Signs Iran Might Not Sign

Rouhani has been defending the nuclear agreement saying it is deal the Iranian people want, the negotiating team represented Iran’s finest minds but what the President of the Emperor’s clothes has stopped saying is that the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei managed the negotiations and that the results represented his wishes. This is major change from Rouhani’s triumphal announcement when the negotiations were completed that the Supreme Leader provided "intelligent guidance and perpetual and explicit support to the negotiating team.”  Khamenei, “truly undertook much heavier responsibility in this regard [in the negotiations]…"   Khamenei’s reply is that the text needs to be studies as though he were unaware of what it said. The Ayatollah may well have pulled a feather out of Arafat-Abbas hat and decided rather than negotiate in good faith make happy noises while the opposing party undermines their own positions with concessions. So the biggest beard in Tehran wants conservative establishment to evaluate the deal and thereby provide the Ayatollah a box of verbal hand grenades he throw at the agreement. The negotiation process may well have mortally wounded sanctions and that is all Iran ever really wanted.

Iran has already promised its attitude to supporting terrorism will not change and this is hardly unexpected but more interestingly the leader sees a need to placate his conservative base. Like so many dictatorships in the region, the military has become the engine of everything with its fingers in every means of production and they literally bank of Iran spreading revolution abroad. The military being large fish in a small pond at home is cash, any kind of normalization will hurt the military right where they can least handle it, in revolutionary pocket books of the elites.

It is important that the eminently literate Ayatollah, the religious head of state who managed the negotiations has decided conservatives must scrutinize the agreement. The Supreme Leader can jail or have murdered all those who disagree with him so either he wants conservatives to feel included anyhow, is preparing to purge one side of the other or even more likely is removing the pin feathers from the Rouhani led government and getting ready to give it some serious setbacks.  Nonetheless, Iran be justifying not signing the agreement.

The Ayatollah may have simply decided it is time to dump the Rouhani led “government” because anything else gained from negotiations will represent diminishing returns for Iran which wants nuclear tipped Shahab five missiles and thinks it can produce them in under ten years. To that the US must answer such bad faith with combination of renewed sanctions in Iran, an aggressive containment strategy that removes Iran from Yemen, Lebanon and Gaza but also results in strikes on the Iranian nuclear program and the Iranian ballistic missile program. If President Obama is prepared to act divisively should Iran either not sign or violate the nuclear agreement then Obama would leave behind the finest legacy since Theodore Roosevelt as Obama can claim it is fine to carry a big carrot and a big stick.  More importantly, taking on Iran’s military complex directly after being misled during negotiations would restore our allies’ confidence in the United States and set back Iran more than the actual agreement would have.