http://lobelog.com/what-would-be-most-likely-to-unravel-the-iran-nuclear-agreement/#more-32959

What Would Be Most Likely to Unravel the Iran Nuclear Agreement

by Paul R. Pillar
The agreement to limit Iran’s nuclear program—one of the most significant achievements in recent years on behalf of nuclear nonproliferation—deserves ample attention and effort to preserve it. Preserving the accord will require much attention and effort, given that many of those who strove to prevent the agreement from ever being completed or implemented are still trying to kill it. A U.S. presidential election year is a fertile time for the agreement-killing efforts, with several presidential candidates on one side of the political spectrum trying to outdo each other in flaunting their anti-Iranism by promising if they take office to renounce the agreement outright.
The unfortunate ignorance-enhancing effects of so much of the rhetoric that was aimed against the agreement while it was being negotiated—rhetoric that involved raising every possible basis for doubt about the agreement, and seeing what would stick—extend beyond making approval of the accord a much closer call than it should have been. The effects today include mistaken notions of the most likely reasons the agreement might yet fail. Prominent among the mistaken notions is that Iranian decision-makers are determined to build nuclear weapons and that the agreement is part of a deceptive and elaborate multi-decade scheme to do so. The supposed scheme never made internal sense in the first place, and this notion certainly is inconsistent not only with the Iranian decision to negotiate the agreement and to accept all the limitations and scrutiny it involves but also with the alacrity with which Iran already has fulfilled all of the provisions it needed to fulfill before the agreement was formally implemented.http://lobelog.com/what-would-be-most-likely-to-unravel-the-iran-nuclear-agreement/#more-32959