The Iran Deal - Praise and Blame - NYTimes.com Re "Accord Reached With Iran to Halt Nuclear Program" (front page, Nov. 24): Illustrating what good diplomacy does, Secretary of State John Kerry and President Obama have begun to separate Iran's national pride from the risk that it would develop a nuclear weapon. The agreement's opponents, like Israel and Saudi Arabia, couch their objections in nuclear terms, but it is Iran's status as a regional power that they obsessively fear. Israel would find greater security in making peace with the Palestinians; Saudi Arabia cannot indefinitely avoid reform. Legitimate issues, like Iran's support for Hezbollah, can be addressed in subsequent diplomacy. And the United States has common interests with Iran, among them curbing Al Qaeda. Above all, the agreement is an essential step to avoiding a war that would be disastrous for the region and that the American people do not want and cannot afford. May it also be a step toward a Middle East free of all weapons of mass destruction. DAVID KEPPEL Bloomington, Ind., Nov. 24, 2013 Israel is once again being portrayed as the "spoiler" in the recent talks between the United States and Iran. How dare a country whose very existence is being threatened speak out against an agreement that does nothing to prevent Iran from completing its nuclear arsenal? The Iranians have bought six more months for the price of empty promises. President Obama has bought a "peace in our time" moment à la Neville Chamberlain. Just as Mr. Obama has dithered in Egypt and Syria, he has now allowed the Iranians to outmaneuver him by giving him an agreement that signifies nothing. This administration consistently presses its allies and not its enemies to achieve what it believes is a victory. Unfortunately for Israel, these alleged "breakthroughs" serve only to signal that the very existence of Israel is dependent solely on Israel itself, since its major ally is more concerned with face-saving measures than with meaningful negotiations. No one wants peace more than Israel - no one. HOWARD B. WEBER President, Coalition for Israel New York, Nov. 25, 2013 As the father of an American victim of Iranian-sponsored terrorism - my daughter Alisa, 20, was murdered in a 1995 suicide bombing by Islamic Jihad - I always believed that America and the Iranians would one day sit down to strike one deal or another so that sanctions could be lifted. I welcomed that prospect because I thought that Iran would renounce its support of terror around the world, a role that won it the State Department's ranking as the No. 1 state sponsor of terrorism. Not for a second did I think that the issue on the negotiating table would be Iran's development of nuclear weapons. I will defer to those who criticize or laud the technical and long-range terms of the agreement. What I want to know as a victim's father is what's in it for us, the victims and their parents, who have suffered at the hands of Iran and its proxies. Iran continues to export murder and mayhem to Iraq and Syria, and is clearly seeking to become the dominant voice in the Middle East. Neither the so-called interim agreement nor the proposed goals of a final agreement address Iran's murderous past. Don't the 241 dead United States service members of the Beirut barracks bombing in 1983 count for anything? I fear that the present agreement allows Iran to wriggle off the hook of accountability for its role in the past and future suffering of innocent third parties. With no plans to put that issue on the table, we are doomed to more death and suffering. The elephant in the room in this deal is Turkey. So far, all of its foreign policy objectives have failed. Its positions regarding Egypt, Syria and Israel have not borne fruit, and it is sending its foreign minister to Iran to try to restart its relationship with its non-Sunni, non-Arab Muslim neighbor. What options does Turkey have? Will it lose its position as the major non-Arab Muslim country to Iran if Iran gets a bomb? Will it change its policy toward Israel as a counterbalance to Iran, with the added incentive of a natural gas pipeline from the Israeli gas fields through Turkey to Europe? Will it pursue its own bomb and have to deal with the fallout from its NATO allies? Everyone is concerned about Israel and the reaction of the Gulf states, but we cannot ignore Turkey. Re "How Bush Let Iran Go Nuclear" (Op-Ed, Nov. 21): The only trouble with Ari Shavit's excellent article is that it does not go far enough. The problem of United States policy in not confronting Iran as the epicenter of terrorism does not begin with George W. Bush, as Mr. Shavit suggests. It starts with the Carter administration in its handling of the hostage crisis and extends through the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. The bombing of the United States Marine barracks outside Beirut in 1983, which resulted in the deaths of 241 American service members, was attributed to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, but the United States simply lobbed some shells from the U.S.S. New Jersey into the empty hills of Lebanon, which did nothing to discourage Iran. Similarly, after the bombing of Pan Am 103 in December 1988, the finger of suspicion pointed to Iran. It was refocused on Libya exclusively after Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain reminded the first President Bush that Iran is bigger than Vietnam. And so we swept the problem of Iran under the rug for successive administrations. The pact with Iran reached over the weekend is a continuation of that phenomenon at a time when it matters most. Instead of finally coming head to head with Iran's ultimate ambitions - regional hegemony and an existential threat to Israel - the Obama administration has left a stronger Iran in place with hardly a dent in its ambitions. The writer, an international lawyer, was counsel to the United States delegation to the United Nations in the Reagan administration.