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Story highlights Frida Ghitis: President Barack Obama is right to want a deal, but this one gives Iran too much She says the framework agreement starts lifting Iran sanctions much too soon

Obama's political standing and his historic legacy in foreign policy are so deeply intertwined with reaching an accord with Iran that if the deal ultimately collapses, he may fear that historians will conclude that his legacy in global affairs collapsed with it.

There is a reason one gets the feeling that it is the United States and not Iran that is the more eager, even desperate, side in these talks, even though Iran is the country whose economy was sent into a deep chill by international sanctions; the country whose only significant export, oil, lost more than half of its value in recent months. The reason is that Obama has a huge political stake in these negotiations.

The President may insist that the United States will choose no deal over a bad deal, but few people truly believe he has a credible Plan B. Few believe it, particularly in the Middle East and notably among America's Arab friends, who hold the view that Iran is running circles around the United States and outplayed Obama.

As the writer David Rothkopf aptly put it, "Iran is having a great Obama administration."

That's a belief that has already started shaking up the region. Saudi Arabia has said that it will pursue nuclear weapons if it believes Iran has not been stopped, and there is little doubt that other countries among Iran's Muslim rivals will do the same. In fact, the notion that Obama is not handling the Iranian threat effectively is contributing to a new war in Yemen, where Saudi Arabia and other Arabs are trying to push back against gains by Iran's allies.

We can trace it all back to the Democratic primaries in 2007, when then-Sen. Obama said he would meet Iran's leaders "without preconditions," leading his rival, Hillary Clinton, to call the idea "Irresponsible and frankly naive." As the years of his presidency unfolded, and the Middle East started coming apart, finding a deal with Iran started to look like the one major foreign policy achievement Obama might leave behind.

The political imperative started to intrude in strategic considerations on an issue that is of transcendent importance to world peace.

The framework agreement announced on Thursday came two days after Obama's March 31 deadline. The U.S.-imposed deadline served only to pressure the United States, and the French ambassador very publicly decried as a "bad tactic."

That bad tactic was a political move, a push to produce some sort of result, however vague, to protect the talks from critics.

See the article here:
Why Obama desperately wants Iran deal