Subject: Re: The Iran Deal.
I’ve said to let this play out. According to Lee Smith, it has, and the deal is likely to be ass just like Obama’s was.

There is another possibility. That we now know the Obama deal was not ass.

One of the chief criticisms of the Obama deal was in the alternative. Critics argued that we could have gotten more. That Obama didn't bargain hard enough, and that the U.S. could have gotten a better deal. Something that gave us what we got, but with more.

We now know that's almost certainly not true. After ripping up the deal, Trump went through a period of "maximum enforcement" against Iran in his first term, dialing the sanctions up to 11. And we've just seen what happens when we go to war with Iran to "tune them up," and damage them as much as we can without a ground invasion. It didn't get us anything more than where we were in February, with what Iran has consistently been willing to agree to.

They won't give us what we want.

So it looks like Obama (and indeed all of his predecessors since Reagan) was correct, and that we can't get what we want from Iran by either threatening to attack them with a military build-up, or by actually attacking. The "better deal" that critics of the JCPOA kept claiming was left on the table - the one that not only had Iran agree to give up their nuclear enrichment and agree to limits on ballistic missiles and supporting regional proxies - wasn't on the table. It was not achievable. What was achievable was:

- Reduce the nuclear threat by trading relief from anti-nuclear sanctions for Iran not enriching past a certain point (the JCPOA);
- Maintaining hardcore anti-nuclear sanctions but Iran goes up to the line with uranium enrichment.

We now know that Trump was a fool to rip up the JCPOA. He was even more a fool not to take what was on the table back in February. There wasn't anything better to get. And if the Obama deal was the best that we can get from an agreement with Iran, rather than a ground invasion of Iran, maybe it's not so "ass" after all. Because it got Iran to keep their enrichment far far far below weapons grade material, only at the cost of releasing sanctions levied against their nuclear program - and the fact that it didn't address missiles or proxies reflected reality, not a failure of the deal.