Challenge for Obama: Holding Iran to its word

The head of the UN nuclear agency arrived in Iran on Saturday for talks on a timetable for inspectors to visit a newly disclosed unfinished nuclear enrichment plant,state radio reported.

A senior Iranian nuclear official told Reuters that ElBaradei would discuss plans to allow International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors to visit the site,as demanded by world powers. He said ElBaradei would not visit any nuclear site.

After Tehran agreed to send most of its openly declared enriched uranium outside Iran to be turned into fuel,Obama administration officials were clearly walking a fine line on Thursday between celebrating the possible breakthrough in international efforts to rein in Iran’s nuclear ambitions and sounding appropriately sceptical that the administration was not going to be played by Tehran.

“Taking the step of transferring its low-enriched uranium to a third country would be a step towards building confidence that Iran’s programme is in fact peaceful,” Obama said on Thursday. But,perhaps aware of the country’s history of appearing to make concessions and then backing off,he quickly added: “We’re not interested in talking for the sake of talking. If Iran does not take steps in the near future to live up to its obligations,then the US will not continue to negotiate indefinitely,and we are prepared to move towards increased pressure.”

It was,in many ways,the exact opposite of what a White House usually does after major international talks. Instead of painting lukewarm concessions as major breakthroughs and going on and on about “warm substantive” meetings,officials were treating a potentially major breakthrough as if it were a suspicious package.

If Iran has really agreed to send most of its openly declared enriched uranium out of the country to be turned into fuel,that is a significant concession,experts said,and much more than the Bush administration ever got over the years of its non-engagement dance with Iran.

For the administration,the problem is that no one is certain that Iran will actually do what Western officials say that it has now agreed to do. In fact,on Friday,less than 24 hours after the talks in Geneva broke up,Iranian officials did not sound as if they thought they had promised anything.

“No,no!” Mehdi Saffare,Iran’s ambassador to Britain and a member of the Iranian delegation to the negotiations,said. He said that the idea of sending Iran’s enriched uranium out of the county had “not been discussed yet.”

This is not the first time that Western officials have left discussions with their Iranian counterparts thinking they had a deal,only to see it melt away.

In 2007,European diplomats said they thought they had wrung a concession from Iran on the same issue,enriching uranium outside the country for use in Iranian reactors,only to have Iran’s supreme leader,Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,reject the idea as an infringement of Iran’s sovereignty. “That’s the big ‘if,’ isn’t it?” said an Obama administration official.