An interview with an Iranian journalist with connections to the regime, reported in the Wall Street Journal, comports much more closely with the view of the agreement between Iran and the P5+1 that I’ve been suggesting than it does with the view of the deal being portrayed by the White House and in most of the Western press:

Mr. Fazlinejad’s reading of the Geneva agreement mixes triumphalism and hard-nosed skepticism. “We need to be able to have an accurate view of what occurred and then assess it against the positions of the supreme leader and his guidance,” he says. “But as a general matter, if the right to enrich is accepted, which it has been, then everything that we have wanted has been realized.”

Last year, Mr. Shariatmadari, the editor of the newspaper, wrote that Iran has a right to enrich uranium up to 99%. The Obama administration insists that the Geneva agreement doesn’t enshrine a right to enrich uranium. Yet the deal permits the Iranian regime to continue enriching uranium up to 5%—a level that can be quickly escalated to produce weapons-grade material. Mr. Fazlinejad views the Geneva 5% concession as great-power acquiescence to Tehran’s enrichment program. “Now, the details—including the amount of enrichment and the specific enrichment locations and the technological shape of our enrichment program—are up to our technicians to determine,” he says.

Given that the Geneva deal is an interim, six-month arrangement, with a final agreement still to come, Mr. Fazlinejad suggests that Western leaders must “take into account that the supreme leader’s support for the negotiations and agreement has been conditional and by no means absolute. The leader instructed us that if the rights of the Iranian nation and the principles of the revolution are respected and the negotiating team stands up to the overbearing demands of the United States and the global arrogance”—the regime’s terms for the West generally—”then he would support their work.” On the other hand, if the agreement denies Iran’s absolute right to enrich, “then it is from our view essentially void.”

The Kayhan writer warns against perceiving any diplomatic agreement over Iran’s nuclear program as a first step toward broader rapprochement between Washington and Tehran. “The nature of the opposition of the Islamic revolution with the regime of liberal democracy is fundamentally philosophical,” Mr. Fazlinejad says. “It’s an ideological difference. It is not a tactical enmity, or one that has to do with temporary interests, which can be shifted and the enmity thus done away with. . . . So in contrast to all the punditry of late in the international media, which says that these negotiations are a step toward peace between Iran and the United States—those who take this view are completely mistaken.”

I think it’s pretty clear that somebody is kidding somebody. I just don’t know who’s kidding whom.

The editors of the Washington Post are urging Presidents Obama and Karzai to reach an agreement on retaining U. S. forces in Afghanistan after 2013:

Though some U.S. officials claim that a stable Afghanistan is no longer a strategic interest, the United States also has much to lose: namely, the fragile gains purchased by a dozen years of hard fighting that have cost nearly 2,300 American lives. Those gains include an Afghan army that has taken over 99 percent of the fighting against the Taliban and held its own, as well as a nascent democratic political system that is headed toward a competitive presidential election to replace Mr. Karzai. No wonder NATO allies are quietly urging the White House not to throw away in a fit of pique the achievements of the most consequential operation in the alliance’s history.

Note that nowhere in the editorial are the words “Al Qaeda” or “terrorism” to be found. The closest is “counterterrorism operators” by which, I presume, they mean UAV support personel.

I have some questions:

• If the Senate had been told in 2002 that we’d still have forces in Afghanistan 12 years after the attacks in 2001 and wanted to maintain a force in Afghanistan indefinitely, do you think we’d be there now?
• If Sen. Barack Obama had run on a platform of keeping U. S. troops in Afghanistan beyond 2014 and into the indefinite future, do you think he’d be president now?
• What are our strategic interests in Afghanistan?

Keep in mind that there are estimated to be between 100 and 200 Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan combined. Right now we’re fighting the Taliban in both countries. Thinking that there can be an end to such a fight is a categorical error.

Comparisons with World War II are all the vogue in discussing our present strategic position. I think that if President Roosevelt had told the American people that we’d have troops in Germany in 2013 we would still have gone to war against Germany because the perception if not the fact is that we had no other choice. Do we have no other choices in Afghanistan?

When I was in grad school (before the glaciers descended and dinosaurs ruled the earth) the importance of volume, of scale, in processes was brought home to me when it was pointed out that the beautiful, simple, elegant, and provably correct process that I had designed would take an incredibly long time to fulfill if load requirements increased. The process wasn’t scaleable. I had a similar experience years later when a process I designed (also simple and elegant) demonstrably had the same problem: it took an enormous amount of time to complete under load.

That’s why I’m skeptical of the claim that success in the states implies that Healthcare.gov can be made to work:

With all the waves of bad news about the Obamacare website and the canceled policies, it would be easy to conclude that nothing in this law will ever work — that it’s just too big and complicated and messy.

But that’s not the complete picture of the Affordable Care Act rollout. There are a few bright spots — just enough to suggest that, for all the early disasters, the law’s fate isn’t final yet.

There are states that are running their own websites and enrolling a lot of people, way more than the amateur-hour federal website that serves most of the states. Medicaid enrollment, another part of the law, is going significantly better than the signups for private insurance — nearly 400,000 people were determined to be eligible in October.

The problem with that analysis is that the task that Healthcare.gov must perform is on the order of 100 times more complicated that the task to be completed for any single state. If the process does not scale with linear complexity, i.e. that twice as large means twice as complicated, three times as large means three times as complicated, but in geometric complexity or worse, it could well be impossible, not merely impractical, for Healthcare.gov to work.

I’m prepared to believe that the healthcare insurance exchange concept can work at the state level. Beyond that? I’m from Missouri. You’ve got to show me.

as long as nobody uses it. I see that someone has warned the White House about the problem that I’ve been complaining about for weeks, i.e. that the tighter the timeframe in which people must use Healthcare.gov, the greater peak load demands will be place on it:

WASHINGTON — White House officials, fearful that the federal health care website may again be overwhelmed this weekend, have urged their allies to hold back enrollment efforts so the insurance marketplace does not collapse under a crush of new users.

At the same time, administration officials said Tuesday that they had decided not to inaugurate a big health care marketing campaign planned for December out of concern that it might drive too many people to the still-fragile HealthCare.gov.

With a self-imposed deadline for repairs to the website approaching on Saturday, the administration is trying to strike a delicate balance. It is encouraging people to go or return to the website but does not want to create too much demand. It boasts that the website is vastly improved, but does not want to raise expectations that it will work for everyone.

Presumably, part of the process of limiting expectations.

I don’t think that the White House has come to terms yet with the fact that at this late date they’re imposing new requirements on Healthcare.gov that weren’t in place on October 1. You can’t manage a successful development project that way. I would be very surprised if the greater peak load requirements can be resolved simply by throwing hardware at them. There are bound to be bottlenecks.

And if so what is it?

The Iranians have rejected and denounced the summary of the agreement between the P5+1 nations and the Iranians on Iran’s nuclear development program:

TEHRAN (FNA)- The Iranian Foreign Ministry on Tuesday called invalid a press release by the White House alleged to be the text of the nuclear agreement struck by Iran and the Group 5+1 (the US, Russia, China, Britain and France plus Germany) in Geneva on Sunday.

“What has been released by the website of the White House as a fact sheet is a one-sided interpretation of the agreed text in Geneva and some of the explanations and words in the sheet contradict the text of the Joint Plan of Action (the title of the Iran-powers deal), and this fact sheet has unfortunately been translated and released in the name of the Geneva agreement by certain media, which is not true,” Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Marziyeh Afkham said on Tuesday.

She said that the four-page text under the name of the Joint Plan of Action (which has been released by the Iranian foreign ministry) was the result of the agreement reached during the Geneva talks and all of its sentences and words were chosen based on the considerations of all parties to the talks. In fact one of the reasons why negotiations between Iran and the G5+1 took so long pertained to the accuracy which was needed for choosing the words for the text of the agreement, Afkham said, explaining that the Iranian delegation was much rigid and laid much emphasis on the need for this accuracy.

Included in the linked article is what is characterized as the full text of the draft agreement.

The draft agreement includes an implicit acknowledgement of concession on the part of the P5+1 of one of Iran’s primary negotiating points: its “right to enrich”, rejected as recently as the weekend (after the agreement) by Secretary of State John Kerry. That would suggest that there is some disagreement about what has actually been agreed upon.

It’s also unclear to me why White House officials are characterizing the agreement as a “first step” which would imply that future concessions by Iran are a possibility. Quite to the contrary it might be that the P5+1 are so desperate for a deal with Iran that they’ve made all the concessions while Iran has conceded nothing. It seems to me that the minimum requirement for a workable agreement would be unrestricted inspection rather than the “enhanced inspection” called for in the draft agreement.

The most recent poll from Public Policy Polling might give you some flavor of what next year’s race for Illinois governor is likely to be. Sitting Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn, Illinois’s accidental governor, is in more or less a dead heat with the likely Republican candidates:

Only 34% of voters approve of the job Quinn is doing to 60% who disapprove. That ties him for the third most unpopular Governor in the country. That’s actually an improvement for Quinn though- his numbers are up from a 25/64 approval spread a year ago at this time, which had made him the most unpopular Governor anywhere. He’s seen a little bit of improvement with Democrats, Republicans, and independents alike.

In match ups with his potential GOP foes Quinn leads Bruce Rauner 41/38, trails Dan Rutherford 41/39, and ties both Bill Brady and Kirk Dillard at 41% and 39% respectively. Quinn trails by 4-7 points with independents and loses 13-15% of the Democratic vote in each of the match ups.

I think that Pat Quinn is a good egg but a mediocre governor at best in very challenging times. Coping with Illinois’s public pension problem is an urgent necessity and so far Gov. Quinn has been unable to get the Democrat-dominated state legislature to cooperate. The veto session has ended without any action on this most urgent of agenda items which means it will be on the agenda again in the next session. Each time the legislature kicks the can down the road the state’s and Chicago’s bond rating suffers, increasing both the state’s and the city’s operating costs. Illinois’s credit rating is already the lowest of any state.

IMO who sits in the governor’s mansion depends on just how much Republicans want a fellow Republican to get the job. I’m not sure why they’d want it.

Update

Something I probably should have mentioned in the body is that PPP polls seem to oversample Democrats a bit. That’s even worse news for Quinn’s re-election than their raw results would indicate.

When I read this article at National Journal on Congressional Democrats and pollsters gazing nervously at the president’s deteriorating poll numbers:

But despite the Democrats’ proven mastery of campaign logistics, they face limitations if public opinion remains against them. For one, minority turnout is usually low in midterm elections, and would have to be near presidential-year levels to compensate for the party’s historically low standing with white Southern voters. Landrieu is likely to face a runoff election, against a single Republican challenger in December—a month in which turnout is usually anemic among minorities. Hagan faces the challenge of winning loyal support from Democrats as an obscure freshman senator without a high profile in Washington.

Indeed, there’s a growing sense of fatalism among Democrats. Even as strategists are advising their clients on how to best talk about health care, they badly want to change the subject and hope that the problems go away. On that point, the White House and congressional Democrats are on the same page.

“If the election were held today, Republicans would probably win back the majority,” said one longtime Democratic operative tracking internal Senate polling. “But we know for sure the election would not be held today.”

the title of this post (a Southern expression) was my immediate reaction. They’d better hope that Healthcare.gov gets fixed, the PPACA gains in popularity and doesn’t provide ongoing ammunition, the economy improves, and the president’s foreign policy overtures bear fruit. They can’t credibly run against him in 2014 and then hurry back to defend Hillary Clinton’s candidacy as a third Obama term (or an anti-Obama reaction) in 2016.

Something else in which they should take some solace: they’ll be running against Republicans who over the last few years have shown a remarkable willingness to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Politics remains local and candidates do matter.

In prior posts I’ve pointed out how much of one’s reactions to the incipient deal with Iran on its nuclear development program depends on one’s assumptions. This morning I’ve found two newspaper columns that place the opposing points of view and the assumptions that underpin them in stark relief.

At the Washington Post Eugene Robinson proclaims the deal a “great accomplishment”:

Under the Geneva pact, half of Iran’s 20 percent uranium will be diluted and no more will be produced. A military strike that eliminated half of the potential fuel for a “breakout” bomb — and wiped out the capability to make more — would surely be reckoned a success. It is just plain dumb to attack Kerry and Obama for achieving the same thing without firing a shot.

Critics can’t plausibly oppose the agreement on practical grounds. The real reason they are freaking out is that the agreement was made possible by the most extensive high-level bilateral contacts between Washington and Tehran since the 1979 Iranian revolution. This has the potential to reshape the whole region — to the detriment of those vested in the status quo.

The primary assumption here is the one I’ve already mentioned: good faith on the part of the Iranians. If the Iranians use the six months to further the aspects of weapons development they haven’t already mastered, that doesn’t sound like a success to me.

The questions I have for proponents of the deal are a) what evidence do they have either for good faith on the part of the Iranian regime or that future agreements are in the offing? and b) does the agreement make sense as a one-off, is it worthwhile solely on its own strengths?

Bret Stephens, on the other hand, writing at the Wall Street Journal, immediately instantiates Godwin’s Law and declaims the deal as “worse than Munich”, referring to the appeasement of Hitler in the meetings there in 1938:

After Geneva there will come a new, chaotic Mideast reality in which the United States will lose leverage over enemies and friends alike.

What will that look like? Iran will gradually shake free of sanctions and glide into a zone of nuclear ambiguity that will keep its adversaries guessing until it opts to make its capabilities known. Saudi Arabia will move swiftly to acquire a nuclear deterrent from its clients in Islamabad; Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal made that clear to the Journal last week when he indiscreetly discussed “the arrangement with Pakistan.” Egypt is beginning to ponder a nuclear option of its own while drawing closer to a security alliance with Russia.

As for Israel, it cannot afford to live in a neighborhood where Iran becomes nuclear, Assad remains in power, and Hezbollah—Israel’s most immediate military threat—gains strength, clout and battlefield experience. The chances that Israel will hazard a strike on Iran’s nuclear sites greatly increased since Geneva. More so the chances of another war with Hezbollah.

That makes its own set of assumptions, for example, that the Iranians want a nuclear weapon, that there’s anything we could do at this point short of all-out war to prevent Iran from producing a nuclear weapon, that U. S. influence in the region isn’t already ebbing, and that isn’t a good thing.

I still haven’t reached any conclusions. Frankly, I doubt that either of the extreme scenarios are likely to come to pass and am inclining to the view that the agreement is a purely political act that won’t achieve anything material one way or another. But my mind is still open on the subject and I’m amenable to persuasion.

This has been a very bad few weeks for Chicago chefs. Jean Banchet, owner and chef of the legendary Le Français, has died:

Jean Banchet was Chicago’s first celebrity chef, a prodigiously talented cook and gregarious personality who almost single-handedly raised Chicago’s dining reputation from a steak-and-potatoes town to a serious restaurant city.

Banchet, 72, died Sunday in his Jupiter, Fla., home after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

“It was three weeks ago today that we got the news,” said Banchet’s wife, Doris. “It went so fast it was unbelievable. February would have been our 50th anniversary.”

“It is sad,” said Pierre Pollin, former chef/owner at Le Titi de Paris and a close friend. “He was the greatest chef we had in Chicago.”

What Charlie Trotter was to contemporary American cuisine, Banchet was to classical French cuisine. During his ownership and tenure at Le Français, it was the highest-rated restaurant not just in Chicago but in the United States. I doubt we’ll see its or his like again.