Iran Presses For Direct U.S. Talks On Nukes

Posted on May 24, 2006

Iranian officials are furiously working diplomatic back channeles to open a dialogue with the U.S. (Apparently the Iranian’s president’s 18-page letter to Bush opened the floodgates.)

The significance of this? For 25 years Iran has enforced a taboo against making overtures to “The Great Satan.”

Washington Post:

TEHRAN, May 23—Iran has followed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent letter to President Bush with explicit requests for direct talks on its nuclear program, according to U.S. officials, Iranian analysts and foreign diplomats.

The eagerness for talks demonstrates a profound change in Iran’s political orthodoxy, emphatically erasing a taboo against contact with Washington that has both defined and confined Tehran’s public foreign policy for more than a quarter-century, they said.

Though the Tehran government in the past has routinely jailed its citizens on charges of contact with the country it calls the “Great Satan,” Ahmadinejad’s May 8 letter was implicitly endorsed by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and lavished with praise by perhaps the most conservative ayatollah in the theocratic government.

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