What to Believe...

Yesterday I wrote about the Iran-P-5+1 agreement and that I think/hope that it is a monumental event.  I say that because the alternative is military action which is always fraught with more risk than anyone thinks up to the point they start shooting.

It therefore made me extremely uncomfortable that the Iranian Foreign Ministry is now saying that the text published by the US is not the correct text.

It is not surprising.  Everyone around the table has different goals.   This doesn't mean they are all diametrically opposed to one another but it does mean that their respective willingness to compromise is predicated on different desires that might or might not be compatible.

The US is focused on ensuring that Iran is unable to produce a nuclear weapon. 

The Iranians are focused on ensuring that there is no regime change whether internally or externally driven.

One bargaining chip is sanctions- the other is nuclear development. 

I had hoped that the pressure on the Iranian leadership created by economic sanctions had reached the point that the general population was less concerned about Iran's place in the sun and was much more focused on their daily needs to the point that the government had no choice but to negotiate to remove the sanctions.

Fully realising that every politician has to play to both a foreign and a domestic audience I expected that there would be statements that play better in Peoria than they do in Tehran, and vice versa. 

But disagreeing on the text smells of prevarication, the twin sister of stalling.

We have been there before.  The case could be made that the US was guilty of it in our handling of the Syrian crisis.  And that is why despite my sincere hope that this was just playing to the domestic audience, that the US has made it crystal clear that sanctions would be reinstated without delay if there were even a whiff of noncompliance and that the military solution might not be on the table, but it is certainly in the drawer.