By a "few months", you mean at least a year. That is a year in which they would be in breach of the agreement and the other signatory Powers could move to invoke harsh measures, up to and including military action.

Good, now list the better options.

The military intervention necessary to eliminate Iran as a potential nuclear power carries the same environmental risk, and again we see hawks invoking fantastic claims of countries like Iran developing ICBMs.

You seem to think Iran is not a rational player, and that's something I don't buy. It's belligerent, to be sure, but so was the USSR. So no, I don't actually believe the "rogue element" claim any more than I would about Pakistan.

And critics need to be reminded again and again that no one believes Iran has a nuclear device yet.

Oh fuck off. Even North Korea, a genuinely nutty state, represents at best a regional threat. The Great Powers remain essentially untouchable, and for fuck's sake, Iran has several nearby nuclear states (China, Pakistan, India, Israel and Russia) who possess arsenals of one form or another. The whole point of the plan is that the signatory powers (all of which are nuclear states themselves) will have probably a year or more from Iran going into technical breach to mount a response.

Christ all fucking mighty, grow up. Iran does not represent a meaningful threat to the US, and any future existential threat it may represent to Israel is countered by the fact that if it ever mounted a nuclear attack on Israel or Saudi Arabia, the Iranian state, and probably millions of Iranians, would be killed in turn.

The Greeks have made it clear a number of times that they don't want to exit the Euro. This is the price of staying in the Euro. If it is too bitter a pill, then they can reject the agreement and exit the Euro.

One might argue that this deal is the first step along that road.

If the Greeks don't like the deal, they can exit the Eurozone. The Germans were more in favor of that, and this deal has happened in large part because of the desire of the French not to see Greece exit the Euro.

Debt restructuring in this context is a polite way of saying "serious investor haircut, beginning below the jugular." And to put it into sharper relief, at this point, the chief creditors are now Eurozone taxpayers. That's the reason that several EZ leaders, including Merkel and the Finnish leadership, could never have sold their electorates on general debt relief. For that to become palatable at all, Greece is going to have to demonstrate it is capable of abiding by the rules being laid out. First they need to implement all the reforms and other stipulations of this agreement, and when that is done, Merkel may be able to lead the her country and other cynical EZ members into some out and out debt relief.

It strikes me that this new agreement solves this problem. It will essentially be the Troika that takes over supervisory powers for legislative and policy changes surrounding government expenditures and taxes, and so the Greek government can implement the hard policies, and blame those evil foreign occupiers.

To my understanding, Portugal implemented a scheme whereby industries could be assessed based on average profits, rather than relying upon specific businesses to accurately report revenues. It sucks, and probably isn't fair, but where there is a culture of underreporting revenues or overstating expenses, or general evasion, then the only solution is to spread the pain between the law abiding businesses and individuals and the law breaking ones.

One way or another, Greeks are going to be paying a lot more taxes, and if they continue this evasion as a national sport, the Greek government will simply be forced to work with general assessments.

Hey, don't get mad at me. Maastritch was faulty because there wasn't a proper fiscal union. I suspect the underlying scheme was that the Euro would become so unmanageable and would generate so many fiscal crises in poor periphery Eurozone states, and would require so many bailouts from wealthier Eurozone states that finally everyone would throw up their hands and agree to a United States of Europe.

If you voted for currency union, then you either voted for its ultimate failure, or for a fiscal union. There really is no in between.

A number of Eurozone states, lead by Germany, were at a place where their governments would have been in very serious trouble had they simply repeated the process as it has rolled out to date. There were reports that if there had been another bailout like the last ones, the Finnish government would have collapsed, and Merkel certainly has been feeling intense pressure not to give in to Greek demands. The referendum seems to have been the final straw, however. The attempt to shame the Eurozone into handing Greece more money and forgiving more debt badly backfired for Tsipras.

What this all demonstrates is that the Eurozone needs to become a full fiscal union. What is happening in Greece, with the effective seizure, or at least oversight, of the Greek government's fiscal powers, is what needs to happen.

Currencies like the US dollar work because, while there may be fifty states that use the USD, there is a single issuing central bank and a federal government that holds core constitutional fiscal powers. That's why you can have economies as diverse, small and large, as Rhode Island, Tennessee, California and New York in one federal state, because there is no "sharing" of fiscal sovereignty. The states are free to borrow money, but they have no control over central fiscal policy.

In other words, as so many have been saying since Maastricht was signed, for the Euro to actually work, the Eurozone needs to effectively become a single state, and EZ members need to surrender their fiscal powers to a central fiscal authority.

It is in no small part because the other PIIGS states have gone some distance to implementing austerity measures that the Troika had no choice but to put the harshest conditions upon any agreement that allowed Greece to remain part of the Eurozone. If they had simply handed Greece more bailout money, or even gone the distance towards some debt relief, the other troubled EZ states would have had every right to demand the same considerations.

Beyond that, so controversial is any bailout, that any agreement that did not amount to an unconditional surrender would have lead to political crises in some EZ states. Finland's government, in particular, is facing a non-confidence vote if a deal with Greece doesn't contain strong elements of control. That's a big reason for the huge asset sale the deal requires.