US President George W. Bush declared earlier this week that
Washington was willing to join European talks with Iran if Tehran
suspended its uranium enrichment program.
While some hailed it "a major policy shift" and a rare chance
for Iran to accept an American offer, how much real effect the US
offer will have on Iran's nuclear crisis remains unclear.
The US offer to have conditional talks was immediately rejected
by Tehran, which holds that "negotiations without any precondition
would be the best solution to end the Tehran-Washington logjam,"
according to the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid-Reza
Asefi.
Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki also stressed
that the United States must give up its precondition if it really
wanted to join the negotiations.
Analysts said that the US preconditions were far from what the
Iranian authorities could accept. The core of Washington's proposal
is to stop Iran's uranium enrichment but Tehran has never been
ready for a suspension.
With Iran's rejection to the offer, the ongoing argument over
whether the preconditions should be imposed has cast a shadow over
the prospect of a possible resumption of multilateral talks over
Iran's nuclear crisis.
Meanwhile, political analysts have said that the US offer of
conditional talks has hardly changed the fundamental American
policy toward Iran.
Some even noted that to force Iran to give up its suspected
nuclear program was only part of the US goal. Following the
downfall of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, the issue of Iran
quickly became one of the top concerns for the United States in the
Middle East, they said.
The United States has not had formal diplomatic relations with
Iran since the 1979 Islamic revolution when angry students stormed
the American Embassy in Tehran and held 52 American diplomats
hostage for 444 days.
Washington has since been sparing no effort to impose political
and economic sanctions against Iran, warning time and again that
the possibility of military action remained.
The analysts said that Washington's offer to join the EU talks
with Tehran conditionally could be a tactical policy adjustment and
an alteration made under the international pressure calling for
face-to-face talks between Washington and Tehran.
They pointed out that if Iran agrees to the conditions, the
United States will join its European allies in forcing Tehran to
give up its nuclear program completely. But if Iran does not give
in, sanctions will be an option.
"If they (Iranian authorities) continue to say to the world, 'We
really don't care what your opinion is,' then the world is going to
act in concert," President Bush has warned.
(Xinhua News Agency June 5, 2006)
