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Once again the Obama administration is choosing to make Iran out to be the evil empire,
when it could easily have been reasonable and accommodating. On the eve of the talks
we have all been waiting for, and after repeated snubs on top of the snubs from the
Bush administration, the US has chosen to blow this issue up out of all proportion. In 2006 the Iranians agreed to an Additional Protocol to its IAEA commitments, under which they would suspend enrichment and accept tighter reporting standards while they talked to the P5+1 nations about a more permanent solution. But the US refused to talk to them unless they first gave up enrichment entirely, which they were never prepared to do, and the US persuaded the Europeans (UK, France and Germany) to not talk either, so after 6 months of stand-off the Iranians said, "Well if you won't talk to us, then we will drop the Additional Protocol and resume enrichment". And when they formally announced that it was dropped, the Europeans said, "No, you can't do that, you are breaking the rules you agreed to, and the Iranians said, "Tough." This left the Iranians operating under the pre-Additional Protocol rules. So now the facility they are building at Qom is at the stage where it is 6 months away from having nuclear material on site, and it needs to be reported under the old, less strict reporting rules, and so the Iranians reported it to the IAEA by letter on 21st September 2009. Whereupon the US and Europe say that under the rules (their version of the rules) this should have been reported ages ago, and this is proof that the evil Iranians are cheating. Israel takes things a step further and says this is "proof of a nuclear weapons program". How the ABC can report this with a straight face is hard to understand - the facility hasn't even started up yet, let alone enriched uranium to bomb material levels. Obama says the facility is able to house 3,000 centrifuges, but since it is underground, the only way to assess its size is to estimate the volume of rock removed and piled up nearby. This GoogleEarth placemark shows the latest (2010) image. These images were uploaded to GoogleEarth on 25 March 2005 :  Larger scale This is the area in January 2009 from a DigitalGlobe image published at http://www.isisnucleariran.org/assets/pdf/Qom_Imagery_Brief_25Sept2009.pdf  So the Iranians are not cheating under the rules given that the Additional Protocol lapsed 3 years ago. And the IAEA still says they have found no evidence of any weapons program, and the US still can't come up with any proof other than the stuff the CIA/Mossad made up about coming from a laptop in Germany recovered from an anti-Iranian Kurdish group of terrorists. Is this what diplomacy is supposed to be about ? Obama is using EXACTLY the same trickery as Bush on this. Why would he deliberately misrepresent the situation and blow it up into an issue just ahead of talks ? The only interpretation is that he WANTS the talks to fail. Further reading: Keeping Iran Honest by Scott Ritter America Is Led And Informed By Liars by Paul Craig Roberts |