POTUS:Some 53 percent of the American public believes that U.S. President Barack Obama is neither honest nor trustworthy, a CNN poll conducted last week has found. The CNN/ORC International survey, released on Thursday, also found that just 40% of Americans believe Obama can manage the government effectively, a fall of 12 percentage points in the president's approval ratings since June.
According to the report, Obama scored lowest for honesty out of nine personal characteristics tested in the poll.
A deal NOT done: “There is actually no deal yet,” a senior Republican aide told The Hill. “Apparently, they now need to negotiate an implementation agreement — the framework didn't actually compel any action by any side. No idea how long that could take.”
The deal would loosen sanctions in exchange for Iran freezing its nuclear program for six months during negotiations toward a final agreement. The six month clock only starts ticking once the implementation framework is agreed to.
The White House says the deal was the heavy lift, while the details of how to make it work are a technicality. Not all such agreements have implementation agreements, but in this case Iran and its six negotiating partners — the United States, Russia, China, France, Great Britain and Germany — wanted to have arrangements in place regarding nuclear inspectors, the joint monitoring mechanism of Iran's program and the details of sanctions relief for Iran.
The EU view: "It's important that both sides of the bargain are implementing this agreement, so we would coordinate timing-wise also with the Iranian side," EU foreign affairs spokesman Michael Mann told reporters in Brussels
Britain's Foreign Secretary William Hague put the total estimated value of sanctions relief at $7 billion over a 6-month period, but stressed it would not all come at once.
"They do not receive 7 billion on the first day and then decide if they want to implement their side of the agreement," Hague said, calling the amount of sanctions relief "a very small proportion" of the total frozen assets and value of sanctions applied to Iran.
"The way we're doing sanctions relief leaves Iran with a huge incentive" to go for a comprehensive agreement since Tehran wants complete sanctions relief, Hague said.
Jerusalem:Israel will continue to act in the “diplomatic arena” and “in other areas” to ensure that Iran does not get nuclear weapons, a senior Israeli official said Sunday night as Jerusalem braced for continued battle over the Iranian nuclear issue.
“The ball is still in play,” the official said, as Israel digested the significance of the agreement signed in Geneva in the early morning hours that legitimizes Iran’s enrichment of uranium, but freezes the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program for six months in exchange for sanctions relief estimated at $7 billion.
The official said Jerusalem would continue to make its case to “relevant people, we are not giving up.”
In the U.S.: Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), estimated this weekend would ultimately amount to roughly $20 billion. Dubowitz and FDD senior fellow Orde Kittrie today outlined how "the agreement greatly weakens Western economic sanctions" inasmuch as "Iranian sanctions-busters will be in position to exploit the changing market psychology and newly created pathways to reap billions of additional dollars in economic relief beyond those projected by the Obama administration."
According to the NYT: President Obama’s biggest critics — in Congress, the Arab world and Israel — argue that he has the strategy entirely backward. By changing the psychology around the world, they argue, the roughly $100 billion in remaining sanctions will gradually be whittled away. Wily middlemen, Chinese eager for energy sources and Europeans looking for a way back to the old days, when Iran was a major source of trade, will see their chance to leap the barriers.
Others in Israel: “If in another five or six years a nuclear suitcase explodes in New York or Madrid, it will be because of the agreement that was signed this morning,” Naftali Bennett, Israel’s economy minister, declared on Sunday. According to a poll commissioned by the Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom, three-fourths of Hebrew-speaking Jewish Israelis don’t believe Iran will halt its nuclear program as a result of the accord, which places limits on the Iranian program over the next six months in exchange for sanctions relief.
But not all Israelis are opposed to the deal. Israeli leaders like President Shimon Peres and former military intelligence chief Amos Yadlin have expressed cautious optimism about the diplomatic breakthrough, and some in the press have thrown their support behind the initiative as well, including some prominent commentators for Channel 2, Israel’s most-watched television network.
