Is the initial agreement Iran reached with world powerse over its nuclear activies a vital step forward, a sign that President Barack Obama has finally “earned” his Nobel Peace Prize — or is the manifestation of dangerous, Polyanna-ish thinking about Iran, a agreement that shows that Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry and the nations involved in the agreement are hopelessly naive and trying to appease Iran? That’s the debate now shaping up as the agreement becomes yet one more polarizing issue.

Except this time the polarization isn’t just in the United States. As fits the pattern, many Democrats largely support the agreement Obama and the powers have reached. And Republicans for the most part reject it and are attacking Obama. And so is Israel. But there is bipartisan skepticism on the agreement in the US. Here’s a roundup of some news stories and website opinion:

Reuters:

Iran and six world powers clinched a deal on Sunday to curb the Iranian nuclear programme in exchange for initial sanctions relief, signalling the start of a game-changing rapprochement that would reduce the risk of a wider Middle East war.

Aimed at easing a long festering standoff, the interim pact between Iran and the United States, France, Germany, Britain, China and Russia won the critical endorsement of Iranian clerical Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

But Israel, Iran’s arch-enemy and a U.S. ally, denounced the agreement as a “historic mistake”. Critics in the U.S. Congress were also quick to voice concern, with some raising the spectre of failure to rein in North Korea on its nuclear programmes, but they signalled that Congress would likely give the deal a chance to work.

The agreement was announced in the middle of the night in Geneva after long and tortuous negotiations. U.S. President Barack Obama, who sought to improve ties with Iran even before his first election to the White House in 2008, said it cut off Tehran’s possible routes to a nuclear bomb.

Obama sought to reassure Israel on this point, telling Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a phone call on Sunday that the United States would remain firm in its commitment to Israel, the White House said. Obama said he wanted to begin consultations with Israel immediately on reaching a comprehensive solution to Iran’s nuclear problem.

The agreement, which halts Iran’s most sensitive nuclear activity, its higher-grade enrichment of uranium, was tailored as a package of confidence-building steps towards reducing decades of tension and ultimately creating a more stable, secure Middle East.

Indeed, the United States held previously undisclosed, separate direct talks with Iran in recent months to encourage diplomacy towards a nuclear deal, a senior U.S. official said.

Satirist Andy Borowitz captured some of the real Republican reaction to the agreement in a fake story from Iran’s leader:

TEHRAN – The Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, told reporters today his nation agreed to a deal on its nuclear program in the hopes that it would distract attention away from the trouble-plagued rollout of Obamacare. “It’s true, we’ve resisted any deal on nukes for over three decades,” the Ayatollah said. “But when we saw how much trouble Obama was having with his website, we realized it would be uncaring of us not to try to help him out.”

Believe it or not, that is indeed a charge — that it’s all about trying to get attention off Obamacare. A tweet from Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn: “”mazing what White House will do to distract attention from Obamacare.” (That is NOT written by Andy Borowitz).

President George W. Bush’s conservative UN Ambassador John Bolton, in The Weekly Standard:

Negotiations for an “interim” arrangement over Iran’s nuclear weapons program finally succeeded this past weekend, as Security Council foreign ministers (plus Germany) flew to Geneva to meet their Iranian counterpart. After raising expectations of a deal by first convening on November 8-10, it would have been beyond humiliating to gather again without result. So agreement was struck despite solemn incantations earlier that “no deal is better than a bad deal.”

This interim agreement is badly skewed from America’s perspective. Iran retains its full capacity to enrich uranium, thus abandoning a decade of Western insistence and Security Council resolutions that Iran stop all uranium-enrichment activities. Allowing Iran to continue enriching, and despite modest (indeed, utterly inadequate) measures to prevent it from increasing its enriched-uranium stockpiles and its overall nuclear infrastructure, lays the predicate for Iran fully enjoying its “right” to enrichment in any “final” agreement. Indeed, the interim agreement itself acknowledges that a “comprehensive solution” will “involve a mutually defined enrichment program.” This is not, as the Obama administration leaked before the deal became public, a “compromise” on Iran’s claimed “right” to enrichment. This is abject surrender by the United States.

In exchange for superficial concessions, Iran achieved three critical breakthroughs. First, it bought time to continue all aspects of its nuclear-weapons program the agreement does not cover (centrifuge manufacturing and testing; weaponization research and fabrication; and its entire ballistic missile program). Indeed, given that the interim agreement contemplates periodic renewals, Iran may have gained all of the time it needs to achieve weaponization not of simply a handful of nuclear weapons, but of dozens or more.

Second, Iran has gained legitimacy. This central banker of international terrorism and flagrant nuclear proliferator is once again part of the international club. Much as the Syria chemical-weapons agreement buttressed Bashar al-Assad, the mullahs have escaped the political deep freezer.

Third, Iran has broken the psychological momentum and effect of the international economic sanctions. While estimates differ on Iran’s precise gain, it is considerable ($7 billion is the lowest estimate), and presages much more. Tehran correctly assessed that a mere six-months’ easing of sanctions will make it extraordinarily hard for the West to reverse direction, even faced with systematic violations of Iran’s nuclear pledges. Major oil-importing countries (China, India, South Korea, and others) were already chafing under U.S. sanctions, sensing President Obama had no stomach either to impose sanctions on them, or pay the domestic political price of granting further waivers.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s earlier warning that this was “the deal of the century” for Iran has unfortunately been vindicated. Given such an inadequate deal, what motivated Obama to agree? The inescapable conclusion is that, the mantra notwithstanding, the White House actually did prefer a bad deal to the diplomatic process grinding to a halt. This deal was a “hail Mary” to buy time. Why?

Slate’s Fred Kaplan:

The Iranian nuclear deal struck Saturday night is a triumph. It contains nothing that any American, Israeli, or Arab skeptic could reasonably protest. Had George W. Bush negotiated this deal, Republicans would be hailing his diplomatic prowess, and rightly so.

A few weeks ago, a “senior administration official” outlined the agreement that President Obama hoped to achieve in Geneva. Some reporters who heard the briefing (including me) thought that the terms were way too one-sided, that the Iranians would never accept them. Here’s the thing: The deal just signed by Iran and the P5+1 nations (the United States, Britain, France, Russia, and China plus Germany) is precisely the hoped-for deal laid out at that briefing.

It is an interim agreement, not a treaty (which means, among other things, that it doesn’t require Senate ratification). It is meant as a first step toward a comprehensive treaty to be negotiated in the next six months. More than that, it expires in six months. In other words, if Iran and the other powers can’t agree on a follow-on accord in six months, nobody is stuck with a deal that was never meant to be permanent. There is no opportunity for traps and trickery.

Meanwhile, Iran has to do the following things: halt the enrichment of all uranium above 5 percent and freeze the stockpile of uranium enriched to 3.5 percent; neutralize its stockpile of uranium that’s been enriched to 20 percent (either by diluting it to 5 percent purity or converting it to a form that cannot be used to make a weapon); stop producing, installing, or modernizing centrifuges; stop constructing more enrichment facilities; halt all activities at the Arak nuclear reactor (which has the potential to produce nuclear weapons made of plutonium); permit much wider and more intrusive measures of verification by the International Atomic Energy Agency, including daily inspections of all facilities.
Without going into a lot of technical detail (which can be read here), the point is this: The agreement makes it impossible for the Iranians to make any further progress toward making a nuclear weapon in the next six months—and, if the talks break down after that, and the Iranians decide at that point to start building a nuclear arsenal, it will take them much longer to do so.

—Buzzfeed:

Friendlier relations with Iran could remake the context of that conflict as well, if they open doors to cooperation beyond the nuclear issue. Now, it seems, Obama has spent his presidency marching towards those doors – burning many allies in his wake, from Israel to Saudi Arabia. Other former strategic U.S. interests have been all but ignored – Egypt as it descends into military dictatorship, Ukraine and Georgia as they fall back into Russia’s orbit.

But presidents must have priorities and Obama has made his clear. Now he’s earned the foreign policy legacy he campaigned on. And now perhaps the Norwegians can feel a bit more confident about their hasty reward.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is concerned:

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu characterized the agreement signed with Iran early Sunday morning as a historic mistake.

Directly contrasting US President Barack Obama who praised the agreement as opening a “new path toward a world that is more secure,” Netanyahu – speaking at the weekly cabinet meeting — said the world has become more dangerous as a result.

“What was agreed last night in Geneva is not a historic agreement, it is a historic mistake,” he said. “Today the world has become much more dangerous because the most dangerous regime in the world took a significant step to getting the most dangerous weapon in the world.”

For the first time, he said, the leading powers of the world agreed to uranium enrichment in Iran, while removing sanctions that it has taken years to build up in exchange for “cosmetic Iranian concession that are possible to do away with in a matter of weeks.”

Netanyahu said the consequences of this deal threaten many countries, including Israel. He reiterated what he has said in the past, that Israel is not obligated by the agreement.

“Iran is committed to Israel’s destruction, and Israel has the right and the obligation to defend itself by itself against any threat” he said. “I want to make clear as the prime minister of Israel, Israel will not allow Iran to develop a military nuclear capability.”

Netanyahu’s government denounced world powers’ nuclear agreement with Iran on Sunday as a “bad deal” to which Israel would not be bound.

Yet Israeli officials stopped short of threatening unilateral military action that could further isolate the Jewish state and imperil its bedrock alliance with Washington, saying more time was needed to assess the agreement.

Sen. Chuck Schumer is not happy either:

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) panned the new nuclear agreement with Iran on Sunday, insisting it “does not seem proportional.”

Schumer, the No. 3 Democrat in the Senate and a strong supporter of Israel, said that Iran got much more than it gave up in the deal.

Some Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill have said that Congress could move forward with further sanctions legislation against Iran, but to delay its implementation for six months to allow time to gauge the deal.
But Schumer would only say Sunday that the agreement makes sanctions more likely, even as he said that he hoped the Obama administration met its goal of hoping to eliminate Iran’s ability to create a nuclear weapon.

“This disproportionality of this agreement makes it more likely that Democrats and Republicans will join together and pass additional sanctions when we return in December,” Schumer said in a statement. “I intend to discuss that possibility with my colleagues.”

Politico notes the mixed response:

President Barack Obama’s Iranian nuclear deal is running into deep skepticism — and harsh criticism — from officials in Israel and on Capitol Hill.
Less than 12 hours after Obama announced the agreement at the White House, Democratic and Republican lawmakers ripped it on Sunday morning talk shows, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu taking to Twitter to bash the terms as a “historic mistake” and warn that “this ‘first step’, might be the last step.”

We have just rewarded very bad and dangerous behavior,” Rep. Mike Rogers, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Perhaps most troubling for Obama, support from longtime allies in Congress has mostly been muted and heavily conditioned.

“If this interim deal reduces stockpiles of enriched uranium to levels appropriate only for civilian use, halts uranium enrichment above dangerous levels, reduces technology that can be used to enhance enrichment, and imposes intrusive daily inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency that can give the world immediate warning if Iran plans to move toward nuclear weapons,” Sen. Tim Kaine, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee under Obama, said in a statement, “it will be an important trust building step toward our ultimate goal.”

The basic framework of the deal temporarily relaxes a small set of sanctions on Iran — freeing up billions of dollars for the regime — in exchange for Tehran agreeing to suspend aspects of its nuclear program for six months. The idea is to give negotiators a set time frame to work out a more substantial follow-on agreement, without allowing Iran to continue pursuing nuclear weapons, while Tehran continues its talks with the negotiating team made up of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany.

If the first-day reaction is any indication, the next six months could well present a tough test of the diplomatic vision Obama put forth in his first campaign for the presidency in 2008 and in his first term. Obama campaigned on extending an open hand to America’s toughest adversaries, and his twist on Iran sanctions was to create incentives for other countries to adhere to U.S. efforts to cripple the oil and banking industries in the Islamic Republic. That appears to have worked.

The White House issued this FACT SHEET.

SOME TWEETS:

Wow! An agreement between the West and Iran on its nuclear program. Congrats all around. Good work by the Kerry and @Jzarif

— Nicholas Kristof (@NickKristof) November 24, 2013

JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief

Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.

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