Iran: the deal and the prospects

Submitted by Matthew on 8 April, 2015 - 10:28 Author: Colin Foster

On 2 April, in Lausanne, the USA, the EU, other diplomats, and Iran announced a deal to limit Iran’s nuclear programme and in return to lift economic sanctions against Iran.

In Iran, people took to the streets to celebrate. Business moguls worldwide celebrated more quietly about the prospect of new access to Iran’s oil and gas wealth and its markets.

The deal is said to include severe cuts in Iran’s nuclear programme but to open the door for sanctions, which have boosted increasing economic chaos in Iran, to end within six months or a year.

US leaders are also anxious to solidify collaboration with Tehran’s clerical-authoritarian regime to stabilise Afghanistan and Iraq.

There remains a real risk that the belligerent Republican-majority US Congress will derail the deal. Congress has already derailed reforms in the IMF which the US government itself proposed, thus prompting China to launch a new rival international development bank which most US-allied governments have joined. Back in 1920 a Republican Congress blocked the USA from joining the League of Nations (forerunner of the UN), which the US government itself had proposed and designed.

From a socialist point of view, the deal is not “ours”; but even less would we want the US ultras to wreck it in favour of more threats of war.

If the deal sticks, one good side-effect may be to make the US government more susceptible to pressure to stop Benjamin Netanyahu’s chauvinist Israeli government extinguishing the possibility of “two states” in Israel-Palestine.

To make good on that possibility (if it emerges) requires the existence, on the streets, of a strong and rational campaign upholding the Palestinians’ right to an independent state alongside Israel.

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