Category Archives: Iran deal

Netanyahu steered U.S. toward war with Iran — the result is a deal he hates

Shibley Telhami writes: Much of the criticism of the Iran nuclear deal has focused on the fact that it is entirely limited to the nuclear issue, which leaves Iran a free hand — and new resources — to continue policies that have angered regional and international players. There is no denying that if Iran plays its hands well and uses the next decade to build its economic and political potential, its regional influence is likely to expand, as is its capacity to do the sort of things that have angered Israel and Gulf Arab states.

The deal’s biggest critic may be Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who called it “a historic mistake.” The irony is that the urgency with which the Obama administration pursued a nuclear deal was itself a product of Israeli actions. For Netanyahu, the deal was a good example of “be careful what you wish for.”

A little reminder is helpful here. To his credit, President Barack Obama succeeded early in his first term to get international support for sanctioning Iran — one critical reason for Iran’s willingness to take the negotiations more seriously. There have been deliberate and sustained efforts to continue pressuring Iran on multiple levels, including its behavior outside the nuclear issue. [Continue reading…]

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UN moves to lift sanctions on Iran after nuclear deal

The New York Times reports: The United Nations Security Council on Monday unanimously approved a resolution that creates the basis for international economic sanctions against Iran to be lifted, a move that incited a furious reaction in Israel and potentially sets up an angry showdown in Congress.

The 15-0 vote for approval of the resolution — 104 pages long including annexes and lists — was written in Vienna by diplomats who negotiated a landmark pact last week that limits Iran’s nuclear capabilities in exchange for ending the sanctions.

Iran has pledged to let in international monitors to inspect its facilities for the next 10 years and other measures that were devised to guarantee that its nuclear energy activities are purely peaceful.

The Security Council resolution, which is legally binding, lays out the steps required only for the lifting of United Nations sanctions.

It has no legal consequence on the sanctions imposed separately by the United States and the European Union.

The European Union also approved the Iran nuclear deal on Monday, putting in motion the lifting of its own sanctions, which include prohibitions on the purchase of Iranian oil. Europe will continue to prohibit the export of ballistic missile technology and sanctions related to human rights. [Continue reading…]

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AIPAC forms new lobby group to oppose Iran deal

The New York Times reports: The pro-Israel group Aipac has formed a tax-exempt lobbying group to oppose the nuclear deal reached this week with Iran.

Aipac, an acronym for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, has been a vocal critic of President Obama’s policies toward Israel and his negotiations with Iran. The new group, Citizens for a Nuclear Free Iran, was formed with the sole mission of educating the public “about the dangers of the proposed Iran deal,” said Patrick Dorton, a spokesman.

“This will be a sizable and significant national campaign on the flaws in the Iran deal,” Mr. Dorton said.

A person who had been briefed on the plan said the group planned to spend upward of $20 million on the effort. Another person familiar with the campaign said advertising was planned in 30 to 40 states. [Continue reading…]

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Ayatollah Khamenei, backing Iran negotiators, endorses nuclear deal

The New York Times reports: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, voiced support on Saturday for his country’s nuclear deal with world powers while emphasizing that it did not signal an end to Iran’s hostility toward the United States and its allies, especially Israel.

“Their actions in the region are 180 degrees different from ours,” he said.

Speaking after a special prayer marking the end of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, Mr. Khamenei portrayed the nuclear agreement as a victory for Iran, not least because it does not require the country to completely stop enriching uranium, as some in the West had wanted. The speech appeared to remove a main obstacle to formal approval of the agreement in Iran.

“After 12 years of struggling with the Islamic republic, the result is that they have to bear the turning of thousands of centrifuges in the country,” Mr. Khamenei said, referring to the United States and its five negotiating partners. [Continue reading…]

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Iran is about to open for business

Azadeh Moaveni writes: Mobile phones in Tehran started beeping and buzzing well before Iran’s nuclear agreement with the West was finalized. They carried an important sentiment that couldn’t wait for the niggling details to be ironed out in the talks between Iran, on one side, and China, France, Germany, Russia, the U.K., and the U.S. on the other. “Congratulations, the agreement is almost signed! Come dine with us for less,” read the text from a local pizzeria. Discounts and specials celebrating the coming end of the sanctions pinged around the capital.

In the offices of Takhfifan, Iran’s answer to Groupon, staffers interrupted their weekly meeting every 10 minutes to refresh the news on their laptops. “We’re all counting the seconds,” said Nazanin Daneshvar, the site’s founder, hoping “that we’ll get back to a better place after such a long, difficult time.” Daneshvar’s marketing platform is thriving: It boasts a million subscribers who grab daily deals on everything from concert tickets to swimming pool passes. An Iran reopened for global business could eventually bring in Western companies and investors, which might finally mean economic growth of a different scale. A normal scale.

Even normality — the most modest expectation — would be vastly different from the Tehran I last experienced in 2009, before that summer’s Green Movement uprising. Like many dual-national Iranian journalists, I haven’t dared to return since the violent suppression of the protests. (Reporter Jason Rezaian of the Washington Post has been detained on espionage charges for more than a year.) I’ve followed the country through family and friends, most of whom tell the same tale: six years of diminished hopes and sullenness, brought on by global economic ostracism. [Continue reading…]

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Iran unlikely to spend most of its post-sanctions funds on militants, CIA says

The Los Angeles Times reports: A secret U.S. intelligence assessment predicts that Iran’s government will pump most of an expected $100-billion windfall from the lifting of international sanctions into the country’s flagging economy and won’t significantly boost funding for militant groups it supports in the Middle East.

Intelligence analysts concluded that even if Tehran increased support for Hezbollah commanders in Lebanon, Houthi rebels in Yemen or President Bashar Assad’s embattled government in Syria, the extra cash is unlikely to tip the balance of power in the world’s most volatile region, according to two U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the intelligence document.

The controversial CIA report, on which key members of Congress have been briefed, provides ammunition to both sides in the battle brewing on Capitol Hill over what White House aides call President Obama’s signature foreign policy achievement, a sweeping multinational agreement that aims to block Iran’s ability to build nuclear weapons for at least a decade in exchange for the easing of sanctions that have hobbled its economy. [Continue reading…]

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The nuclear physicist answering lawmakers’ questions on Iran deal

The Wall Street Journal reports: As the White House ramps up its campaign to sell its Iran nuclear deal to a skeptical Congress, a shaggy-haired scientist is proving to be its best asset on Capitol Hill.

Both Republicans and Democrats called Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, a former Massachusetts Institute of Technology physics professor, the administration’s most credible source of information on the accord reached this week aimed at curbing Iran’s nuclear program and the negotiations that produced it.

“He’s by far been the best witness, the best person to talk to,” said Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R. Tenn.). On Thursday, Mr. Corker said Mr. Moniz would testify at the committee’s first hearing on the final deal next week, along with Secretary of State John Kerry and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew.

The agreement reached Tuesday in Vienna puts strict limits on Iran’s nuclear program for the next decade that are designed to keep Tehran from being at least 12 months away from amassing enough nuclear fuel for a bomb. In exchange, the U.S., the European Union and the United Nations will lift economic sanctions on Iran.

Mr. Moniz, 70 years old, played a key role over the months of talks that led to the accord between Iran and six global powers. In particular, he had a string of one-on-one technical discussions with Ali Akbar Salehi, now chairman of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran. Mr. Salehi studied at MIT in the 1970s, when Mr. Moniz taught at the school, though they didn’t meet there.

“It’s extraordinarily fortunate that at this moment in time we have, in the cabinet and on the negotiating team, an honest-to-goodness nuclear physicist who knows this stuff,” said Sen. Angus King (I., Maine). [Continue reading…]

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Dealing with Iran post-deal

Frederic C. Hof writes: One may see the nuclear agreement with Iran as the product of a faulty premise and still respect the industry of US Secretary of State John Kerry and his team in arriving at respectable terms consistent with that premise. One may see the prospect of a regionally aggressive Iran soon to be flush with cash as alarming and still — given the positions of Washington’s closest allies and the international community in general — counsel Congress to show solidarity with the commander-in-chief. What really matters at this point is that the United States and its partners pivot from their exclusive focus on closing the nuclear deal to address Iranian behavior that makes the battle against the so-called Islamic State (ISIL or ISIS) something between difficult and impossible.

The premise has been that Iran, left to its own devices, will field nuclear weapons, and that a nuclear-armed Iran would be exponentially more dangerous to its neighbors and to the region than it is now. Two years of track two discussions with senior, well-informed Iranian interlocutors have convinced me that this is not the case.

My Iranian interlocutors — hardliners and pragmatists alike — were gratified by Tehran’s accomplishments in Syria and elsewhere, in particular the preservation in Damascus of a regime completely in the service of Iran’s Lebanese militia: Hezbollah. They noted that Iran’s successful intervention in Syria had been accomplished without a nuclear arsenal. They pointed out that having such an arsenal would encourage their enemies to go nuclear. A thoroughly nuclearized region could complicate an aggressive Iranian policy of armed intervention by potentially turning every intervention into a nuclear crisis. [Continue reading…]

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What does the Iran deal mean for Syria?

Aron Lund writes: In the conspiratorial world of Syrian politics, speculation is rife about secret “Syria clauses” in the deal. The opposition fears an under-the-table deal benefiting Iran and Assad, while government supporters are afraid that Iran will now move to improve its relations with the West by sacrificing Assad. Neither seems very likely and negotiators are probably correct when they claim that the Vienna process focused exclusively on the nuclear issue. But it is no secret that there are those on both sides who would like to see a more comprehensive rapprochement, or at least improved coordination in the struggle against the extremists of the self-proclaimed Islamic State.

With the nuclear deal now signed and perhaps secure, there is suddenly room for new talks to begin. Or if they are already secretly under way, such parallel diplomatic tracks can be accelerated without fear of upsetting the nuclear talks. Whatever happens, Iraq and Syria will be top concerns for all involved, although the former may make for more fruitful discussions than the latter.

In pushing so hard for the nuclear deal, Barack Obama has seemingly wagered that some combination of trade and talks will be more successful at incentivizing U.S.-friendly Iranian politics than the isolation and military threats of the past decades. Whether he is right or wrong, it is not an unreasonable assumption. For Assad, too, today’s celebration must therefore be tinged with quiet concern over how an improvement in Iranian-Western relations might affect Tehran’s political priorities in coming years. A historic achievement this may well have been, but history has a way of unfolding at its own pace and in its own ways. [Continue reading…]

Rasha Elass writes: President Bashar al Assad appears heartened by the Iran nuclear deal, presuming that Tehran will continue to be his main backer. Many analysts say Assad would not have survived this long without Iran’s support, and would quickly falter without it.

Assad may be right, but not entirely.

While it is true that Iran will not abandon its hegemony over Syria, a hegemony that has grown to unprecedented levels in government-controlled areas from Damascus to Syria’s coastline, there is a flip side to this equation.

Bolstering Assad has become expensive for Iran, which has injected billions of dollars into Damascus, and has sent military and security personnel to aid Assad’s military operations in Syria. While it is difficult to know exact numbers, Iran has been public about the hundreds of casualties it is enduring in Syria so far, a cost that many Iranians may find pointless.

With Iran coming in from the cold, there might be political capital to be harvested if Tehran emerged as a real broker to a resolution in Syria.

One way of doing this is to keep the Assad regime somewhat in tact, but without Assad himself. For months, some Syrian opposition members have been floating this idea as well, preferring it as a way of moving forward while avoiding a post-Saddam scenario, when the US dismantled the military and the entire government in Baghdad. It is a workable solution if Syrian opposition is well represented in the new, transitional government. Iran may also prefer this solution because it puts an end to a seemingly endless war, yet it maintains Tehran’s leverage over Damascus.

Already Turkey is calling on Iran to step up to this challenge. [Continue reading…]

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Why Israel, Saudi Arabia, and neocons hate the Iran deal

Fred Kaplan writes: Here’s the thing to keep in mind about most critics of the Iran nuclear deal that was signed Tuesday morning: Their objections have nothing to do with the details of the deal.

The most diehard opponents — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Saudi King Salman, and a boatload of neocons led by the perennial naysayer John Bolton — issued their fusillades against the accord (“an historic mistake,” “diplomatic Waterloo,” to say nothing of the standard charges of “appeasement” from those with no understanding of history) long before they could possibly have browsed its 159 pages of legalese and technical annexes.

What worries these critics most is not that Iran might enrich its uranium into an A-bomb. (If that were the case, why would they so virulently oppose a deal that put off this prospect by more than a decade?) No, what worries them much more deeply is that Iran might rejoin the community of nations, possibly even as a diplomatic (and eventually trading) partner of the United States and Europe. [Continue reading…]

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Can the Iran deal be a new Camp David?

Marc Lynch writes: The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) agreement over Iran’s nuclear program announced on Tuesday is a genuinely historic accomplishment. While experts will closely parse the terms of the agreement in the coming days, early reports suggest that it is a well-crafted piece of diplomacy which meets the core needs of all sides and provides creative solutions to complex problems. Tuesday’s Iran deal is the most significant American diplomatic achievement in the Middle East since the Camp David accords, which secured an enduring peace between Egypt and Israel. The Obama administration will justifiably present the deal as delivering on its highest Middle East priority.

The successful conclusion of the difficult bargaining phase is only the beginning, of course. As with most international negotiations, the deal now sets the stage for an intensive, multi-level political battle over ratification and implementation. The deal will need to survive the ratification phase within the American and Iranian domestic political realms, and it will need to be processed within the U.S.-led Middle East regional order and survive the vocal objection of American allies, such as Israel and Saudi Arabia. It will have to be implemented effectively and fairly, delivering a level of nuclear transparency and sanctions relief acceptable to the key players.

Total failure is of course still possible, given the wide range of potential spoilers and the complexity of the deal. It is easy to envision the positive relationship rapidly going sour over accusations of cheating, hostile rhetoric, military escalations in other theaters or political setbacks. But should the deal hold, what seems more likely to be at stake in the coming politics is the degree of transformation in regional order: Will the deal be the starting point for a fundamental regional realignment, or will it remain limited to the narrow nuclear realm? [Continue reading…]

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Iran deal viewed through the prism of Shiite history

Mohamad Bazzi writes: In early July, as his negotiators were working around the clock in Vienna to reach an agreement with world powers on limiting Iran’s nuclear program, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani was back in Tehran recalling an event that happened nearly 1,400 years ago. In a speech, Rouhani invoked the historic compromise made in the year 661 by his namesake, Imam Hassan, Shiism’s second imam, to step down and prevent a new war between the then-emerging Sunni and Shiite sects. “Imam Hassan made an important decision during difficult circumstances that could have destroyed the Muslim community,” Rouhani said, “and led to a long period of bloodshed.”

Rouhani wasn’t alone in citing Imam Hassan’s legacy. The supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — who has final say in all political and national security matters — also began to invoke the imam in setting the stage for Tuesday’s compromise, calling it a policy of “heroic flexibility.” By repeating this term several times, Khamenei reached back into Shiite history to offer theological rationales for the prospect of a rapprochement with Iran’s Western adversaries.

It is striking that, throughout the past 12 years of on-and-off negotiations with the West over Tehran’s nuclear program, Iranian leaders have used references to Imam Hassan and his younger brother Imam Hussein — and the two historical models for settling conflicts that these figures represent — to signal their intentions, both hardline and soft, and provide theological justifications for their actions. Hassan’s path emphasizes compromise (or, to its hardline critics, accommodation), while Hussein chose rebellion and martyrdom. These two trends defined Shiite history — and they are an important part of the religious and ideological debates within the Iranian regime. [Continue reading…]

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Shakedown: Israeli opposition leader heads to Washington to ‘demand’ more money and weapons

The Jerusalem Post reports: Amid news of the nuclear deal reached between Iran and the P5+1 group of world powers, opposition leader Isaac Herzog (Zionist Union) announced Tuesday that he will be leaving for the US in the coming days to “demand a dramatic package of security measures for Israel.”

Voicing his disappointment over the deal, Herzog noted that a country that “funds, trains and nurtures terrorist organizations,” was both detrimental to Israel and to its future.

“With regard to security, I am more extreme than Netanyahu,” Herzog remarked. “In light of the situation, we must do everything within our power to improve our security,” he said. [Continue reading…]

The Times of Israel reports on the response from another opposition leader: Yesh Atid chairman Yair Lapid said Wednesday the Iran deal was the country’s biggest foreign policy failure ever.

“We stand today facing the greatest foreign policy failure by any Israeli prime minister since the establishment of the state,” Lapid told the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. “Netanyahu] is not [former British prime minister Winston] Churchill before the Second World War, he is [former Israeli prime minister] Golda [Meir] after the Yom Kippur War.”

The 1973 war, in which Israel was surprised by several Arab armies and needed urgent US airlifts of weapons, is considered one of the greatest strategic fiascoes in the history of the country. Then-prime minister Meir resigned in the wake of a commission of inquiry that analyzed Israel’s failure to see the war coming.

Lapid said that he would defend Israel to the world but added that a better agreement could have been reached:

“To the outside world, in English, we will support the government and explain to the whole world how dangerous this agreement is, and I have been doing this since yesterday,” he said. “But inside, in Hebrew, let’s face it – the prime minister failed in reaching a different agreement […] we could have had a deal in which the main issue is that of inspection. Sanctions could have been removed based on milestones [reached] and not according to a schedule, and then the deal would be different,” he said.

Lapid said Netanyahu has decimated Israel’s foreign relations: “Until yesterday the entire world was convinced the US and Israel always walk hand in hand. As of yesterday [the world] learned that the US will no longer listen to the prime minister, the Europeans won’t listen to the prime minister, the Chinese, the Russians, the Democrats [in the US], and he left scorched earth in Israel’s foreign relations. [Netanyahu] needs to go home after a failure of such colossal proportions. The prime minister cannot remain in office.” [Continue reading…]

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What the Iran nuclear deal means — and what it doesn’t

By Scott Lucas, University of Birmingham

Iran and the 5+1/E3+3 Powers (US, Britain, France, Germany, China, and Russia) have at last completed a comprehensive nuclear agreement after years of discussions and threats of conflict. The deal sets out requirements for keeping Iran’s nuclear programme from producing nuclear weapons, and establishes a timeline for lifting sanctions that have pushed the country to the brink.

But how can the complexities of the 139-page document be understood, especially amid the already charged argument between those who support and those who oppose the deal? Here are the fundamental points.

This is a good deal for all sides

An excellent agreement is not based on one side “winning” and the other “losing”. It is based on each side compromising but still reaching important objectives.

For the first time, Iran gets international recognition of its enrichment of uranium for civil purposes. That legitimacy also brings the prospect of re-opened trade and investment links, vital for an economy which has been crippled by sanctions and mismanagement over the past decade.

The US, other powers, and the international community get defined limits on that enriched uranium. Put bluntly – and in defiance of the hyperbolic objections of the deal’s critics – Iran has been pushed far back from a militarised program for many years, even if it really was seeking nuclear weapons in the first place.

It no longer has any 20% uranium in a form that can be developed for a bomb, and even its 5% uranium is sharply reduced. Its nuclear facilities, including enrichment plants and a proposed heavy-water nuclear reactor, are under an extensive and tightly defined system of inspections. Some of its military sites will be visited to ensure that no traces of any past quest for nuclear weapons remain. Iran will finally adhere to the Additional Protocol of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The situation will still be far from “normal” given the years of tension. Nonetheless, for the first time, there is the prospect of Iran becoming part of the global challenge over nuclear proliferation, rather than a pariah.

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Iran nuclear deal: Supreme Leader makes supreme decision

The Guardian reports: Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has weathered some critical moments over the last quarter of a century – the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 when Tehran feared it would be the next target, the disputed re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad which shook the legitimacy of his rule and the acrimonious years that followed as sanctions hit the country’s economy.

Perhaps the biggest decision of his career, however, was the one he had to make this week. The historic deal struck in Vienna could not have happened without Khameni’s blessing. He has the final say in all state matters in Iran and his decision may define his leadership.

On one side of the negotiating table of the 22-month talks sat seven parties struggling to secure a formula that would allow a comprehensive nuclear agreement with Tehran, which will have profound implications for the Middle East. On the other side, there was one man not actually present but whose view was decisive. No one doubted who that person was. [Continue reading…]

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The Iran deal is built to last

Richard Dalton writes: Reaching an agreement with Iran over its nuclear weapons programme has been a long and arduous process. The deal, announced earlier today, is a tremendous achievement for non-proliferation and regional security – and for the negotiators and their political leaders. There are good reasons to believe it will stick.

First, there are effective provisions to guard against cheating. The agreement will deter Iran from breakout using existing or covert facilities. There are snap-back provisions to restore sanctions in the event of violations. In addition, the military option is still not “off the table” – Iran will not want to risk an attack, which would grow more likely if the deal fell through.

Second, while there will be resistance in the US Congress, there are grounds for optimism that they will not succeed in undermining the deal. There is no viable better agreement available if the US turns down this one. For one thing, there would be no international support for more sanctions if the US were seen to have vetoed the deal. The deal’s opponents are unlikely to muster a veto-proof majority against the agreement; and a hypothetical Republican president in 2017 would hesitate before scuppering a deal that had by then been satisfactorily implemented and increased the security of the US and its allies. [Continue reading…]

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Iran’s nuclear deal could allow its people to thrive again

Azadeh Moaveni writes: At the height of former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s defiance of the west over Iran’s nuclear programme, his government popularised the slogan, “nuclear energy is our absolute right.” One day I went outside my house in Tehran to find fresh graffiti scrawled on the wall nearby: “Danish pastry is our absolute right.” It referred to the beloved pastries that his government had decreed, in the wake of the Danish Prophet Muhammad cartoon controversy, needed rebranding. That graffiti comes to mind today, as Iran and the west announce their agonisingly awaited nuclear deal.

Back then, as today, Iranians cared more about what enhanced their daily lives than ideology and tough stances. For a decade, and especially the past three years, sanctions have gouged away at people’s quality of life. They have lost jobs as unemployment spiked, lost access to important medications and to software the rest of the world takes for granted. The era of sanctions has been the era of loss of many things: of carefully acquired savings, of dreams of studying abroad, of being able to serve meat once a week. Most painfully for a country that has the Middle East’s most educated, sizeable middle-class, Iranians have lost the ability to be genuinely cosmopolitan; international travel today is outside the reach of everyone but the Maserati-driving elite, buying a book from Amazon is technically impossible, as is registering for hundreds of university courses abroad, online and actual.

It is difficult to enumerate the endless ways – economic, cultural, academic – that sanctions have impacted the lives of ordinary Iranians. That is why, as they witness with such great anticipation the announcement of an agreement that will eventually bring sanctions to an end, it is hard to piece together their vision for what will change. The mood in Tehran is pure fizz, and the talk spans everything from cheaper iPhones to democracy. [Continue reading…]

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