By Steve Hynd
Yesterday, the Jerusalem Post ran a short piece claiming that:
Iran has completely rejected a UN-brokered nuclear deal, but US President Barack Obama has postponed the official announcement on Teheran's refusal due to internal political reasons...The official reportedly told journalists in Paris that Iran has also refused to resume nuclear talks with the six world powers.
It was tweeted by Obama critics like Danielle Pletka at the neocon AEI, but to be honest it's unbelievable. Even if Iran was willing to keep silent about such refusals for its own reasons, neither Obama nor Iran has enough pull with the IAEA's El Baradei or, especially, France's Iran-hawk foreign minister Bernard Kouchner, to keep the whole thing quiet for more than 30 seconds. In fact, it looks very like Kouchner was the source of the JP report. Today he told reporters that in his opinion: "In practice, the answer has almost been given and it is negative". That's not the same thing by a long chalk but close enough for the war-shills at Murdoch's Jerusalem rag.
There are still signs that Iran is interested in some kind of deal, though. Turkey has confirmed just yesterday, in concert with the IAEA, that it has offered to store Iran's uranium in escrow rather than sending the LEU to provenly unreliable partners Russia and France. There had been reports last week of such an offer, and also reports that Iran had rejected it. But if Turkey is going public now, then it seems Iran can't have rejected the offer yet after all. Moreover, an important voice in Iran's internal deliberations, armed forces chief of staff General Hassan Firouzabadi, said on Thursday that he favored a deal.
�We won�t suffer from an exchange of fuel,� the Mehr news agency quoted the general as saying.
�On the contrary, in obtaining fuel enriched to 20% purity for the Tehran reactor, a million of our citizens will benefit from the medical treatment it can enable and we will prove at the same time the bona fides of our peaceful nuclear activities.�
The general said he had no particular issue with the amount of low-enriched uranium that Iran shipped out - 1,200kg under the current proposals drawn up by the UN nuclear watchdog and approved by the major powers.
�The quantity of uranium enriched to 3.5% that will be shipped out in order to obtain the fuel is not so large as to cause damage,� he said.
Still, Obama is either covering bases or showing he doesn't believe in his own initiative any more, by pressing Russian president Medvedev for sanctions support and saying that �time was running out� for diplomacy. The Chinese, as ever, will be the stumbling block for further sanctions at the UNSC. They'll almost certainly veto any such move and their growing relationship with Iran pretty much guarantees they'll work to undermine any sanctions the US and others might impose unilaterally.
Iran, on it's part, is signalling that it wants a relaxation of existing sanctions as part and parcel of any deal.
Mohsen Rezaee, former commander of Islamic Revolution Guards Corps and currently the Secretary of the Expediency Discernment Council of the Islamic Republic, said that, "In my opinion, the suspension of sanctions by the west is their proper response to build confidence."
"If we cannot obtain this privilege from them, we will, in practice, be the loser of this political deal (of nuclear exchange) as we were in the past," Rezaee was quoted as saying.
He pointed out that in the past, Iran, voluntarily and in order to build confidence, suspended its nuclear activities and signed Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), but it did not receive deserving confidence-building response from the west.
"In the past, the U.S. President Barack Obama had asked Iran to hand over large amount, 75 percent, of its uranium to them in order to build confidence. It naturally can be the subject of a political deal," Rezaee said, adding that "the suspension of Iran's sanctions by the west can be their proper response."
Iran has also halted expansion of its enrichment program, as the IAEA reported last week, perhaps as a signal of good faith.
So it doesn't look like some kind of deal is impossible, just yet - and negotiations are probably continuing behind the scenes and off the hawkish radar. Julian Borger at the Guardian suggests a reason the Obama administration might want those negotiations to spin out for as long as possible.
After a meeting with Dmitry Medvedev, Barack Obama said time was "running out" for the deal. Strictly speaking, the time allotted by the IAEA ran out weeks ago, but all parties involved in the deal are reluctant to abandon the only really promising development in Iranian nuclear talks in more than four years.
The Americans and Europeans believe the uranium export proposal has caused new and interesting splits in the Iranian body politic that could ultimately change a line. A European diplomat I spoke to last week saw Ahmadinejad as the most enthusiastic on the uranium deal, with Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, united in scepticism with conservative opposition figures like Ali Larijani, and reformists like Mirhossein Mousavi. Tearing the deal up and threatening sweeping sanctions would simply reunify the Iranian camp, the argument goes.
But he also ends pessimistically:
And yet, time has to be called at some point, because without a deadline there is no incentive for Iran to agree to anything, and because Israel is believed to have its own timetable for military action if no progress is made. Unless something remarkable turns up, that deadline will fall at the end of December. At this rate, 2010 looks like it could be an even bleaker year in the Middle East than 2009.
If Israel attacks Iran, America and the West will be involved in another major war in the region whether they like it or not. Everyone will assume Western complicity in such an attack.
So, will 2010 finally be the year that the neocons and allied Israeli hardliners finally get their long-wished-for conflict with Iran? The "real men go to Tehran" crowd are obviously hoping so.
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