Portside

Under Secretary of State Sherman also suggested at one point that there would be no real need to prohibit any Iranian missile if the negotiations on the nuclear programme were successful. “Not having a nuclear weapon,” she said, “makes delivery systems almost — not wholly, but almost — irrelevant.” That admission underlined the wholly political purpose of the administration’s apparent embrace of the Israeli demand that Iran negotiate limits on its ballistic missiles.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his friends in the Republican Party here in the USA want a war with Iran. There really is no other conclusion.

Washington has an eagerness to extricate itself militarily from more than a decade of war in the Greater Middle East and “pivot” its strategic focus and resources more toward the Asia/Pacific and its highly complex relationships with China and key U.S. allies there.

The ultra Right tastes blood in the snafu that threatens "Obamacare"; they are gleefully throwing everything into their last, best chance to overturn any expansion of health care. A "broader" coalition, both domestic and international, is feverishly doing its all to abort efforts at easing tensions with Iran.

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In 2003 when Khatami made the peace proposal, Iran had just declared a small set of nuclear experiments. As of 2006, it began serious nuclear enrichment activities, though UN inspectors have never found evidence of a nuclear weapons program. As Secretary of State John Kerry pointed out Saturday night, if the Bush administration had accepted Iran’s 2003 proposal, the rancor, saber-rattling, sanctions and the rapid advances in Iran’s nuclear program could have been avoided

The substance of the accord reached in Geneva is a breakthrough, but the politics of the agreement is equally important. President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry signed the deal in explicit, full-frontal defiance of American hawks, neoconservatives and hardliners, the Israel lobby, and anti-Iran partisans in Congress. What exactly has been agreed, what are the next steps and how effective will it be in preventing Tehran from developing atomic weapons?