Iran: Incentive Package a ‘Step Forward’
The six-nation incentive package aimed at halting Iran's uraniam enrichment appears to have some purchase in Tehran. But don't start celebrating. The Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei again vowed that Iran would never back down on its nuclear program. This is also bad news for Cheney and Rumsfeld: The appearance of diplomatic progress will make a future U.S. invasion all the tougher to justify.The six-nation incentive package aimed at halting Iran’s uraniam enrichment appears to have some purchase in Tehran. But don’t start celebrating. The Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei again vowed that Iran would never back down on its nuclear program.
This is also bad news for Cheney and Rumsfeld: The appearance of diplomatic progress will make a future U.S. invasion all the tougher to justify.
Dig, Root, GrowAP:
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Friday that the six-nation incentive package aimed at getting his country to halt uranium enrichment was a step forward in resolving the dispute over Iran’s nuclear program.
“Generally speaking, we’re regarding this offer as a step forward and I have instructed my colleagues to carefully consider it,” Ahmadinejad told reporters after meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao on the sidelines of a regional summit in Shanghai.
Ahmadinejad’s remark was the highest-level sign that Iran was preparing to negotiate over the package of incentives offered by the Big Five of the U.N. Security Council, plus Germany.
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Mainstream outlets’ coverage of U.S.-Iran relations are augmenting the Trump administration’s provocations at a critical moment.
On Monday, a Russian ship carrying almost all of Iran’s stockpile of low-enriched uranium left Iran, “fulfilling a major step in the nuclear deal struck last summer and, for the first time in nearly a decade, apparently leaving Iran with too little fuel to manufacture a nuclear weapon,” The New York Times reports.
The White House announced Sunday that Iran will start whittling down its stockpile of enriched uranium by Jan. 20, giving a sense of momentum to the agreement announced in November between Washington and Tehran.
Two days of discussion over Iran’s nuclear program ended in uncertainty Thursday, with Iran maintaining it has the right to enrich nuclear fuel and the lead negotiator for the European Union stating vaguely that “significant problems remain” with the Iranian position. Negotiations are set to resume in June.
Iran has officially declared that it has created its first domestically produced piece of raw uranium, otherwise deceptively known as non-edible yellowcake, and has subsequently delivered that uranium to a plant for enrichment.
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