For more on the facts, apart from Graham Allison’s careful parsing of the deal, I direct you to the roundtable of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. (E.g. from Siegfried Hecker, former director of Los Alamos Labs: “Much hard work lies ahead to make it a historic opportunity. Even so, the Iran nuclear deal was hard-won and is better than any other reasonably achievable alternative.” Or from Sharon Squassoni, director of the Proliferation Prevention Program at CSIS: “The Vienna agreement with Iran ... is a lumbering, 159-page tome of historic dimensions. ... Still, the level of detail, nuance, and overlapping obligations is impressive. Some of the details are astonishing.”—which she means in a good way. Or from Kingston Reif, of the Arms Control Association: “Many observers, including this author, doubted whether such an agreement could be reached. While a final judgment on the deal must await its implementation, what has been achieved to date is remarkable and historic.”) Or consider this analysis from the Molad institute about why the deal is more advantageous for Israel than any real-world alternative. Or this from Steven Metz.

Maybe these people are wrong. But if so, let’s hear some details of a better approach. Let’s hear a realistic alternative. Rather than, “Oh, that Obama is so weak. He just should have been strong.”

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Judgment: Of course, provable facts take us only so far into the future. Judgment about appropriate risks and rewards inevitably comes into play. And here I argue: The historical balance weighs very heavily against the judgment of those opposing the deal. Those who have lined up against similar deals, in the past, have usually been wrong. This doesn’t prove that opponents are wrong now, but it’s worth thinking about.

I’m not even talking about recent historical judgment concerning this same part of the world. Virtually every opponent of the new Iran deal was also a proponent of invading Iraq 12 years ago. In both cases, Iraq and Iran, the very same people thought that the threat was imminent and grave, that diplomacy was ineffective, and that a hard line was called for. This group notably included David Frum, who at the time was a speechwriter for George W. Bush. (Before you ask: I was a speechwriter for Jimmy Carter while the movement to overthrow the shah was gaining momentum in 1978.)

So far, I have found exactly two public figures who have opposed or questioned the Iran deal and who did not also support the Iraq War: They are Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey and, disappointingly, former-Senator-now-presidential-candidate Jim Webb of Virginia. In all other cases, people who are alarmist about Iran in 2015 are the same ones who were alarmist about Iraq in 2003.

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The more important point about judgment concerns the long record of agreements of this sort. Many of them have been controversial; some have been enacted and some have not. But in most cases, I contend, the skeptical opponents have been proven, by history, to have been wrong. Let’s consider: There has been one major case in which the proponents of diplomacy were proven naive, the advocates of a tougher line were right, and the talk of compromise ended in ashes. That was of course Munich in 1938.