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Sunday, March 03, 2013

Israeli consensus: Iran stalling for time

For what it's worth, EU chief negotiator Catherin Ashton is learning to dress modestly, even by Iranian standards (still waiting to see her in a hijab, but it looks like that could happen soon too). Unfortunately, she's not accomplishing much else, at least according to the consensus here in Israel, which is that Iran is playing for time.
“The only concrete result of the latest round of talks, is that the Iranians, have got more time that they can exploit to move forward in their nuclear program,” the Israeli official said.
During those talks, the six world powers involved in the talks — the US, United Kingdom, France, Russia, China and Germany — offered Tehran the option to ease their ban on trade in gold and other precious metals and relaxation of an import embargo on Iranian petrochemical products.
In exchange, a senior U.S official said, Iran would among other things have to suspend uranium enrichment to a fissile concentration of 20 percent at its Fordow underground facility and “constrain the ability to quickly resume operations there.”
Western diplomats are hopeful that the talks could lead to progress on halting Iran’s nuclear program, while Israel has remained skeptical, believing that Iran is exploiting the situation.
Speaking before Sunday morning's cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Netanyahu agreed.
At the weekly cabinet meeting the prime minister said that the only thing the talks had achieved was more stalling time for Iran, and with that time he said, Iran plans to continue enriching uranium in order to make a nuclear bomb.
"Iran is getting closer to this goal," he warned.

...

The United States, China, France, Russia, Britain and Germany last week offered modest sanctions relief in return for Iran curbing its most sensitive nuclear work but made clear that they expected no immediate breakthrough.
In an attempt to make their proposals more palatable to Iran, the six powers appeared to have softened previous demands somewhat, for example regarding their requirement that the Islamic state ship out its stockpile of higher-grade uranium.
US Secretary of State John Kerry has called the talks "useful" and said that a serious engagement by Iran could lead to a comprehensive deal in a decade-old dispute that has threatened to trigger a new Middle East war.
 What could go wrong?

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1 Comments:

At 5:41 PM, Blogger Empress Trudy said...

I'm not that optimistic. I believe Iran already is a nuclear power and they've agreed with the EU and Obama to run out the clock on sanctions at which time Iran will announce they're a nuclear power and the EU and Obama can claim it a great victory of diplomacy that the Peaceful Peaceloving Persians of Peace were never attacked. It will clearly be too late to do anything then, not that they had any intention of ever doing anything at all. But for all the mumbling from Sunni Arab world, they will quietly hope that it leads to the destruction of the Jews, and them, and only then, will Obama step in to stop Iran from hurting the Arab states.

 

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