On Thursday, at the invitation of the pro-Israel group JINSA, former George W. Bush administration officials John Hannah and Eric Edelman, together with Ray Takeyh, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Dennis Ross, former adviser to President Obama, assembled to discuss the prospects for a final Iranian deal. It was illuminating, to say the least.

Ex-Obama adviser and other Iran experts: Obama is blowing it
By Jennifer Rubin – The Washington Post
June 19, 2014

On Thursday, at the invitation of the pro-Israel group JINSA, former George W. Bush administration officials John Hannah and Eric Edelman, together with Ray Takeyh, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Dennis Ross, former adviser to President Obama, assembled to discuss the prospects for a final Iranian deal. It was illuminating, to say the least.

Ross and Edelman said they took at face value the Obama administration’s promise that “a bad deal is worse than no deal.” (From our vantage point — call me cynical — a “bad deal” is in the eye of the beholder and considering the interim deal, the administration seems to be setting a very low bar for what is acceptable.) That makes the chance for a deal slim. At any rate, Ross — who certainly saw the administration up close in its first term — said that the key for the administration was to roll back sanctions in exchange for “dramatically” rolling back Iran’s nuclear program. Ross conceded that “everything they [the Iranians] are conveying is that they can’t roll the clock back. If it remains that way, there will be no deal.” He remained open to the possibility that Iran is just posturing in public, but didn’t quibble with the idea that Iran may be convinced that it doesn’t need to give up anything. Takeyh opined that if there is no deal by July 20, there will be no deal, even if the parties keep talking.

Ross and the other panelists were emphatic that bringing Iran into the Iraq picture and allowing the mullahs to succeed in their aspiration of a Shiite state beholden to Tehran was a very bad idea. Ross reminded the audience that Iran has killed numerous Americans by its manufacture of improvised explosive devices and “in many ways Iran is responsible for what is happening in Iraq.”

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