- 2 October 2009
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- 4 Comments
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- Diplomacy, UN
A cursory look at the balance sheet after yesterday’s Geneva talks
2 October 2009 Posted By Patrick Disney
After one day’s meeting, a mere seven and a half hours long, the world woke up today to reports of “surprisingly productive” talks between Iran and the P5+1 yesterday in Geneva.
Let’s take a very brief look at what’s come out so far:
- No breakdown: The absolute bare minimum of success yesterday was the absence of a complete and total breakdown of the talks. The Obama administration had set the expectations sufficiently low that this really was the big question mark: whether the Iran delegation would flip over the table and storm out like a teenager who has been told to clean its room. (They did not.)
- Access to the Qom facility: The Iranians announced a day before the talks even began that they were committed to opening up the newly-revealed Qom enrichment facility to IAEA inspectors. This very obviously would have been the first matter the West would have wanted to discuss, but Iran went ahead and granted access before the negotiations even began. Inspections are promised to begin prior to the second round of talks.
- Second round of talks scheduled: Based on a willingness on all sides to engage in good faith, a second round of talks has been scheduled to take place in the next couple of weeks. Both sides have expressed their commitment to talks with each other.
- Historic US-Iran bilateral meeting: The first ever high-level bilateral diplomacy took place between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran yesterday. For about 30 minutes, Undersecretary of State Burns met in private with Saeed Jalili.
After the talks finished, it was clear what each side hoped to gain from further discussions:
- Iran wants a presidential summit meeting between Ahmadinejad and Obama (don’t hold your breath); and
- The West wants Iran to hand over its enriched uranium stockpile to a third country to be turned into fuel for a reactor
Then, in another surprise move, the parties announced late yesterday that Iran agreed to the West’s offer to turn over its uranium stockpile to Russia. Julian Borger explains why this is so significant:
Western officials here say that to restock the TRR, Iran would have to send out up to 1200 kg of LEU. That’s about three-quarters of what they’ve got, and it would be out of the country for a year. When it came back it would be in the form of fuel rods, so it could not be turned into weapons grade material in a quick breakout scenario.
Given all that has happened with Iran over the last few months, I can honestly say that, for once, it’s nice to have been pleasantly surprised.
4 Responses to “A cursory look at the balance sheet after yesterday’s Geneva talks”
Last night Bush’s former Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte intimated, in a private speech to the Yale Club in NYC, that the Israelis depiction of Iran as an existential threat may just be “bravado”.
http://www.iranian.com/main/blog/dm/bush-s-director-national-intelligence-bombing-iran
The West is emphasizing the fact that the LEU stock being further enriched in Russia will remove the “threat” of an immediate “breakout”. That’s bunk. The Iranians do not yet have the technology to build a bomb, and its far from convincing they even have the intention.
Emphasize the flip side of the deal. Iran’s request to the IAEA was granted! They will be provided with medium-enriched uranium for the Tehran Research Reactor. This arrangement implies Western acceptance of Iranian nuclear enrichment!
Could very easily be interpreted as a victory for Iran and, some might argue, a validation of Ahmadinejad’s tough approach to the nuclear issue.
I really don’t hope Ahmadinejad and Obama will shake hands, that would be a blow to the Green movement!
You have to give the clerics credit for NIAC and Islamic Lobbyists for keeping this grave matter off Western agendas. The fraudulent presidential election in June and the subsequent mass demonstrations produced the biggest regime crisis in years. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei must have been panicked at the prospect of losing control — and with reason. Western democrats, not knowing what it is like to rule by fear and force, generally underestimate what a scary and uncertain business it can be, how a single wrong move, usually a too-timid response, can spell catastrophe. Even the masterful Deng Xiaoping, faced with much smaller opposition demonstrations in 1989, believed his Communist oligarchy could lose power absent a decisive show of force followed by a thorough purge of unreliable figures in the regime. In Iran, the regime’s violent crackdown, its mass arrests of opposition figures — including the children of high-ranking clerics — and all the farcical show trials have been signs of weakness and anxiety, not confidence.