IRAN: Tehran says it doesn’t ‘recognize’ two-week nuke deadline

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With days before a two-week deadline is set to arrive, Iran appears unlikely to give a definitive yes-or-no answer to Western demands that it stop expanding its nuclear program as a precursor to preliminary negotiations.

On Wednesday evening, Iranian foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki gave a crystal-clear answer to the question of whether Iran would respond according to the Western timeframe. ‘Iran does not recognize the deadline for the nuclear issue,’ he told reporters. ‘We answer to the incentives package whenever it fits us.’

European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana along with U.S., European, Russian and Chinese envoys met with Iranian nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili in Geneva on July 19 to discuss a package of economic and political incentives Iran could obtain if it stopped enriching uranium. At the very least, they wanted Iran to stop increasing its uranium enrichment.

No one’s really surprised about Iran’s refusal to respond...

... Iranians are famous for being hard bargainers as well as tricky diplomats. Iran’s current rulers are ultra-nationalists and pride themselves on their feisty independence. They’ve managed to weld Iran’s nuclear ambitions to its peoples’ dreams of grandeur. They’ve tried to turn their position on the nuclear issue into a symbol of scrappy Third World defiance against the designs of the world’s rich and elite nations.

And they get prickly when anyone, especially the West, starts imposing ultimatums.

‘Backing down one step in the face of the arrogance will encourage it to come one step forward,’ Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said on Wednesday, according to the Islamic Republic News Agency. ‘The idea that retreating and giving up right stances and words will make the arrogance [the U.S.] change its policy is totally wrong and baseless.’

Russian President Vladimir Putin has consistently warned the West not to back Iran into a corner with threats and sanctions. It’s not that he’s got a lot of love for the Islamic Republic. He says he just doesn’t think such tactics will persuade Iran to give up its enrichment of uranium, a precursor to building either a native nuclear power industry or an atomic bomb.

Even the U.S. is backing away from a strict interpretation of the two-week deadline. ‘I didn’t count the days. [The deadline]’s coming up soon,’ State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters.

Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations’ arms control branch, Asghar Soltanieh, said today that Iran won’t suspend, but it wants to keep talking. Many Western diplomats wonder whether talking will eventually lead to a suspension or merely stretch out the negotiations until the Bush administration runs its course and Iran further masters the enrichment cycle.

— Borzou Daragahi in Beirut and Ramin Mostaghim in Tehran