In Tehran, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called the dispute over Iran's efforts to enrich uranium an unwarranted "Western outcry" and said the nation would not succumb to Western pressure to stop.
Speaking to Iranian nuclear experts, he said achieving nuclear technology was more important than mining for oil in Iran, where oil revenue makes up some 80 percent of foreign-exchange earnings.
"Let me tell you, the importance of achieving and using nuclear energy is higher than oil exploration for our country," state-run television reported him as saying.
However, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in talks in Shanghai, China with Russian President Vladimir Putin, said Iran was ready to enter negotiations on an incentives package by the U.N. powers designed to encourage it to relinquish its nuclear fuel enrichment program.
"The Iranian side responded positively to the six-nation proposal for a way out of the crisis," Putin told reporters afterward. He said "Iran is ready to enter negotiations" and that he hoped that it would soon set a date for the start of talks.
Ehsan Jahandideh, a member of the Iranian president's delegation in Shanghai for a regional summit, confirmed Ahmadinejad's remarks.
What is mixed about this?
Iran's "way out of the crisis" is to get nuclear weapons before we can work up the nerve to stop them from getting them. Iran will not give up their nukes and in the interest of buying time to get them they stand ready to talk as long as any EU flunky trained in the fine arts of sitting and crafting proposals in French, English, and Farsi.
The statements by the two Iranian leaders are fully consistent with Iran's strategy.
