War and Peace

The first thing I need to do in this post is to apologize to Leo Tolstoy.  He wrote the book I appropriated the title of this post from.  It was published in 1869 and looks at the Napoleonic Wars from the Russian perspective.  So I owe him an apology for stealing his title.  I also owe him because I have not read the book.  Oh, I started it twice.  The first time was while I was in High School.  I worked my way through maybe 50 pages and quit.  This is understandable.  I was looking for action and I wasn't getting it.

A few months ago I attempted to remedy my earlier failure.  I got about the same distance in and quit again.  The first thing you need to know about "War and Peace" is that it is long.  That is no longer off putting because I am retired.  I have plenty of time.  And with the passing of years I now have a better perspective on literature.  And "War and Peace" is definitely literature.  I have looked "literature" in the eye before and frequently found it wanting.  But "War and Peace" has a reputation for being great literature and in this case the reputation is richly deserved.  It is extremely well written.  But what it is not is a war memoir.  Instead what it is is a character study and a wonderful one.

I got far enough in that Tolstoy had introduced a half a dozen characters.  The characters were extremely well drawn.  You quickly gained the impression that you knew them and that you could tell how they would behave when they were off stage.  It was obvious that what Tolstoy was about was to create characters that had different personalities and perspectives.  He would then propel them through the traumatic events of the Napoleonic period.  Their perspectives would inform us about the meaning and impact of the various events.  That would give us insight not just into the tactical and strategic military situation but how it impacted people and why people behaved as they did.

That's what great literature does and I could see what Tolstoy was about.  But I have a failing.  I do not like to spend time with people who I find disagreeable or annoying.  It is ok if they disagree with me.  That doesn't stop my wanting to spend time with them.  But in the case of "War and Peace" I could see that I would be spending a lot of time with characters I did not want to spend time with.  So I gave up on the book.  Others are more into great literature than I am.  Others would find the characters interesting or charming or whatever.  They would look forward to spending time with them.  For those I can't recommend the book enough.  But on to the subject at hand . . .

We are now living in a peculiar and unusual time in the history of the U.S.  At the end of his second term as out first President George Washington in 1789 recommended that as a country we avoid "foreign entanglements".  As a country we turned our back on this advice nearly immediately.  Instead we got involved in what is referred to in our history books as the "War of 1812".  It was a blatant land grab for Canada.  It was self evident that those Cannucks would be ecstatic to join our wonderful nation.  Except they weren't.  And it was also self evident that the British were too tangled up in the Napoleonic Wars to be able to deal with us.  Except they weren't.  The whole thing was a fiasco for the US.  Militarily, the only battle we won was the "Battle of New Orleans", which took place after a treaty had been signed but before the news made it across the Atlantic to our shores.

This event pretty much drove home Washington's message.  And, except for the odd excursion (getting into a tussle with a group of third raters - The Barbary Pirates, invading Mexico to "chase after bandits", the "Spanish American War" - another land grab but a successful one), we stuck to "Civil" wars.  During this period the D.C. embassy scene was considered "party central" because nothing important was happening.  Then World War I (called "The Great War" until World War II came along) happened.

WW I was a great opportunity for us.  We could and did sell supplies of all types from food and clothing to rifles and heavy artillery to both sides and we made a fantastic amount of money doing it.  This worked extremely well in the early part of the war.  It made the war very popular but solely as a money making opportunity.  No one wanted to actually get involved.

Then the British started blockading the European mainland and the Germans started engaging in unlimited submarine warfare.  The only thing both sides agreed on was that they wanted us in the fight.  Unfortunately for the Germans the British won and we ended up getting in on the British side.  By this time both sides were exhausted and fresh meat on the British side turned the tide in their favor.

After the war US President Wilson was championing for a more just and lawful international environment with the objective of making war, or at least great wars, a thing of the past.  He failed spectacularly.  Instead the opposite happened.  A concept of a "limited" and "civilized" war had evolved in Europe over the centuries.  The Europeans had fought many small wars and over time that came to seem like the natural condition of things.  The idea was you had a small war.  Someone won.  Someone lost.  The loser paid reparations.  This made it possible to imagine war as a profitable enterprise.  You could either get a lot of loot in the form of reparations, immediate gain, or you could gain territory, long term gain.

There is a great book by Barbara Tuchman called "The Guns of August" about the run up to and the first six weeks of WW I.  WWI was a planned war.  Each side had a plan for how their side would profit by the war.  WW I was supposed to happen in 1912.  But things did not go quite as everyone expected so it didn't quite come off.  The 1914 assassination of Archduke Ferdinand was just too good of an opportunity.  No one cared about him.  He was not an important figure.  But the war got started anyhow.  And after it got started it quickly spun out of control.  It was neither "limited" nor "civilized".

It turned out to be fantastically expensive both in terms of blood and in terms of treasure.  Nothing could be done after the fact about the blood.  But the British and the French politicians did what they could on the treasure front by forcing the Germans to agree to pay fantastic amounts of reparations.  Outside of a few propagandists everyone knew that the Germans were no more responsible for the start of the war than anyone else.  Many horrible things happened during the war and the Germans perpetrated a goodly number of them.  But the important thing was that they had lost.  And the rule was "loser pays".  So the Germans got stuck with the bill for the whole mess.  Except they couldn't pay so they didn't pay and so we got Hitler and then WWII.

It should be no surprise that the US public was not keen on getting into WW II after the whole WW I experience.  Sure Hitler was a very bad actor.  But that was Europe's problem so let Europe deal with it.  And maybe we could work the same racket we had with WW I again and get even richer.  To some extent this worked in the 1939-41 period when we were not in the war.  In spite of "lend lease" and some other giveaway's the US made a ton of money off the British and others before we got sucked into the war.  But eventually the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the Germans declared war on us and we were in.

In WW I we sent about a million men to Europe and about half made it into combat.  At one point we had more than twelve million men under arms in WW II.  There was, to a modest extent during WW I and to a tremendously large extent during WWII, a conversion of our manufacturing base away from civilian goods and toward military goods.  We managed to disengage to some extent from the world stage after WW I but we became one of only two superpowers as a result of WWII.  Disengagement was no longer an option.

In the mean time the stakes had been raised by the invention of the Atomic Bomb.  WW I was fantastically expensive to the European powers.  The expense of WW II was spread more broadly around the world.  Besides the US, Japan, China, parts of North Africa, and many other areas were drawn deeply into the action.  WW III, should it take place, was generally expected to wreck death and destruction far in excess of even WW II.  So there was a longing for the "limited" and "civilized" wars of pre-WW I Europe.  Now the U.S. was forced by its position in the world to be a player.  But no one had to be happy about it.

So we had Korea and Vietnam and any number of smaller limited wars.  The US experience of these events was generally negative so there was still no real stomach for this kind of thing.  But in each case a "necessity" argument was presented.  With Korea and Vietnam it was "we have to contain communism".  In other cases, the first Gulf War, for instance, it was "our vital national interests are at stake".  That's how it went up to the turn of the Millennium.

Then 9/11 happened.  The justification for the War in Afghanistan was the most basic one:  "we have been attacked".  It harkened back to World War II, "the good war".  And on 9/11 we actually were attacked.  But then there was the next war, Iraq.  The justification for Iraq was "we are about to be attacked".  Supposedly Saddam was fomenting terrorism all over the place and Saddam backed terrorists were about to (or had because Saddam was behind 9/11) swarm all over us.  And it wasn't just small bore stuff.  Saddam had rockets and chemical weapons and was about a minute away from having nuclear weapons.  That was the story.  It turned out to be all bunk.

In this Iraq was an echo of Vietnam.  There was a lot of dishonesty involved there too.  I have addressed Vietnam at greater length elsewhere (see http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2014/04/vietnam-lessons-learned.html) but here's the Cliff's notes version.  Ho Chi Minh was a French educated Vietnamese nationalist who was also a Communist.  He started an independence movement after WW II.  The French wanted to re-colonialize and Vietnam was one of their colonies.  We chose to side with the French and against Ho.  But the French bungled it (see the battle of Dien Bien Phu, for instance).  This led to a partitioning into the North and the South and was supposed to lead to elections in 1956.  But we sabotaged the elections and instead supported a number of incompetent dictators.

We eventually had to commit US troops, over 500,000 at one time, but that was not enough to prop up the Saigon government and the country eventually "went communist" in 1975.  Since then things have gotten better and we now have good relations with Vietnam.  And we got into a shooting war in Vietnam as the result of the "Tonkin Gulf Incident", which did not happen as advertised at the time and may not have happened at all.  Lots of U.S. government actions all along the way were hidden from the general public and, in many cases, replaced with lies.

In both the Iraq and Afghanistan situations a major goal of the US was behavior modification.  The countries were supposed to become less anti-American and more pro-American.  They were also supposed to become more pro-democracy and pro-capitalist (usually characterized as "market driven" but the real point was to make the countries more accommodating to US business interests).  Militarily, both situations were a quick and inexpensive success.  But in both cases "nation building" would be necessary to effect the necessary attitude adjustment.  This attitude adjustment has worked so well that we are still involved in a serious military way with both countries more than a decade later.

So, after a period of bending over backwards to stay our of all but the most minor military conflicts we have tilted to a "war is the first option" approach.  Oh, we used to occasionally stray from strict adherence but we usually quickly returned to our "no war" orthodoxy.  For this long period you had to make a strong and convincing argument to get the country to engage in military activity.  Now you have to make a strong and convincing argument to get the country to avoid military activity.  And it's not like our recent small wars have gone all that well.  They haven't.  So I am a bit puzzled.  You might not believe that I have characterized the current situation accurately so let me go into some detail.

The original invasion of Afghanistan was an easy sell as it should have been.  9/11 was not mounted by the Afghan government.  But the perpetrators were sheltered by them.  And Al Qaeda admitted responsibility.  They actually bragged about it.  So there was no "ignorance" or "doubt" defense open to the Afghan government.  They should have coughed up Al Qaeda.  But they chose not to.  I don't know why and at this point it is useless to speculate.  So the invasion of Afghanistan was well justified.  The problem was not the early military component.

The problem was that if Al Qaeda was to be permanently denied safe haven in Afghanistan then some attitude adjustment would be necessary.  But no serious effort was ever mounted to do that.  Why?  Because those resources were needed for the forthcoming fight with Iraq.  The Bush administration approach to Afghanistan was always "do the minimum necessary to keep Afghanistan off the front page".  So things festered.  I believe President Obama made a serious effort to repair the damage.  But by that time we had run out of good will and credibility.  I will have more to say on the current state of Afghanistan below.

There is a debate as to why the Bush administration wanted to go into Iraq.  I am not going to rehash the various theories.  Suffice it to say that they did.  And they had a good enough PR operation to sell the media (mainstream and conservative - there was some push back from the liberal media but no one listened to them).  The media sold the public and in we went.  It was not a good idea but let's pretend that it was.  Here too you have the attitude adjustment problem.  The initial administration plan was (1) send in the Marines (and the rest of the military), (2) watch a guy named Ahmad Chalabi quickly and easily get installed in Iraq as the new man in charge, (3) withdraw in triumph and (4) bask in a job well and cheaply done.

Most of you are now asking who Ahmed Chalabi is.  He is an Iraqi expatriate who was popular with conservatives in the US and pretty much no one else.  When we parachuted him into Iraq the Iraqis took one look at him and said "we want nothing to do with this guy".  He has pretty much been invisible since for good reasons.  But the problem is that the Administration had no "plan B".  In the short run we put in place a series of US governor/ambassador types to run things.  Had they been sufficiently knowledgeable, powerful, and competent things might have gone well anyhow.  But they weren't.  So the US administration of Iraq was botched.  Things went down hill pretty much immediately and have never completely recovered.

And then there's the Iraqi we eventually found to run the place.  Nouri al-Maliki was known to Iraqis and was well wired into the power structure of the country.  The problem is that he also had well known close ties to Iran.  Once he consolidated his position (he did have the advantage of being competent) he set about tilting strongly toward Iran and the Shiites to the detriment of others: Sunnis, Kurds, the US.  But by that time we were stuck with him.  A tag team effort by Presidents Bush and Obama resulted in the cessation of all direct military activity by US forces and their "withdrawal" at the end of 2011.

Let's see what things look like now.  You would think that the "stay out of war" contingent would be firmly in control now.  But they are not.  In the recent past we got involved in Libya and Syria.  In both of these cases we are talking mostly "proxy" activities.  We provided a lot of logistical and intelligence support to the Libyan effort to kick Gadhafi out.  We also did some strafing / bombing / shelling.  But in both cases we have avoided "boots on the ground".  Somehow special forces and paramilitary intelligence forces don't count.  We are also involved in "drone" activity an a number of places.  Again , since it is "covert" it apparently doesn't count.  But there is talk of invading Iran, putting boots on the ground in Syria, and other forms of overt military activity.

We have also reversed course on the two big ones, Iraq and Afghanistan.  We have a substantial overt/covert (it's officially covert but no one is making any secret of what's going on) presence now in Iraq.  This is possible because al-Maliki is out and the current Iraqi government is very afraid of ISIS.  The number of "active military" in Afghanistan was supposed to go down to 5,000 by the end of this year (2015) and go to zero by the end of next year.  But apparently at the request of the Afghans (Afghanistan also has a new man in charge as of earlier this year and the new government has a lot of fear that the Afghans can't currently go it alone successfully) the draw down of US troops has stayed stuck at about 10,000.   The official plan is to draw down to 5,000 some time next year and be at zero by the end of the year but no one is buying that story.

So we have live wars going on in Iraq and Afghanistan.  We have the covert version of live wars going on in Syria and Yemen.  I'm just going to skip going into details on the Yemen situation for the moment in the interests of , wait for it, brevity.  We have drone wars going on in Pakistan, various parts of the Arab world, various parts of North Africa roughly adjacent to the Arab world, and, I believe (there is no news coverage of this part of the world to speak of) central Africa.  All of these are more or less wars.  Then there is Iran.  We are not at war with Iran.  There are certain political factions that say we should be but the current state is "no war".

Article I section 8 of the Constitution grants the power to declare war to the U.S. congress.  We have a large and active group of constitutional purists resident on the right.  They are all over, to hear them tell it, anyone who is messing with the constitution.  And this whole "war powers" thing has been with us as an issue going back to the immediate post-Vietnam period.  There is a law on the books whose nickname is "The War Powers Act".  The whole point is to make sure no president follows in the footsteps of Lynden Johnson and gets us into some kind of war without the congress being seriously involved.  Since the law was passed congress has mostly asserted ineffectively and the President has gone around congress and done pretty much what he wanted to do without much involving congress.

Afghanistan in the early going was not controversial so we went in and no one other than some peaceniks had a problem with that.  President Bush did the usual presidential thing with Iraq.  He got congress to pass a vaguely worded resolution that didn't actually authorize much.  Then he interpreted it to give him Carte Blanche in Iraq.  So far  the legal justification for U.S. activities in Iraq pretty much hangs on that document.  President Obama got a much more on point piece of legislation through congress to justify our actions in Libya.  But Syria has been a mess from a "war powers" perspective.

To his credit, Obama asked for an authorization for Syria but congress has yet to act and seems unlikely to act in the foreseeable future.  So where the constitution directs congress to be active they have been shockingly passive.  And there has been not a peep on any of this from the conservative constitutionalists.  Where is congress gung ho to act?  Iran of all places.  And it's not about military action.  That would actually make sense.  Instead it is about a nuclear deal.  Color me totally confused.

It would be nice if there was thoughtful intelligent discussion swirling around this issue.  Unfortunately, we as a country don't do that any more.  So what we have is a bunch of nonsense.  In order to do what I can to contain the nonsense.  Let me supply a little background.

The place I am going to start is with two components of international law.  They are the concept of "national sovereignty" and "treaty obligations".  National sovereignty is simply what a country can and can't do simply by virtue of being a country.  If you go back a couple of hundred years countries got to run their own show because no one was in a position to make them do anything else.  Countries got to set up and operate any legal system they wanted to within their borders, for instance.  As a practical matter, countries can go to war with other countries.  This is one of those "might makes right" things so what's allowed and what constitutes "proper procedure" in these situations has always been and continues to be a little fuzzy.

And back in the day it was generally hard for a country to do something within its own boundaries that had much of an effect on another country.  But then it became possible to dam up rivers and do other things that could affect another country.  Initially such cross border effects were the rare exception.  But over time more and more activities that took place solely within a country's borders could and did have a large effect on other countries.  While the possibility existed that the effect would be a beneficial one in most cases it was not.  In the modern world, for instance, industrial pollution can travel half way or more around the world.

Initially, treaties were pretty much about wars.  They were an agreement about how things were to be going forward once the war was over.  A lot of the terms were based on who won and by how much.  As it became more and more common for what a country did inside its borders to affect another country this treaty concept was extended to cover more and more things.  And before continuing I want to point out that there is no "treaty enforcing court" with a police force or army to back up its rulings.

There are lots of various "international" courts but there is pretty much no direct enforcement power behind any of them.  This means that a country can choose to pay attention to a particular ruling or not.  And everybody knows this.  So part of the implementation of many treaties involves each country passing laws within its own internal legal system making the terms of the treaty part of the regular law of that land.  The standard "enforce the laws of the land" mechanism now becomes responsible for making sure that the land in question meets its treaty obligations.

So that concept floated in conservative circles that treaties are not "the law" and specifically "the law of the land in the US" are bunk.  Many of the treaties they are claiming can be ignored have been codified into US law by a statute passed by congress and "signed into law" by the President.  And the treaty at issue in the Iran nuclear talks falls into the "it's been turned into a US law in the usual manner" category.  So what am I talking about?  International treaty codified into US law says any country can engage in nuclear activities "for peaceful purposes".  That means that Iran has a right, both by international treaty and by US law, to engage in peaceful nuclear activities.  And a well established peaceful nuclear activity is enriching Uranium to "reactor grade".  Iran is doing something that perfectly within its rights when it enriches Uranium.  It does not need permission from the US or anyone else to do this.

Things get sticky if they are enriching Uranium for military purposes.  As far as I know this is legal unless you have signed the "Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty".  Notice that it's a treaty.  If the US can ignore any old treaty it wants to in spite of the fact that it has ratified the treaty and codified it into law, why can't Iran?  The actual answer is "do as I say not as I do".  The argument is just that childish and should be laughed out of the room.  But it isn't.  So let's continue on the assumption that treaties mean something and obligate countries who have ratified them.

Iran has ratified the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty so it is under an obligation to not be in the business of making nuclear weapons.  They say they aren't.  Their critics say "Liar!  Liar!".  Again we are in little kids' school yard mode.  It may shock you to learn (I'm being sarcastic here) that in one sense countries act exactly like little children.  Countries over the years have frequently thrown tantrums and refused to live up to their treaty obligations.  Since this sort of thing has been a common occurrence for a long time there is a well established and thoroughly tested technique for dealing with these situations.  President Reagan put it succinctly:  "Trust but verify."  You don't take the other party on faith.  You check to see what he is actually doing.  That won't stop him from behaving badly but you will know it when it happens and you can act accordingly.

The U.S. Senate, according to the Constitution, has a duty to "advise and consent" to U.S. treaties.  Ordinarily I would argue that "It's a treaty so the Senate should get a chance to advise and consent".  But look at the track record of the current and recent (going back say 10 years) Senate.  They seem to enjoy gridlock more than fulfilling their responsibilities, even the constitutionally mandated ones.  And they seem more interested in scoring PR points than seriously going about the nation's business.  So I am concerned.

The administration makes a highly technical argument that "it's not a treaty".  I don't know if they are right or wrong but putting anything through the Senate process scares me.  The good news is that if the agreement (and we currently don't have an agreement - we have a "framework") gets a "thumbs up" from the Senate, that would be a very good thing.  And it is possible that nothing one way or the other will happen in the Senate.  That's good in the sense that the agreement will end up in force.  It's bad in the sense that it adds ammunition to the argument that "the Senate is a joke".  Worst would be if the Senate gave the deal a "thumbs down".  Why am I all wound up about this?

The short answer is that I think the Obama Administration got a very good deal and I think bad things will happen if the deal falls apart.  I have already telegraphed some of the reasons why I think this.  The Iranians already have a legal right to enrich Uranium.  It seems obvious that they are going to continue to do this.  So the two choices are "enrich any way they want" or "enrich under very tight controls".  Option 2 seems like by far the best one.  There is no "don't enrich at all" option out there.

Now, a little tech talk.  It's pretty simple.  The question is "how much"?  Uranium consists primarily of two Isotopes.  You don't need to know what an Isotope is so don't worry.  One is called U-238 and the other is called U-235.  You can't make a bomb out of U-238.  Think of it as sugar and of U-235 as gasoline.  If you put sugar in with the gas in a car the engine will freeze up and the car will stop.  Too much U-238 makes Atom bombs freeze up and not go boom.  Uranium from a mine contains less than 1% U-235.  The rest is U-238.

The amount of U-238 you can have in a bomb and still have it go boom is classified but is rumored to be 10% or less.  So to make a bomb you must concentrate the U-235 and get rid of the U-238.  This process is called "enrichment".  The result of the enrichment process is called "enriched Uranium" and it is characterized by the percentage of U-235 in the result.  So 90% enriched Uranium is definitely "bomb grade".  The more you enrich Uranium the harder it gets to enrich it further.  And it turns out that you have to enrich Uranium a little to use it as fuel in a nuclear reactor.  "Reactor grade" enriched Uranium is enriched to 5% or less.  So the Iranians are on solid ground if they stop at 5%.  The framework says they will actually stop at 3.67%.  That's a really good deal.

The Iranians are said to have enriched some Uranium to 20%.  Is that bomb grade?  No!  The most you can say is that it is suspicious.  The Iranians have committed to get rid of all their Uranium that is enriched to more than 3.67%.  Again, that's a really good deal.

The modern method for enriching Uranium is to use a special centrifuge.  The U.S. during WW II decided it was impossible to make a centrifuge capable of enriching Uranium.  The details are technical and unimportant.  What is important to know is that it is very hard to make a Uranium enrichment centrifuge.  As with many things, if you make a lot of something (computer chips, for instance), you get good at making them better and cheaper.  This turns out to be true for centrifuges.  The Iranians started out with "generation 1" centrifuges.  They didn't work very well and they were expensive to operate.  They now have been at this business for a while.  So they have developed "generation 2" centrifuges and perhaps "generation 3" or more.  The older centrifuges couldn't enrich to 20%, for instance.  The newer ones obviously  can.

The Iranians have agreed to mothball all their newer centrifuges and use only generation 1 models in the future.  Would it have been better to get the Iranians to destroy them?  It seems like the obvious answer would be yes.  But the Iranians are proud of what they have pulled off so they wouldn't agree to this.  Does this have a practical effect?  Actually, no.  If they destroyed all their newer centrifuges and they wanted to build new ones, they could.  They now know how.  And they would probably be even better than their best current models.  We want to discourage the Iranians from building new centrifuges.  The "mothball" provision does this better than a "destroy" provision would.

There is some stuff in the framework about a new reactor the Iranians are building.  What's the story on that?  It's technical but here's the bottom line.  Besides U-235 there is an Isotope of Plutonium called Pu-239 that is good fuel for bombs.  This new reactor was designed to make lots of Pu-239.  The framework commits the Iranians to changing the design of the new reactor so it makes almost no Pu-239.  And even if it did, the Pu-239 ends up in "spent fuel rods" that need processing to extract the Pu-239.  The Iranians have committed to sending all spent fuel rods out of the country to be reprocessed by someone else, most likely the Russians.  So the "nuclear reactor" path to getting your hands on bomb fuel is cut off.

Now let's move on to the "verify" part of the framework.  Here too what the Iranians have agreed to is breathtaking.  Most of the monitoring will be done by the IAEA, a UN nuclear monitoring organization with a high level of expertise.  Properly resourced, the IAEA can and will do an excellent job.  Where these resources will come from is the only significant issue that is not addressed in the framework.  Presumably the countries like the US that want to keep a lid on Iran's nuclear program will take care of this.  But you never know.  Moving on . . .

The Iranians have agreed to a fantastic amount of oversight.  The IAEA will be able to inventory and track centrifuges.  The mothballed ones will have RFID locks on them so that tampering can be detected remotely.  The centrifuge facilities (active, research, and storage) are subject to regular inspections on a random schedule.  Spent fuel will be tracked as long as it is "in country".  The modifications to the reactor will be tracked.  Uranium will be tracked from all the way back to the mine to all the way forward to when it leaves the country.  That's pretty thorough.  Consider for the moment that there is no inspection, monitoring, or tracking of any nuclear material in the US by the IAEA or anyone else not part of the US government.  This is a major concession on the Iranian side.  They are letting their  sovereignty be compromised to an extent that is literally unimaginable in the U.S.

So why are the Iranians willing to do a deal that looks so bad for them.  It turns out that it is a combination of economics and ego.  The sanctions that the Obama Administration has been able to  put in place have seriously and deeply harmed the Iranian economy.  Critics say "well that just means that you should pile more on".  But unilateral sanctions put on by the US are less than ineffective.  The reason the Obama sanctions have worked so well is because the Obama people got so many countries to buy in.  Let's assume the Europeans are a "gimmie".  They aren't but let's assume they are.

Two other key players are China and Russia.  Russia has a border with Iran.  They could easily make a lot of money by trading with Iran in violation of the sanctions.  Then there are all the nuclear components of the deal the Russians are in a position to throw a monkey wrench into.  The are not our friend but they have been helpful on this issue so far.  China is in the business of doing deals.  Iran has Oil and other things the Chinese want to do deals on.  Our relationship with China is in much better shape than the Russian one is but Chinese interests are often not our interests.  We need both Russia and China to stay on board for the sanctions to work.

Now let's move on to the ego issue.  Iran occupies what was the Persian Empire a few thousand years ago.  There are several times in history when Persia was a superpower.  Persians, as Iranians used to be called, remember the good old days because they are taught about them in school.  It turns out that part of the sanctions regime is a UN resolution.  The Iranians take that as a serious insult to their identity as a member in good standing of the world community.  They definitely want that blot on their honor removed.  Some kind of crappy US sanction can be seen as a badge of honor, a dueling scar, if you will.  But being the subject of a UN sanction.  That is a serious blot on the family name.

The sticking point, at least from the Iranian side is when the sanctions get removed.  They want as many as possible removed as quickly as possible.  And they want the UN sanction to be one of the first to go.  The US and the other powers on the other side of the table want to go slow and do a lot of verification before removing any sanctions.  Another provision that still needs to be worked out has to do with something called "snap back".  It is an idea for dealing with the timing issues.  The way it would work is that the sanctions would be removed.  But if the Iranians failed to live up to a commitment the sanctions would automatically snap back into place.  The Iranians have concerns.

I presume there are some other issues having to do with various implementation details but I don't know what they are.  Finally, I want to make a general remark on the "they could have gotten a better deal" idea.  First, I think the Obama people got a very good deal.  There are a lot of provisions that surprised not only me but many experts in the field.  And we are all surprised that they are tougher than we expected.  Secondly, there is the idea that the status quo is not that bad.  This is not true for two reasons.  We're in a "honeymoon" period where the Iranians have suspended a lot of activities we disapprove of.  But if the deal falls through they will go back to where they were a couple of years ago.  That means lots of centrifuges making Uranium that is enriched far above 5%.  It means that the inspectors are out and the Iranians are free to do whatever they think they can get away with.

And then there are the sanctions.  The Russians, Chinese, and Europeans are for the most part enforcing the sanctions.  But part of this is because they think the sanctions will come off relatively soon.  If the deal falls through then plan on the sanctions starting to leak then pretty much falling apart.  So the choice is not between a "better" deal and the current supposedly flawed deal but between a good deal and a situation that is much worse then the present because the sanctions will fall apart and the Iranians will be incentivized to engage in bad behavior.  "If we do the right thing we don't get anything for it so we might as well do the wrong thing."

We are going to have what we have.  Enough Democrats caved and decided to support the Republican initiative to inject the congress into this process.  That caused Obama to throw in the towel and stop opposing the Republican bill.  Democrats did get several useful improvements / concessions to the final version of the bill.  Obama says he will sign it.  It may be that congress will have moved on by the time the final deal is on the table and it will be one of those "not with a bang but a whimper" things.  Or not.