The European Union has made another sizable mistake, this one trying to negotiate with Iran regarding its aspirations to pursue nuclear technology. The Telegraph reports that the Iranian shell game worked perfectly:
An Iranian foreign policy official has boasted that the regime bought extra time over its stalled negotiations with Europe to complete a uranium conversion plant.
In comments that will infuriate EU diplomats, Hosein Musavian said that Teheran took advantage of the nine months of talks, which collapsed last week, to finish work at its Isfahan enrichment facility.
“Thanks to the negotiations with Europe we gained another year in which we completed the [project] in Isfahan,” he told an Iranian television interviewer.
Mr Musavian also claimed that work on nuclear centrifuges at a plant at Natanz, which was kept secret until Iran’s exiled opposition revealed its existence in 2002, progressed during the negotiations.
This comes as no surprise to Slowplay.com. We pegged this six months ago, on February 7:
Read: We’ve tricked the Euros into a standstill with all of this talk. We know they won’t ever really do anything to us, so we’re trying to broker some sort of sweetheart deal where we claim to be sensitive to their concerns and give them some concessions. We’ll then ignore all the concessions and continue on our merry way. We hope that the United States doesn’t take us to account and screw everything up by toppling our regime.
Some EU heads must roll over this one. This is a complete and total disgrace.
See also, Slowplay.com on Iran:
February 8
March 12
July 31
Nathan Novak at 5:15 pm
I remember saying to a friend several months ago, “Good ideeeeeeeeea? Good idea to let the Iranians stall things? NO. NEVER. Terrible idea.” Then my friend looked at me like I was crazy.
Comment by Professor Honigsberg — August 23, 2005 @ 4:08 pm