{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.028955098615190935, 'fraction_numerical': 0.01174989509022241, 'mean_word_length': 4.930348258706467, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
The Middle East in the Midst of a Policy of Confusion and Muddle: Part 2

The situation in the Middle East is changing on a daily basis and, since my article was submitted in June 2015 there have been new developments in the Middle East, this postscript tries to address two of the most important event during this period: the nuclear deal between Iran and P5 + 1 (group of six world powers); and the Turkish government’s bombardment of PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party) positions in the Qandil mountains in northern Iraq. After more than 20 months of negotiations regarding Iran’s nuclear programme started in New York, Iran and the P5 + 1 powers finally signed a deal on 14 July 2015, and it now looks as though the US president has managed to defeat Republican legislators’ attempts to block the deal. Not everyone is happy. Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has already declared that ‘some of the negotiating countries’ (a clear reference to the Americans) were ‘willing to make a deal at any price’, and afterwards he described it as ‘a mistake of historic dimensions’. His allies in the US Republican Party echoed these sentiments. As details of the 159-page document became known, it was clear that it was neither the ‘win–win’ claimed by Iranian president Hassan Rowhani and his foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, nor the disaster that conservative Islamist opponents inside Iran said would result from any deal with the ‘Great Satan’. While Iran’s nuclear programme was not ‘heroic resistance’, as supporters of the regime claimed, giving up major aspects of it was not ‘heroic softening’ either, as supreme leader Ali Khamenei claimed in early 2015. The Financial Times summary is accurate: ‘Iran has accepted unprecedented international control and surveillance over its nuclear programme, as well as cuts in its uranium stocks and in the number of centrifuges’. At the end the day, Iran’s neoliberal, dependent capitalist economy was brought to its knees by punitive sanctions imposed by successive US administrations. They had little to do with the country’s nuclear programme: they were about regime change from above. However, for the time being, that threat, along with the possibility of a military attack, has been lifted—at least until the US presidential elections of 2017. Rowhani, speaking soon after the deal was signed, claimed that Iran had actually