28 January 2009: Times
By Bronwen Maddox
Now we know what President Obama meant in his inauguration speech by calling on potential enemies to unclench their fists. He meant Iran above all, and he used his first interview with a foreign media outlet – al-Arabiya television – to promise to extend the hand of American diplomacy to Tehran if the regime froze its nuclear programme.
This is a definite, deliberate and energetic attempt to change the course of negotiations with Iran, which have gone almost nowhere for nearly seven years. It is offering a big prize – contact with the US and normalisation of Iran’s relations with the rest of the world. Obama has made clear that he intends to explore immediately whether there is any point in US officials having direct talks with their Iranian counterparts.
This is a rejection of the philosophy of George W. Bush’s presidency that the US should grant contact with a hostile or obstructive regime only as a reward for that country’s compliance with US objectives. But behind Obama’s offer, there is also a threat. It’s just that no one – crucially, including Iran and Israel – knows what it is. Susan Rice, his new Ambassador to the United Nations, warned of putting increasing pressure on Iran if it did not curb its nuclear programme.
The US and Europe accuse Iran of aiming to build nuclear weapons, which it denies. Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State, and Dennis Ross, the new Middle East supremo, have both talked, outside the frame of their new jobs, about the possibility of a strike on Iran’s nuclear
facilities but few close to the Obama team think it is an attractive option.
Mark Fitzpatrick, of the IISS think-tank in London, said that within a year Iran would have enough low-enriched uranium to make a weapon, if it then enriched the material further. He added that Iran had enough uranium in gaseous form to make 35 weapons.
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