Politic?

Playing For Keeps

"We singled out eight or nine issues, fewer than 10, where we need to add the finishing touches."
"Everyone's focused on securing good-quality agreements. And there is every reason to believe that we'll achieve that."
"Very significant progress [was made at the talks]."
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov

"We are interpreting in a flexible way our deadline, which means that we are taking the time, the days we still need, to finalise the agreement."
"This does not mean we are extending our deadline."
"[A deal is] something which is still possible even if we are now getting into the difficult time."
Federica Mogherini, European Union foreign policy chief

US Secretary of State John Kerry had wanted an agreement finalised by Wednesday -- Reuters

Representatives of both Ian and the Security Council plus Germany stated that a deal was closer than ever before as foreign ministers arrived at Vienna's Palais Coburg hotel on Monday. Still, and unsurprisingly when the talks broke up in the early hours of Tuesday, it appeared obvious that the midnight deadline would be missed, after all. Ms Mogherini said the negotiations, which she has been chairing, would continue.

The country in question, whose nuclear program has been squirming in and out of the intensive glare of international fears and condemnation which has finally led to this impasse, impassively declares it has no 'deadline' for the negotiations to reach a successful conclusion, blandly drawing attention to the anxiety of the United States to conclude a deal that would reflect well on President Obama's parting gesture to a world community that invested so much hope in his double-tenure.

During his first four years as President of the United States, one of Barack Obama's first overtures was to Iran, extending a hand of friendship, seemingly unaware or deliberately oblivious to the fact that the Islamic Republic shudders at the very thought of 'normative' relations with the Great Satan, leading to its reflexive response of slapping that hand away lest Iran be contaminated. But Mr. Obama was undeterred and forged on.

Did he never really believe that Tehran's intention was to secure for itself through the work of its brilliant nuclear scientists and the trading of blueprints with Russia, North Korea and applause from Venezuela, that it would achieve its goal? Not the medical isotopes the Republic declares it has every right to produce, nor the alternate energy source the possessor of the world's extremely large reserves has at its service enabling it to fund its network of terrorist militias and related unsavoury items.

President Obama has thrown a veritable lifeline at Iran which had been reeling under the effects of the sanctions with inflation skyrocketing and its economy contracting, the result of a decade of sanctions. The President's first act was to express his goodwill by injecting billions into the Iranian economy and finally, conceding that Iran would, within the space of a decade, with the success of a 'deal', achieve its goal through enough enriched uranium to produce a bomb.

What was originally a 'red line' restraining Iran from ever reaching that point, dissolved just as the Syrian 'red line' of chemical weapons filtered away into the desert sands; Iran's resolve is steadfast, Obama's is conditional. Unimpeded inspections by IAEA inspectors slowly became "managed access" inspections, because Iran indignantly called upon its sovereign rights, and the U.S. administration concurred.

The demands for access to Iranian nuclear scientists, Iran's future plans and weapons facilities have likewise been abandoned, because the presumably weaker side in the negotiations between the Republic and China, Russia, France, Britain, United States and Germany prevailed upon their better natures to be more understanding of Iran's pride and honourable intentions.

The gradual staged sanctions relief in lock-step with certification from the International Atomic Energy Agency that unfettered inspections were to verify the Republic had honoured its obligations under the agreement suddenly have morphed into a wholesale, swiftly implemented relaxation of sanctions, as a goodwill gesture to a secretive, dishonest regime which had never in its history revealed the full extent of its nuclear operations, included the building and operation of a secretly located nuclear installation built into the side of a mountain.

Totally bypassed was the reality of a country headed by fanatical mullahs utterly impervious to the concerns of the international community that a country threatening the very existence of others in its neighbourhoods, a country which oppresses its religious and ethnic minorities, indulges in mass corporal punishment put on public display, one that employs the militant violence of Islamist functionaries to destabilize other countries, is not held to account.

And now that country with its history of malignant intrigue and violence -- which blatantly demonstrates its craftsmanship in building more powerful ballistic missiles which will be tipped not with medical isotopes as a humanitarian delivery system to its neighbours -- can be enabled to continue with its nuclear program, which its parliamentarians make clear in speaking with Iranian media that despite the interference it has suffered, it has no intention of slowing down its research and development.

Good thing President Obama is so stoically sanguine about the next decade and Iran's ambitions. He will have attained his legacy project, and the Nobel committee might just consider a joint presentation to Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, while the Islamic Republic of Iran will have gone on to launch a nuclear rush of Middle East oil-rich states assembling their own armaments, while simultaneously threatening world peace.