Obama's Political Problems on the Iran Negotiations

[Reality Check]

President Obama is risking a political defeat on any tentative agreement he makes with Iran.

President Obama is not only negotiating from a position of weakness with Iran, he, Obama, is also negotiating from a position of weakness with the other Permanent Members of the UN Security Council.

Obama must have support from 34 members of the Senate and avoid a veto of the deal by any permanent member of the UN Security Council to implement any peace agreement Obama negotiates with Iran.

Obama is willing to accept a symbolic agreement, Iran is not.

Iran demands immediate removal of Oil, Banking and Financial Sanctions in return for a deal. Iran's recent concession is that other meaningless sanctions can be phased out over time as part of the deal.

To deliver that Obama must either deliver a UN Security council resultion for Iran's benefit or win a majority vote in the U.S. Congress to immediately revoke the most effective U.S. Sanctions against Iran.

Obama has given up on the later. He would be lucky to get the 34 votes needed in the Senate to block a veto overide. Congress is in a mood to enact more sanctions against Iran, not fewer.

That leaves convincing France, the UK, Russia and China not to veto a bad nuclear deal with Iran in the UN Security Council.

But Obama lacks leverage with France and the UK.

France sees a bigger down side to letting Iran build a bomb with UN approval and sanctions lifted, than having Iran build a bomb as a rogue state in defiance of UN Security Council resolutions and with crippling economic sanctions already in place.

France also believes, correctly, that if it vetoes a bad deal and Iran goes ahead and moves toward building a bomb, then oil rich Sunni Arab states will reward France with lucrative contracts as part of a major arms race in the middle east. France might even be willing to turn a blind eye, and allow Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey to start their own secretive Nuclear Weapons program while France sells them billions of dollars worth of nuclear technology. France already did this for Iraq. Russia also already did this for Iran. Why not France again for Turkey, Saudia Arabia and Egypt ?

The UK government is facing an election on May 7th. After that the UK government will be more likely to do the right thing, than what is politically necessary to avoid defeat in the May 7th election. Doing the right thing for the UK may not include both releasing Iran from it's UN status as a rogue nation and allowing it to also build hundreds of nuclear armed intercontinental ballistic missiles.

For Obama May 7th may be more of a deadline than June 30th.

Finally, Obama has been attempting to convince the other P-5 members that Iran is really a potentially good dog. Iran just killed a few of the neighbors chickens, and with proper rewards Iran will change it's ways and the P-5 can always chain the dog up again ( reimpose sanctions if the dog starts killing chickens again ).

At the same time Iran is demanding it be treated like a star race horse and rewarded immediately, and accordingly ( an immediate lifting of the most effective sanctions), while at the same time Iran is behaving like a Tasmanian Devil, coming to the negotiations with the neighbors blood on it's face.

He who lives by politics, dies by politics.