would Iran need to save face at this point?

3.) The Obama administration cared about what the US public thought:

The White House point person during the later stage of the negotiations was Rob Malley, a favored troubleshooter who is currently running negotiations that could keep the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in power.

.....“We created an echo chamber,” he admitted, when I asked him to explain the onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”

Rhodes...said, “We had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups like Ploughshares, the Iran Project and whomever else. So we knew the tactics that worked.” He is proud of the way he sold the Iran deal. “We drove them crazy,” he said of the deal’s opponents.

....The person whom Kreikemeier credits with running the digital side of the campaign was Tanya Somanader, 31, the director of digital response for the White House Office of Digital Strategy, who became known in the war room and on Twitter as @TheIranDeal. Early on, Rhodes asked her to create a rapid-response account that fact-checked everything related to the Iran deal. “So, we developed a plan that was like: The Iran deal is literally going to be the tip of everything that we stand up online,” Somanader says. “And we’re going to map it onto what we know about the different audiences we’re dealing with: the public, pundits, experts, the right wing, Congress.” By applying 21st-century data and networking tools to the white-glove world of foreign affairs, the White House was able to track what United States senators and the people who worked for them, and influenced them, were seeing online — and make sure that no potential negative comment passed without a tweet...."

The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign-Policy Guru

The genocide doesn't stop if the negotiations started in 2013 instead of 2012.

No, it doesn't. But it gives Iran access to less money with which to assist in the genocide against the Sunni Syrians.

 

[Loudmouth]

It does have to do with the deal being made in the end, since it may have swayed public opinion enough to make this an incredibly unpopular move by more people, thus giving Obama more pause.

But it wouldn't change the actual deal. If you have a problem with the actual deal, then that is the case you need to make.

They would have access to less money (to the tune of $150b) which means less assistance to Assad's regime in its genocide which is an immediate threat to millions of Syrians.

There would still be genocide, and they would be constructing a nuclear bomb at the same time.

1.) Regarding hardliners within the Iranian government:

"Leon Panetta, who was Obama’s head of the C.I.A. and secretary of defense and also enough of a product of a different culture to give honest answers to what he understands to be questions of consequence....I ask him about a crucial component of the administration’s public narrative on Iran: whether it was ever a salient feature of the C.I.A.’s analysis when he ran the agency that the Iranian regime was meaningfully divided between “hard-line” and “moderate” camps.

“No,” Panetta answers. “There was not much question that the Quds Force and the supreme leader ran that country with a strong arm, and there was not much question that this kind of opposing view could somehow gain any traction.”"

The "moderates" vs. "hardliners" were all picked by Khomeini.

Still makes sense to keep promises not to divulge when negotiations started.

2.) Why did Obama still say in 2015 when signing the deal that negotiations had taken place in the past 2 years (when it started before that)? Why would Iran need to save face at this point?

So he signed the deal before public opinion could have stopped him from signing it? This makes your case even worse.

3.) The Obama administration cared about what the US public thought:

Again, just window dressing.

 

[LoveBeingAMuslimah]

But it wouldn't change the actual deal. If you have a problem with the actual deal, then that is the case you need to make.

I don't need to make any case besides the deal being absolutely wrong to make at a time when Iran is helping in committing a genocide. What the details of the deal are don't matter to me since the elephant in the room is the genocide and terrorism they are engaged in.

There would still be genocide, and they would be constructing a nuclear bomb at the same time.

But the genocide wouldn't be as bad as it is now. There wouldn't be as many people they could kill and there wouldn't be as many people they could hire to kill those people. With access to $150b, they can do both of those things for much longer.

Nuclear bombs are not the imminent threat to Syrians right now. What is the current and real threat to Syrians today and for the past 4 years is the genocide.

Still makes sense to keep promises not to divulge when negotiations started.

That was your line of defense (that lying to the American public about when the negotiations started was to appease the "hardliners" as opposed to the "moderates" ). But there was no difference in the regime.

So he signed the deal before public opinion could have stopped him from signing it? This makes your case even worse.

No, the spin doctor was already operating long before he signed the deal, as I showed you later in that post but you called that window dressing. Him saying it so clearly (that negotiations had begun 2 years ago) exposes how blatantly they were lying and how desperately they want the public to believe other than the truth.

Again, just window dressing.

Swaying the public opinion in order to go ahead with the deal when otherwise the deal may not have gone ahead is pretty big and upsetting news to me.

 

[Loudmouth]

I don't need to make any case besides the deal being absolutely wrong to make at a time when Iran is helping in committing a genocide. What the details of the deal are don't matter to me since the elephant in the room is the genocide and terrorism they are engaged in.

Then why are you in a thread that is about the Iran nuclear deal? All you have done is waste our time.

 

[LoveBeingAMuslimah]

Then why are you in a thread that is about the Iran nuclear deal? All you have done is waste our time.

Title of thread: "Nuclear deal with Iran - good or bad?"
Me: Bad because it is giving Iran access to $150b with which to assist Assad in the genocide against Sunni Syrians. Also bad because it required deception in order to sell the deal to the public (without this deception, the deal may not have gone forward).

Pretty straightforward. Need me to break this down too and waste my time explaining basic concepts again?

 

[Loudmouth]

Title of thread: "Nuclear deal with Iran - good or bad?"
Me: Bad because it is giving Iran access to $150b with which to assist Assad in the genocide against Sunni Syrians. Also bad because it required deception in order to sell the deal to the public (without this deception, the deal may not have gone forward).

A good deal can also involve deception. That is the part you don't seem to understand.

 

[LoveBeingAMuslimah]

A good deal can also involve deception. That is the part you don't seem to understand.

A deal that gives a country access to funds to use to help commit genocide (during an active genocide) is never a good deal. At least to most moral or decent people.

 

[FredVB]

I have to agree that any deal contributing to genocide is certainly bad, this shouldn't be dismissed.

 

[Loudmouth]

A deal that gives a country access to funds to use to help commit genocide (during an active genocide) is never a good deal. At least to most moral or decent people.

A country that uses money for committing genocide and having a nuclear bomb.

A country that uses money for committing genocide and has no nuclear bomb.

For most moral and decent people, the latter is the best option.

 

[LoveBeingAMuslimah]

Could've saved everyone the trouble (specifically the Syrians who have been directly hurt by Obama's Iran deal since the genocide they're undergoing was given a boost by it) years ago, but maybe this will finally convince the proponents of the Iran deal (unlikely). Also, I'd like to say that I told you so.

"The Obama administration blocked a highly effective interagency effort to dismantle a Hezbollah drug and money laundering enterprise to grease the skids for the nuclear deal with Iran. That’s the story Josh Meyer of Politico told in his recent well-documented, well-sourced, investigative report."

[...]"Even if the Obama diplomats could verifiably totally dismantle the nuclear program, flushing the regime with cash without requiring reform in other areas seemed dangerously foolish. And it took years of diplomatic heavy-lifting for the United States to build consensus among other nations to isolate Iran.

Sanctions may not have finally prevented Iran from stopping its nuclear program, but they were really starting to hurt the regime. After all, it was the pain from those sanctions and isolation that brought Iran to the negotiating table in the first place."

[...] "We were promised "anytime, anywhere" inspections, but by the time the deal was done, verification, while still hailed as the toughest verification regime in history, still only allows managed access to Iranian sites, and the agreement was written with such ambiguity as to allow the Iranians to continue to insist certain sites remain off limits."

Now there's no denying it: Obama's failed Iran deal wasn't worth the cost

Everyone is (rightfully) harping on and on about the different ways Trump is ruining America, but where were they when it was Obama doing the same thing? In fact, they were actually in support of Obama when Obama did the worst things he could possibly do for America and the world regarding Iran as well as in his response to Assad's genocide. At least Trump's got it right on this one thing (his apparent stance on Iran). Obama was everything Iran wanted...yet they still continued saying "death to America". And today we still have people in the West supporting Iran's regime...even when Iran recently had to quash major protests by its people who were complaining about poverty (so looks like all of those billions of dollars went straight to contributing to a genocide and not to helping its own people).

 

[RDKirk]

The only way a country can be forced to do anything in the long term is by genocide.

If genocide is not the option, then just get ready to live with whatever that country is determined to do.

Or make it truly in their best interest to do otherwise...and threats won't work in the long run.

The basic failure of US policy toward both Iran and North Korea is that it's totally threat-based. If you frighten a small man, he will never stop seeking a way to kill you; that's true for countries as well.

 

[LoveBeingAMuslimah]

The only way a country can be forced to do anything in the long term is by genocide.

If genocide is not the option, then just get ready to live with whatever that country is determined to do.

Or make it truly in their best interest to do otherwise...and threats won't work in the long run.

Making it truly in their best interest to do otherwise involves threats, however you want to word it.

But what you mentioned does nail Iran's path up until now...

Committing a genocide against the US was not an option and they were not ready to live with what the US had wanted before Obama (sanctions against Iran). So they made their list of demands:

• the US lifts the sanctions & gives Iran 100+ billion dollars with which it can continue slaughtering Syrian Sunnis, supporting the Houthis who are slaughtering Yemeni Sunnis, and supporting the sectarian Shia militias in Iraq
  
• the US makes the conditions of the nuclear deal vague so much so that Iran can practically do whatever it wants because it doesn't have to provide access to all of its sites
• the US gives Iran money for hostages
• the US releases dangerous prisoners for Iran
• the US forced agents to lay off of monitoring Hezbollah, an Iranian ally and supporter of Assad.
  
• the US listens to what the pro-Iranian, pro-Assad Shia Iraqi militias ask them to do in Iraq (i.e. provide airstrikes wherever the Iraqi militias call them)
• the US could not respond to Assad's usage of sarin in any meaningful way. There was no red line and the response wasn't even a slap on the wrist. All that happened was giving lip service to Assad's chemical weapons being taken away (clearly ineffective as evidenced by his continued use of them).

And on top of that, the US further benefited Iran because:

• the US did not provide much material support to the rebels fighting against Assad. In fact, the train-and-equip program was solely meant to fight ISIS and not the biggest threat (Assad and its allies)
  
• the US deliberately targeted rebels and never the regime (up until 2017)
  
• the useful idiot (or clever, evil?) proponents of the Iran deal keep talking up Iran and the deal (and usually had strongly worded statements against Saudi Arabia and wahabis with nothing similar against Iran and rafidhis). And even today, many of those same people are defending the Iranian regime against the protests of the Iranian people. Some people continue to try to say there are hardliners vs. moderates in the Iranian regime.

Yep, Iran really played the US and came out the biggest winner in that sense. It had the US eating out of its hand while it does whatever it wants.

I'm still baffled that the Iran deal is thought of as a positive by anyone. I don't understand how a superior country was bested by Iran and was eager to meet its demands even while it continued committing a genocide against Syrians (the genocide that has sparked the greatest humanitarian crisis since World War II).

The basic failure of US policy toward both Iran and North Korea is that it's totally threat-based. If you frighten a small man, he will never stop seeking a way to kill you; that's true for countries as well.

Curious that even after Obama appeased Iran, Iran continues to say "death to America" and gains support among "anti-imperialists" in the West because it portrays itself as anti-American even though it and its allies benefited the most in the region (besides Israel) from the US.

 

[RDKirk]

Making it truly in their best interest to do otherwise involves threats, however you want to word it.

But what you mentioned does nail Iran's path up until now...

Committing a genocide against the US was not an option and they were not ready to live with what the US had wanted before Obama (sanctions against Iran). So they made their list of demands:

• the US lifts the sanctions & gives Iran 100+ billion dollars with which it can continue slaughtering Syrian Sunnis, supporting the Houthis who are slaughtering Yemeni Sunnis, and supporting the sectarian Shia militias in Iraq
  
• the US makes the conditions of the nuclear deal vague so much so that Iran can practically do whatever it wants because it doesn't have to provide access to all of its sites
• the US gives Iran money for hostages
• the US releases dangerous prisoners for Iran
• the US forced agents to lay off of monitoring Hezbollah, an Iranian ally and supporter of Assad.
  
• the US listens to what the pro-Iranian, pro-Assad Shia Iraqi militias ask them to do in Iraq (i.e. provide airstrikes wherever the Iraqi militias call them)
• the US could not respond to Assad's usage of sarin in any meaningful way. There was no red line and the response wasn't even a slap on the wrist. All that happened was giving lip service to Assad's chemical weapons being taken away (clearly ineffective as evidenced by his continued use of them).

And on top of that, the US further benefited Iran because:

• the US did not provide much material support to the rebels fighting against Assad. In fact, the train-and-equip program was solely meant to fight ISIS and not the biggest threat (Assad and its allies)
  
• the US deliberately targeted rebels and never the regime (up until 2017)
  
• the useful idiot (or clever, evil?) proponents of the Iran deal keep talking up Iran and the deal (and usually had strongly worded statements against Saudi Arabia and wahabis with nothing similar against Iran and rafidhis). And even today, many of those same people are defending the Iranian regime against the protests of the Iranian people. Some people continue to try to say there are hardliners vs. moderates in the Iranian regime.

Yep, Iran really played the US and came out the biggest winner in that sense. It had the US eating out of its hand while it does whatever it wants.

I'm still baffled that the Iran deal is thought of as a positive by anyone. I don't understand how a superior country was bested by Iran and was eager to meet its demands even while it continued committing a genocide against Syrians (the genocide that has sparked the greatest humanitarian crisis since World War II).



Curious that even after Obama appeased Iran, Iran continues to say "death to America" and gains support among "anti-imperialists" in the West because it portrays itself as anti-American even though it and its allies benefited the most in the region (besides Israel) from the US.

You'll have a hard time convincing me your attitude isn't because they are Shiites.

 

[CRAZY_CAT_WOMAN]

Why would you want to give a nation of Islamic extremists pledged to the elimination of Israel a nuclear weapon? That's beyond stupidity. Either this president is complete idiot, or his hatred of the west know no limitations. If Iraq gets a nuclear bomb they will use it to destroy Israel. They've said as much repeatedly.

Here's the fallout (literally). Israel is a nuclear power. They're not going to sit idly by while madmen achieve nuclear capability. Israel will HAVE TO make a pre-emptive strike to prevent annihilation. With Iran's centrifuges deep underground that means some kind of nuclear weapon. This STUPIDITY on the part of the fool on the hill will make a bloody war in the Middle East an absolute certainty. Iran doesn't need nuclear energy. The price of gasoline in Iran is only 0.3 Euro's per liter which is 70% lower than the average world price of gasoline.

I can't believe anyone thinks this is a good deal.

Why should any country, including America be able to have nuclear weapons or these deals. Maybe because all countries have a right to protect themselves. Just think if the Indians had them in the United States, before people(I getting most were Christians) took their land . They would still own their land.

 

[LoveBeingAMuslimah]

You'll have a hard time convincing me your attitude isn't because they are Shiites.

I mean, I didn't know I was at all subtle with my hatred for Iran due to its actions in Syria. Pretty sure I mentioned Iran in relation to the genocide of Sunni Muslims in Syria a few times on this page alone and also have a 27-page thread dedicated to Syria, on top of smaller threads.

I don't like Shiism, that is obviously true. I don't like that they forcibly converted the inhabitants of Iran from Sunnism to Shiism & killed those who refused to curse the companions of the Prophet, I don't like that Iran has a shrine dedicated to the killer of the Prophet's companion, that their religion revolves around hatred and cursing, that Iran doesn't allow an actual masjid (for the sole purpose of Sunnis to worship in it) to be built in Tehran, that it hires Shia militants to fight and kill Sunni civilians and is blatantly trying to form a Shia crescent (with major help from the west). But my attitude here was due to its actions of committing a genocide against my brothers and sisters.

It's like you telling a Jew that their hatred towards Nazi Germany is because of the Christian faith of many of them while completely ignoring the Holocaust.

 

[RDKirk]

I mean, I didn't know I was at all subtle with my hatred for Iran due to its actions in Syria. Pretty sure I mentioned Iran in relation to the genocide of Sunni Muslims in Syria a few times on this page alone and also have a 27-page thread dedicated to Syria, on top of smaller threads.

I don't like Shiism, that is obviously true. I don't like that they forcibly converted the inhabitants of Iran from Sunnism to Shiism & killed those who refused to curse the companions of the Prophet, I don't like that Iran has a shrine dedicated to the killer of the Prophet's companion, that their religion revolves around hatred and cursing, that Iran doesn't allow an actual masjid (for the sole purpose of Sunnis to worship in it) to be built in Tehran, that it hires Shia militants to fight and kill Sunni civilians and is blatantly trying to form a Shia crescent (with major help from the west). But my attitude here was due to its actions of committing a genocide against my brothers and sisters..

That's been going back and forth for 1400 years.