Leverage

Dealer
“You have a large country, with a significant military, that has proclaimed that Israel shouldn’t exist, that has denied the Holocaust, that has financed Hezbollah,” Mr. Obama said, speaking of Iran. “There are very good reasons why Israelis are nervous about Iran’s position in the world, generally.” (New York Times, 7/16/2015)

And then Obama said to himself: 'But I am doing the deal anyway.'


Dealt
With a better deal impossible, Mr. Obama said that the only viable alternative to the negotiated settlement his administration had presented was war. And he challenged critics of the deal to acknowledge that what they really wanted was a military solution. (New York Times, 7/16/2015)

This is Obama's most gratuitous argument. It has been effectively rebutted numerous times and yet he still uses it. The alternative is not war with Iran. The alternative - the status quo - is that sanctions remain in place and Iran is eventually suffocated. The mullahs relent or they are overthrown.


Ill Repute
Valerie Jarett, reputed to be Obama’s closest adviser, remembers Shiraz, the Iranian cultural capital and the Florence of the East, where she was born and grew up....Secretary of State John Kerry admires Iran because he knows it through his Iranian son-in-law, who hails from a pre-revolution middle-class family. (NYPost.com, 7/19/2015)

So does this explain why the Obama administration did the deal?