The best way to ensure Iran doesn’t acquire a nuclear bomb is to make clear it does have a right to an enrichment programme.
Sometime in mid-November, it’s likely that the Iran and the United States, along with the rest of the P5+1 world powers, will sit down in either Geneva or Vienna in an effort to restart talks over Iran’s nuclear programme. Unfortunately, it appears that Barack Obama’s administration will go into such talks with a strategy almost guaranteed to fail.
Unless the United States is willing to acknowledge that Iran, a signatory to the Non-proliferation Treaty, has the right to enrich uranium on its own soil, there’s no chance that the negotiations will work. Years of behind-the-scenes Track II, off-the-record discussions between senior Iranian officials and a number of retired US diplomats of the highest rank have shown that only a win-win outcome can resolve the crisis. The ‘win’ that Iran needs is recognition that it has the right to enrich, while the ‘win’ that the United States, the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency needs is Iran’s agreement to abide by iron-clad oversight of its work by IAEA inspectors under strict, intrusive new protocols.
Despite his outreach to Iran since taking office in January, 2009, Obama has never once declared that Iran has the right to carry out an enrichment programme. Last June, Senator John Kerry—who is close to the president and who’s advised him since Obama was first elected to the Senate in 2004—told the Financial Times that Iran does indeed have that right. In his laudable Cairo speech that same month, in which the president outlined his vision of better relations between the United States and the Muslim world, Obama said that Iran retained the right to peaceful use of nuclear energy.
At the time, I was in Teheran, meeting with Ali Akbar Rezaie, the director general for North and Central Americas at the Iranian foreign ministry, who’d read the Cairo speech very carefully. ‘President Obama didn't say that we have the right to enrich uranium. But he also didn't say that we do not have that right. It’s not clear to us whether he omitted that point intentionally or not,’ Rezaie told me. ‘We don’t know what’s in his mind.’
Sometimes, in diplomacy, creative ambiguity can be helpful. But, in the looming showdown over the Iranian nuclear programme, it’s time for some plain speaking.
Last autumn, in the first meeting between the United States and Iran in three decades, the P5+1 and Iran reached a deal to transfer about two-thirds of Iran’s low-enriched uranium (LEU)—about 1200 kilograms of the approximately 1800 kilos it had then—to Russia and France, where it would be further enriched and processed into fuel rods at the Tehran Research Reactor (TRR). That deal, intended to serve as a confidence-building measure, had the added benefit of leaving Iran without enough LEU to allow it to build even a single bomb, if it were further enriched to weapons-grade. It could also be argued that the October 2009 accord tacitly accepted Iran’s enrichment programme, since, under its terms, Iran didn’t have to shut it down.
Photo Credit: Uniphoto Press
View as Single Page
Reddit
Digg
StumbleUpon
Delicious
Technorati
Yahoo
Google
Plurk
elenore
The essential problem is the U.S. doesn’t need to do anything either which way.Dear Boomers,America has failed at the League of Nation,U.N.,One World Order BS from the beginning(WW1)it was foolish ideology.We are 5% of World population.Yes we are wealthy but not wealthy enough to bribe or force Nations into our so called enlightened idea of World Order especially without European help which is the wealthiest continent in the World,who sits back and let’s us be suckers paying for their defense and having to offer little.All you foolish Boomers who have continued the stupid from your previous generations has lost America and your children money,lives,jobs,and freedoms in pursuit of forcing other people.What do have to show for it.You have never stopped genocide.It happened before ww1 and no Nazi didn’t invent it and sadly were not the last are the largest mass murder,Genocide in Russia,China,Cambodia,etc…What is the purpose of our foreign diplomacy,and I don’t think it is the safety of America.we can blow up the Earth.Why do we close bases down in America while we have 1000 world wide.We can only control what happens in our own borders and international waters in regards to our own ships.
trisha
And, America doesn’t attack small countries that are unable to defend themselves, I suppose. Where does this whole Israeli control of U.S. Foreign Policy bull come from. Israel is a thorn in the side of its Arab neighbors and is doing America’s work, just as, formerly, it did Britain’s work. America and Israel are joined at the hip. Both nations share a common world view from a position of deluded National preeminence, both were born of a genocide and share a common goal, namely: to destabilize the middle-east and to thereby control global access to its mineral wealth.
Perhaps, if politicians like Hillary Clinton didn’t threaten Iran with annihilation, just for looking sideways at Israel, the Iranians might not feel they need nuclear weapons. Iran is key to solving America’s problems in Afghanistan and Pakistan – assuming, that is, that America actually wants to solve these problems. It would behoove the Obama administration to consider that before it attacks Iran, while Israel stands well behind, holding its coat.
William Fuller
It doesn’t matter what Obama wants or doesn’t want. It is crystal clear that Obama is doing exactly what G. Bush did: following the wishes of the enormously wealth and powerful Jewish community. The majority of his major admin officials are Jewish. That is not an anti-Semitic statement. It is a statement of fact.
Am I mistaken? Produce your evidence and I will produce mine, and then one can see for oneself.
I expect that no one will bother to actually check facts here but instead scream to Jehovah that the world is truly anti-Jewish and they are being once again persecuted.
Put up or shut up.
ToivoS
And even worse, in the case of Iranian threats to obliterate Israel,
Iran has not threatened Israel, that is just lying propaganda out of Israel based on faulty translations.