Iran and world powers agreed to meet again next month to try to ease the long standoff over its nuclear work despite achieving scant progress at talks in Baghdad towards resolving the main sticking points of their dispute.
Iran would love it if the West reverses its long-held position and allows Iran some form of Uranium enrichment--that opening leaves room for lots of cheating. Which is apparently easy enough now:
The U.N. atomic agency has found evidence at an underground bunker in Iran that could mean the country has moved closer to producing the uranium threshold needed to arm nuclear missiles, diplomats said Friday.
The International Atomic Energy Agency has found traces of uranium enriched up to 27 percent at the Fordo enrichment plant in central Iran, the diplomats told The Associated Press.
And if we give in and allow Iran to carry out some enrichment, the excuse Iran trotted out for this discovery will be easier to make and even more difficult for the West to call them on:
A top Iranian nuclear negotiator said traces of enriched uranium discovered at an underground bunker came from a "routine technical issue," the country's official IRNA news agency reported on Saturday.
Even if we can get our maximum position of no more enrichment at all, years of talking while Iran's centrifuges spun have put Iran in a good position to get to their goal:
Iran has significantly stepped up its output of low-enriched uranium and total production in the last five years would be enough for at least five nuclear weapons if refined much further, a U.S. security institute said.
Iran seems to think Israel is a one-bomb state, so they'll have a margin of error if everything is halted now.
But all Iran really needs from the West is time to finish their nuclear work. So just talking is a victory for Iran.
Heck, time is really just what most Westerners want, too. If only Iran will go nuclear before we strike, these Westerners can claim it is too late to do anything about Iran's nuclear program--darn the luck, we were so close to doing something--and we just have to stop worrying and learn to love the Iranian bomb.
UPDATE: I'm reasonably sure there will be some sort of deal. The main sticking point will be convincing Iran that we really are willing to pretend that Iran is making some concession to us. But there's a decent chance that Iran is so confident that they won't stoop to that level of even pretending to back down to the West.
Have no doubt that Iran has learned from Saddam about how to treat international inspectors:
The U.N. nuclear watchdog has not yet given good enough reasons to visit an Iranian site where it suspects there may have been experiments for developing nuclear weapons, Iranian media said.
And when will there be enough good reasons? When Iran has scrubbed the site enough to make sure that any anomolies are small enough to be a mere "routine technical issue" rather than a violation. Prove it, IAEA. We dare you.
