John Brennan, director of the C.I.A., speaking about nuclear talks on Tuesday night at Harvard. Credit Gretchen Ertl/Reuters
New York Times: C.I.A. Director Says Iran’s Economic Peril Helped Drive Nuclear Deal
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — The director of the Central Intelligence Agency has provided the first public glimpse of American intelligence assessments about why Iran’s leadership agreed to the tentative nuclear accord last week, saying that Iran’s president persuaded its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that their country’s economy was “destined to go down” unless he reached an understanding with the West.
The C.I.A. director, John O. Brennan, speaking Tuesday night at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, suggested that a key to the deal was the election of President Hassan Rouhani, who had hardly been the supreme leader’s first choice.
It took more than two years, he suggested, for the new president, a former nuclear negotiator himself, to persuade the far more isolated Ayatollah Khamenei that “six years of sanctions had really hit,” and that the economic future imperiled the country’s leadership.
WNU Editor: John Brennan is probably right .... but why is President Obama resistant to impose even more sanctions in view of Iran's reluctance last week to do the necessary compromises to satisfy the international community that their nuclear program is peaceful. You would think that threatening even more sanctions (as well as imposing some sanctions) would make a deal even more possible .... but apparently this is not how the White House sees it.
2 comments:
Is there anything left to sanction? I would think that when it gets to the short strokes in the private meetings Iran brings up Israel's nuclear program and the 5 + 1, especially the US, back off. After all this time it is hard to believe that Iran doesn't already have a bomb and perhaps that is why they are running the show, because the negotiators aren't sure they don't.
A guest on the Sean Hannity April 6th or 7th) show opined thatIran already has a testable nuke.
what they want is to be left alone to mass produce bombs.
According to the guest the next step would be extortion diplomacy like North Korea.
The Mongols practised extortion diplomacy. A current Mongolian author proudly acknowledged the fact in a book he wrote about Mongolian nomad / Chinese relations. I had bought the book (in China) and didn't read the whole thing due to preconceived ideals and prejudice. that was a mistake. Maybe the author was onto something that as true. The prideful boast rankled.
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