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Source: http://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2015/07/who-bamboozled-whom/
Is the White House Seeking to Contain Iran?
(Mosaic) Michael Doran - The nuclear deal with Iran is a wildly lopsided agreement. Whereas Iran received permanent concessions, the U.S. and its partners managed only to buy a little time. When Obama's critics suggest that the White House has been taken in, they tacitly assume that the president shares their goal of containing and rolling back Iran - an enemy power bent on ousting the U.S. from the Middle East and vanquishing America's allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia foremost among them. But he does not see Iran that way at all. In Obama's eyes, the nuclear deal is a means to the larger end of a strategic partnership in the Middle East. In fact, the White House has consistently displayed an aversion to countering Iran, based on the conviction that, thanks to U.S. diplomacy, Iran will voluntarily come to place limits on its own ambitions. The deal has permanently ceded diplomatic leverage to Iran and nullified vigorous containment as a serious option. The writer, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, is a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense and a former senior director of the National Security Council.