[Peace-discuss] Arrogant lies by Clinton & Rice

[C. G. Estabrook]

	DC to Lula: "Nice try, but too late"
	By Teymoor Nabili in	
	Americas Middle East
	on May 19th, 2010

It didn't take too long for Washington to put Lula firmly in his place.


Brazil's President thought he had scored a diplomatic coup last weekend, by 
persuading Iran to ship 12 tonnes of partially-enriched uranium out of the country.

In many ways he had. Washington, after all, had failed to achieve the same goal 
last October.

But Lula had barely 24 hours to savour the success before Hillary Clinton took 
all the wind out of his sails. With a rhetorical pat on the head for him and his 
Turkish allies, Clinton dismissed the whole process as meaningless, and 
announced that Iran will face more sanctions.


There are a number of unanswered questions regarding the announcement coming 
from Tehran, and although we acknowledge the sincere efforts of both Turkey and 
Brazil to find a solution regarding Iran’s standoff with the international 
community over its nuclear program, the P-5+1, [...] are proceeding to rally the 
international community on behalf of a strong sanctions resolution that will, in 
our view, send an unmistakable message about what is expected from Iran.

But what exactly is expected from Iran? Many had believed that Brazil/Turkey 
deal fulfilled all the conditions Washington had demanded last October in the 
so-called TRR (Tehran Research Reactor) talks.

Not according to Susan Rice, US ambassador to the UN, who said on Tuesday:

We need to be clear; the TRR proposal had nothing do with Iran’s sanctioned 
activities to date, and its nuclear obligations.
By “nuclear obligations”, Rice meant P5+1 demands that Iran give up enriching 
uranium, (which it is allowed to do under the terms of international agreements.)

The whole whiplash event came as a surprise to a number of observers, including 
the National Iranian American Council:

  Linking the TRR deal to suspension of enrichment is a new component – it was 
the White House itself that decided last year to go forward with a deal to swap 
Iran's LEU for fuel rods without a suspension in order to throw back Iran's 
break out capability.
Equally confusing is the fact that Washington’s arguments for another round of 
sanctions against Iran have been based almost exclusively on the claim that Iran 
had rejected the TRR agreement.

But most bizarre of all was Rice’s contention that the crushing of Lula’s 
diplomatic achievement, and the rush to more sanctions, constituted “making 
manifest and real the dual track approach”, and that “the door remains open”.

As representatives from the UK, Russia and China followed Rice up to the UN 
microphone on Thursday, to read almost verbatim from the same script, a couple 
of journalists tried to point out the contradiction: with Brazil having coaxed 
Iran into some fairly major bargaining concessions, didn’t Washington’s 
sanctions bombshell actually constitute a slamming of the diplomatic door?

No-one seemed to hear the question.

http://blogs.aljazeera.net/americas/2010/05/18/dc-lula-nice-try-too-late

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