The deal is sure to be given cool, careful and skeptical scrutiny in Washington where remaining internationalist moderates are being rapidly and systemically purged from their last two power centers: the U.S. State Department and the CIA, but it was also received with widespread criticism in Iran's influential popular press.

This is undoubtedly an unlimited suspension of uranium enrichment, the newspaper Kayhan fulminated. It is exactly the same illegitimate and illegal demands from European countries which Iran had previously clearly rejected.

What Iran has agreed to is the cessation of uranium enrichment under the name of a long term and a full scale suspension, the newspaper Jomhuri-ye Eslami commented. No one can offer this right before it is ratified in the Majlis, - the Iranian parliament.

Iranians had expected to get more than we got, grumbled the newspaper Khorasan.

Reaction in the Iranian press was far from uniformly hostile.

Many papers grudgingly welcomed the agreement as the best deal Iran could get.

Indeed, though the agreement superficially appears to be a triumph for the moderate pragmatists around President Mohammed Khatami, it runs the danger of sparking a revival of popular anti-Western, and especially anti-U.S. nationalism to restore the battered political fortunes of the old hard-liners led by former Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati; Tehran Mayor Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad; parliamentary Speaker Gholam Ali Haddad-Adel; parliamentarian Ahmad Tavakoli and former Revolutionary Guards commander Mohsen Rezaie.

There is also the possibility former President Ali-Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the head of the Expediency Council, once a relative moderate but now trying to court conservative support, will try and take advantage of it.

That is because divided as they are on domestic issues like corruption, the imposition of Islamic religious law and the repression of popular criticism, Iranians, especially young students, appear united in their enthusiasm for the country's burgeoning nuclear program.

There are many reasons for this: One is simple national pride in developing nuclear weapons and nuclear power. A second is that in a violent, volatile region where so many potentially hostile neighbors have nuclear weapons already, from Israel in the west to India and Pakistan in the east, there is a deeply felt popular consensus that Iran had better have them too.

Where American and Israeli critics in particular see Iran's development of nuclear weapons as a threat to fundamental U.S. national security and possibly to the very continued existence of the Jewish state, Iranians see it as essential for their national survival.

They fear remaining defenseless against a nuclear-armed Israel that has made no secret of its opposition to their nuclear program.

Also, Iran lost at least half a million dead - the total death toll may have even been far higher - in its bloody, eight-year war with neighboring Iraq following Saddam Hussein's unprovoked attack on it in 1980 in the early days of the Islamic Republic.

Iraq bombarded Iranian cities with short-range tactical missiles and used poison gas often in its operations in that dark time. Iranians believe it would not have dared to do so if they already had a nuclear deterrent of their own at that time.

The U.S. invasion and conquest of neighboring Iraq last year also concentrated Iranian minds wonderfully. They had failed despite the expenditure of hundreds of thousands of lives to militarily defeat far smaller Iraq in a war that lasted eight years.

For the second time in 12 years, the United States pulled it off easily in only three weeks, at a cost of less than 300 lives. Clearly, conventional Iranian military forces could not hope to fare much if at all better against a U.S. military at the height of its power than the Iraqis did.

Iran's nuclear program is also universally popular because of the widespread recognition that the oil wealth the nation produced for global consumption through the 20th century is finally running out.

Iran has had to turn to technically complex and difficult programs of pumping gas into many of its oil fields to boost their internal pressure and make the continued extraction of their reserves a practical, cost-effective proposition.

Therefore Iran, like China and India, sees a large nuclear program as essential to provide for its long term electrical generating needs even apart from any strategic considerations of defense or offense.

Also, though Iran's hard-liners have been discredited for many years with much of the nation's professional classes and youth, they retain a firm grip on the nation's power structures especially in the army, the intelligence services and the Revolutionary Guards.

If they want to torpedo Majlis ratification of the EU accord, they have many political levers they can pull to pull it off.

More fundamentally, the hard-liners will be carefully watching Iranian popular reaction to the accord. It may be grudgingly accepted. But if there is widespread anger it could prove a godsend.

Having been on the receiving end of so much anger in popular demonstrations in recent years, for the first time in at least a decade if not more, they may have an issue that will turn hundreds of thousands of people out on the streets in Iran's crowded cities on their side.

Popular resentment against unpopular treaties that were negotiated for cool-headed and constructive reasons is not unique to Iran.

In the first decade of the American Republic, the image of John Jay was burned in effigy from one end of America to another after he concluded a useful but highly controversial treaty with the former colonial overlord, England.

It remains to be seen if the new nuclear accord will meet a similar fate or worse from the people of Iran.

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