The Iran deal

Some of the leftist blogs were skeptical that a deal would be reached. Juan Cole sugests a plausible reason:Did rise of Daesh/ISIL ensure Iran Nuclear Deal ? In another article he discusses Reagan's deals That Time Ronald Reagan Opened Iran and illegally sold Khomeini weapons : "Then Reagan had his people steal hundreds of T.O.W. anti-tank missiles from the Pentagon warehouses and illegally ship them to Khomeini’s Iran, then on the US terrorist watch-list. Let me just underline this. Reagan was prevented by law from selling US weaponry to Iran, and certainly without notifying Congress under the Arms Export Act. There was no aboveboard, legitimate way to do this. So he just had his people pilfer expensive weaponry and ship it to Iran. A notorious Israeli arms dealer was the intermediary.

Note, too, just for the annals of perfidy, that Reagan was at the same time militarily supporting Iraq,  and had told Baghdad they were his allies.Reagan, being a fiscal conservative, made Khomeini pay for the weaponry. Reagan then put that money in secret Swiss bank accounts and gradually sent it to the Nicaragua right wing death squads. That was how he got around the Boland Amendment. He didn’t use US government money for this purpose. It was Khomeini’s money.

In return for the American weapons, Iran agreed to pressure the Lebanese Shiites to let US hostages go, solving a PR problem for the US Republican Party."