the iran deal

[xoxoxoBruce]

Hopefully it would spur the regional enemies of Iran to get their shit together and cooperate to a stable stalemate... but I doubt it.

[xoxoxoBruce]

A couple opinions...
Here

Ezra Klein: Let’s start with the basic question. Is this a good deal or a bad deal?

Ian Bremmer: It’s a close call, no question. I don’t expect the Iranians are going to hold firm on their commitments. I think the arbitration mechanisms will be challenging. And I think our colleagues in the P5+1 will be more flexible with the Iranians than we will be. So over six or 12 months I think we’ll have a lot of fights over this.

But I accept Obama’s argument that the alternative to this deal was worse for the United States. It’s not that I thought we were going to head for military conflict, but it was going to be difficult for the Americans to maintain the same level of sanctions that we presently have. The Americans would have been blamed by not just Iran, but the Russians and the Chinese, maybe by some others, and so the strong international sanctions that we’ve worked so hard to build over so many years would have eroded. You would have had the worst possible scenario, where the Iranians were not subject to any international inspections or strictures but they were starting to get out from under the tough sanctions regime anyway.

And here

Max Fisher: Why is this a good deal?

Jeffrey Lewis: It's a good deal because it slows down their nuclear program — which they say is for civilian purposes but could be used to make a bomb, and which we think was originally intended to make a bomb. And it puts monitoring and verification measures in place that mean if they try to build a bomb, we're very likely to find out, and to do so with enough time that we have options to do something about it.

There's a verifiable gap between their bomb option and an actual bomb. That's why it's a good deal.