Politic?

Are We There Yet?

"We are not yet where we need to be on several of the most difficult issues."
"This negotiation could go either way."
"We want a good agreement, only a good agreement, and we're not going to shave anywhere at the margins in order just to get an agreement. This is something that the world will analyze, none of us . . . intend to do something that can’t pass scrutiny. "
"While I completely agree with [Iranian] Foreign Minister Zarif that we have never been closer, at this point this negotiation could go either way."
"If we don’t have a deal, if there’s absolute intransigence, if there’s not willingness to move on things that are important, President Obama has always said we would walk away."
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry

Foreign ministers sit around the table at the Palais Coburg Hotel, where the Iran nuclear negotiations were being held in Vienna, Austria on July 6, 2015. (AFP/POOL/CARLOS BARRIA)

With one day left on the extension of the end-of-June final agreement addressing the controversial Islamic Republic of Iran nuclear agenda, the dissembling and avoidance of the real issues must conclude. And there is little doubt that there is high anxiety on either side for an agreement to be signed. Iran's Ayatollahs rumble menacingly that they will not tolerate Western interference in their right to obtain civil nuclear infrastructure.

If that were the only concern, that Iran have the nuclear infrastructure in place to produce its own medical isotopes and alternate energy sources there would be no alarm among the community of international countries knowing full well that this is a weak subterfuge behind which Iran hides its weapons ambitions with which to quell any grumbling among Middle East nations that Iran be looked at as the senior representative of Islamic power.

The Obama administration anxiously awaits a signed deal to present to Congress for the mandated 30-day review period. While Mohammad Javad Zarif awaits the promise that sanctions be expunged and a deal Iran could sign signalling its oil freely available once again on the world market and the freeing up of its offshore investments allowing it full-bore advance into its aspirational nuclear file happily presented to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme one.

Iran merely wants what any other sovereign country takes for granted for itself. The right to get on with its international affairs, dispatching its proxy Lebanese Islamist militia, Hezbollah abroad to commit atrocities on its behalf; continuing its program of publicly-viewed executions for 'crimes' against the Republic, unabated by criticisms from human rights groups from abroad; and proceeding with its actions meant to destabilize the Middle East and beyond.

Above all, to keep prying eyes from its valuable programs in producing powerfully far-ranging ballistic missiles, the better to threaten its neighbours and its enemies in the far-abroad, and nurturing its dream, undisturbed by the presence of aggravating inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency who have no right, no right whatever to validate the suspicions of the international community that the Iranian military led by the Republic Guard Corps, intends to achieve nuclear supremacy.