Surely, this time, Lucy won't yank the football away.
International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Mohammad ElBaradei is pressing members of the agency's board of governors to give Iran "one last chance" before sending Iran's case to the United Nations Security Council for possible sanctions, IAEA officials and European diplomats told Newsmax in Vienna. The decision to refer Iran to the UN Security Council could come on Thanksgiving Day, when the IAEA Board of Governors has its next scheduled meeting to discuss "new information" discovered by inspectors in Iran, the officials said.
ElBaradei discussed a potential "face-saving" deal European negotiators could offer Tehran during meetings with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice in Washington on Tuesday, U.S. and IAEA officials said. "Our message to Iran is that they have an opportunity to influence the timing and nature of the report to the UN Security Council," a State Department official said.
Portions of the offer, which the Europeans have not embraced, were leaked to the New York Times, which reported on Thursday that Iran would be allowed to continue to produce uranium hexafluoride gas (UF6), the feedstock used for uranium enrichment, as long as it exported the product to Russia where it would be enriched to produce reactor-grade fuel.
But a European official directly involved in the negotiations with Tehran denied that the Russia proposal was even on the table, and said the New York Times report was false. "There is no offer," he told Newsmax in Vienna today. "Why should we make an offer? The Iranians must come to us" since they were the ones who had reneged on their promises to suspend all enrichment-related activities. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice also denied the New York Times report. "There is no U.S.-European proposal for the Iranians. I want to say that categorically," she said on Thursday.
An IAEA official present at the Washington, DC meetings where the idea was discussed found other inaccuracies in the New York Times account. "The idea is to allow Iran to make uranium tetrachloride (UF4) I presume they mean uranium tetraflouride â not UF6 â and to keep it under strict IAEA monitoring," the official said. "A moratorium or a total ban on all fuel cycle activities is a non-starter, because of [Iranian] national pride." Like Aryan pride or Bushido. Remember what happened to them.
The U.S. continues to push for a "renewed suspension" of all nuclear fuel processing and enrichment in Iran, a State Department official said. "This is the bar that has been set by the IAEA, and these are our instructions: Iran must renew suspension, renew cooperation with the IAEA, and resume negotiations with the EU3."
The IAEA believes Iran could agree to limit work at Isfahan to UF4 because trial production runs of UF6, which is made from UF4, have been "crap," a senior IAEA official said. "The quality is just no good. This will allow Iran to save face."
The European official, who had just emerged from a meeting in Vienna of the political directors of the three European Union countries (France, Germany and the UK), insisted that ElBaradei had not presented the U.S. offer as a done deal or even as an informal proposal. "Lots of ideas are being discussed," he said.
He called it "something someone wants to float. A trial balloon." European and U.S. officials insisted that it was not up to ElBaradei to lobby the board or to float proposals, but to report the results of IAEA inspections in Iran. "Only the board makes decisions," a State Department official said.
An IAEA official present at the meeting in Washington said that Secretary of State Rice had asked ElBaradei to be "the messenger boy" to Tehran. "Since the Secretary General would like to find a solution that does not send Iran's case to the UN Security Council, he had no problem with that," the official said.
Diplomats in Vienna speculated that the U.S. offer, which would allow Iran to invest in an enrichment facility in Russia but not to enrich uranium itself, was designed to win Russian support at the Security Council should Iran veto the offer, which is expected.
The EU-3 are working on a non-paper they will circulate before the Nov. 24 board meeting that "lays out our red lines and the principles that must underpin" an eventual agreement, the EU official said.
A "non-paper." Perfect for non-men with non-courage and non-intelligence from non-nations with non-militaries.
The IAEA is trying to convince Board of Governors members that referring Iran to the UN Security Council could prompt Iran's radical new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to expel IAEA inspectors from Iran. "It's much better to keep IAEA inspectors in Iran than to send Iran to the UN Security Council in New York without a strategy," a top IAEA official told Newsmax in Vienna. "They did that three years ago with North Korea. And look where we are now" Right. They had made zero progress until the inspectors left, then suddenly claim full capability in weeks.
Iran's new nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, has threatened to toss out IAEA inspectors if the Board of Governors refers their case to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions. Larijani, a Revolutionary Guards intelligence officer, once headed Iran's state broadcasting agency. "At least now Iran is respecting the Additional Protocol, though not actually obeying it" the IAEA official said. The Additional Protocol requires Iran to provide extensive information on previously clandestine nuclear facilities and to allow international inspectors to visit undeclared sites throughout the country.
Despite the clear pattern of cheat and retreat, the EU-3 agrees with ElBaradei that some solution must be found to prevent sending Iran to the UN Security at the end of this month. "So we go to New York, the inspectors get tossed out, and we get a war. Then what have we achieved?" the European official said.
You've let Iran get an extra year on their Manhattan Project. That's what you wanted, right?
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The head of the UN nuclear watchdog welcomed on Thursday moves to avert possible UN sanctions against Tehran over its nuclear programme and appealed for compromise as Iran's president said he was ready to talk.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) 