21 july 2015, a good deal

Not so long ago, the options for dealing with iran were bomb or it gets the bomb. Barack obama and the dogged john kerry have dug in and expended a lot of political capital to create a third option, of a solid deal that limits iran's nuclear options, freezes the possibility of nuclear weapons acquisition for at least a decade and begins to turn a rogue state that not so long ago threatened the peace of the world into a legitimate regional player. This is the most noteworthy achievement obama has to justify the nobel prize he received in the golden dawn of his presidency (see 10 october 2009, history's eyes on obama). There were no better options and indeed welcoming iran back to the world and enabling its people to prosper and take part in mainstream civilisation is the best long-term route to moderating the regime and marginalising extremity, political and religious, within the islamic state's polity. Israel and the republicans are unhappy, as much at an obama foreign policy success as the result. Yet they have no alternative other than war, a poor form of arms control and surely not a sensible course of action in a middle east more rife with violence, extremism and chaos than any time since the second world war. Now iran is damped down a bit, can we please have a little more sustained effort on syria, iraq, israel/palestine, yemen, libya, tunisia...