Another Chance At Negotiations With Iran

By Steve Hynd

As the warmongering Right gins up its noise machine for another try at the old "Real Men go to Tehran" bullshit, it looks very like the Obama administration is going to ignore them, thankfully.

The Atlantic's Max Fisher wrote yesterday that Iran might be ready to seriously try for a deal and today Robert Dreyfuss says that talks are definitely on.

The State Department announced yesterday that it is prepared to re-engage and restart the aborted talks over the deal reached last October concerning the enriched uranium for Tehran's research reactor. This is a big deal. Said P.J. Crowley, the State Department spokesman:

"We obviously are fully prepared to follow up with Iran on specifics regarding our initial proposal involving the Tehran research reactor�as well as, you know, the broader issues of trying to fully understand the nature of Iran's nuclear program. We hope to have the same kind of meeting coming up in the coming weeks that we had last October."

According to US officials, the new talks are likely to begin at the technical level. But they could quickly escalate to more senior officials.

The Iranians have also agreed to start talking again in September. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, who supported the October deal but failed to get backing either from Ayatollah Khamenei or from the reformist opposition for it, says that Iran will re-enter talks.

What does this all mean? It means that despite the huffing and puffing from some quarters, diplomacy is back on track.

This is good, good news - and it makes me wonder if Hilary Clinton has lost a policy war in there somewhere. Let's face it, she's been a spanner in the works all along. One of the best things Obama could do to help future talks would be to muzzle her comments to the press. But Obama would also do well to take to heart the words of the outgoing State expert on Iran, who seems to have resigned in frustration:

"Here's the problem," Limbert said. "For 30 years, careers were made both here and in Tehran by how nasty you could be to the other side and how creative you could be in being nasty to the other side. So if you're going to change that, what happens if it doesn't get some immediate result? It's very easy to slip back into what you always have been doing."

Here's hoping - because jaw, jaw really is better than war,war.