That would have been all fine and dandy Shahryar jaan, except we didn't save face or our dignity and this arrangement has absolutely no benefit to the 75 million regular Iranians - at least not in the next 6 months. As they say, the devil is in the details:
For nearly a decade, we insisted that Uranium enrichment to the 20% level is our right - that was the whole sticking point of this saga. We spent billions of dollars installing and running centrifuges to get 200 kg of 20% enriched Uranium. This stance cost the lives of Iranian scientists and resulted in sanctions that cost the Iranian economy tens of billions of dollars. What did we get in return for this? A $7 billion USD sanctions relief for 6 months - the exact equivalent of how much Iran provides in aid to Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas in 6 months!!! An analogy for this would be having a whole baseball bat shoved in our wazoo and now that they pulled out 2" of it, we think we're all dignified while bending down with 2" of the handle sticking out!
If the intention was to enrich Uranium to 5%, we did not need t o go through a decade of this to begin with - that option was always on the table. Another major blow for Iran and Iranians is that the construction of the heavy water reactor at Arak has been frozen. Not that it was on schedule to begin with or I'm concerned about the billions of additional dollars we've lost by delaying its connection to the grid. But, this simply sets a VERY bad precedence that other nations can tell us where, when and how we can produce electricity. We started with Uranium, but now we have to get permission to produce electricity too!
The most concerning in all this is of course Khamenei's statement that "This can be the basis for further
intelligent actions. Without a doubt the grace of God and the prayers of the Iranian nation were a factor in this success." If all of this is the definition of "intelligent actions" and "success", God help us all! Another concerning issue is that the Americans, who believe it or not were preventing a total melt down in the ME by keeping the Israelis and Saudis at bay, just lost the respect of those two nations and will likely not zero leverage with them going forward. We're left in a region of hungry wolves, bent on the floor with a bleeding ass supporting a baseball bat and ruled by a bunch of three legged dogs. The imagery is NOT pretty.
Of course, I appreciate the other view that IF we lived in a PERFECT world this would eventually lead to the lifting of all sanctions IF the agreement was adhered to and IF Iran's economy was fully opened, it would help the creation of civil institutions and IF the economy and those civil institutions were stronger we would embark on a path of democracy. But we have been down that road of if's already, haven't we? And none of those calculations proved to be correct, did they? Our leaders have shown over and over again that a higher cash flow only strengthens their hold on our nation and after their pockets are filled up and "Setad" becomes stronger, it will divert the remainder of the funds to fund the regime's proxy agents in the region. Very little money will flow down to the average Gholi while the regime views its destabilization of the region with its "intelligent actions" as a success.
I hope I'm wrong about that last paragraph, but unfortunately I have seen nothing from the IR to suggest there's one shred of reality behind that scenario... simply wishful thinking on our part.
