1 Boring Old Man

Iran: More accomplished in one day of negotiations

than in 8 years of threats
Salon
by Glenn Greenwald
Oct. 2, 2009

Here are two stories from the last 24 hours which provide an interesting and glaring contrast:

McClatchy, reporting on yesterday’s meeting with Iran in Geneva:

^{Iran also pledged that within weeks it would allow the inspection of a previously covert uranium enrichment facility near the holy city of Qom, and the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, announced that he’d head to Tehran to work out the details.}

Eli Lake, The Washington Times, this morning:

^{President Obama has reaffirmed a 4-decade-old secret understanding that has allowed Israel to keep a nuclear arsenal without opening it to international inspections, three officials familiar with the understanding said. … Mr. Obama pledged to maintain the agreement when he first hosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House in May. Under the understanding, the U.S. has not pressured Israel to disclose its nuclear weapons or to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which could require Israel to give up its estimated several hundred nuclear bombs.}

In addition to agreeing to allow full inspections of its Qom facility, Iran yesterday also did this:

^{Iran agreed in principle Thursday to ship most of its current stockpile of enriched uranium to Russia, where it would be refined for exclusively peaceful uses, in what Western diplomats called a significant, but interim, measure to ease concerns over its nuclear program…}

^{Under the tentative uranium deal, Iran would ship what a U.S. official said was "most" of its approximately 3,000 pounds of low-enriched uranium to Russia, where it would be further refined, to 19.75 percent purity. That is much less than the purity needed to fuel a nuclear bomb.}

^{French technicians then would fabricate it into fuel rods and return it to Tehran to power a nuclear research reactor that’s used to make isotopes for nuclear medicine.}

Steve Hynd explains why Iran’s willingness to agree to this process was both so surprising and so significant.  As is true for any tentative agreement with anyone, there is always the possibility that something could happen prior to compliance, but this was a deal reached after a single-day meeting. Just consider that, as Hynd said on Twitter, the "Obama WH already got more from one buffet lunch with Iran than Bush WH did in 8 years of saber-rattling"…

I don’t know about you, but I’m finally beginning to feel a little room to breathe at last. When we elected Barack Obama, we had such high hopes, but, I for one, was not prepared for the circus coming to town. The oppositionalism and misinformation campaigns of the Republicans, the rise of the clowns in the right wind media, and the disasterous state of our economy combined to dampen any relief we might have felt after the torrential Bush years. I expected some disappointment in that Obama is a consensus builder and a moderate, but I had no idea he’d run immediately into an ambush. But recently, it feels like there’s a break in the clouds. It’s nothing specific – more the tone of the evening news, the flavor of the op-eds,  and some obvious successes like the one Glenn is writing about. Reminds me of that movie title, "a patch of blue." During the campaign, the buzz word for Obama was "unflappable." It looks like that is beginning to play out at last. Frankly, I don’t know how he’s gotten up in the mornings to face the barrage. Cross fingers, throw salt over shoulder, pray for a break in the  clouds…