Waiting for Tehran, Ctd.

Trita Parsi (via Laura Rozen) explains Iran's holdup:

Iran told the International Atomic Energy Agency yesterday it wanted til the middle of next week to respond to the written proposal.

"There's two different dynamics here," the National Iranian American Council's Trita Parsi said of Iran's request for more time. "One is at the [international] talks, where ... the Iranians have shown greater flexibility, primarily since the deal seems to implicitly accept Iranian enrichment."

"Then there's the dynamics in Tehran, where various factions have to endorse the deal," Parsi continued. "Due to their internal strife, that seems to hold this up now and potentially scuttle it."

A good point. There's surely a fair amount of Iran-as-usual behavior going on here, and I think a good deal of it is so that the regime can save face. If the negotiators accepted the terms immediately it could have been used and manipulated by factions in Tehran as equivocation, or worse yet, outright surrender to those rotten Western imperialists. Anti-Americanism is their communism; their terrorism. It's a catchall litmus test which serves to isolate—and if necessary, purge—internal rivals.

But more to Parsi's point, the regime is in fact a dysfunctional and inefficient one. You know you have trouble being expedient when you have to create a body dedicated to ensuring expedience. They preside over a regime with outrageous unemployment and terrible inflation. Ahmadinejad was handed a country enjoying a record surplus thanks to oil profits, yet still he managed to drive up the deficit and ruin the economy. They're not good at this government thing.

Why would they be any more expedient at this diplomacy thing?