Parsi, Sick, and Cohen lament in concert as U.S. spurns fuel deal

As the drama of Iran's election and post-election resistance movement unfolded last year, I came to appreciate the blogs of Gary Sick and Scott Lucas - the latter, Enduring America. deploying an array of Iranian and Iranian-American voices and other analysts along with Lucas. * Both blogs did a good job mapping out the extent to which the Revolutionary Guard, in concert with (or in increasing control of) religious hardliners, had effected a militarist takeover of key ministries and industries during the Ahmadinejad era.   Both, at the same time, offered long-term perspective on the missed opportunities between the U.S. and Iranian governments, whose interests potentially converged on several fronts over the last two decades.  The New York Times' Roger Cohen, while perhaps somewhat too credulous about the benign intentions of the Iranian government prior to the stolen election of last June, basically shared these perspectives.

In the past week, as the Obama Administration spurned the fuel swap deal with Iran brokered by Turkey and Brazil -- with U.S. encouragement, they claim -- those who have seen potential in wide-angle negotiations between the U.S. and Iran have writhed in frustration. These include Cohen, Sick and National Iranian American Council president Trita Parsi, whose ABC news was reposted on Enduring America. Their arguments overlap, and mutually reinforce, e.g., that the new agreement preserved the essential features of the original deal (albeit at a point at which Iran has had another eight months to process fuel -- the 1200 kilograms to be removed from Iran now represents 55% rather than 70% of its stock, according to the U.S); that the Administration's chief grounds for rejecting the deal -- Iran's insistence that it would continue to enrich uranium -- was not a condition of the original agreement; and that spurning Brazil and Turkey sets back the new multilateralism that Obama seemed last year to embrace.  Behold their shared agony: