Posted on 08/14/2005 11:13:28 PM PDT by F14 Pilot
Iran 'kept EU talking' while it finished nuclear plant
By Colin Freeman
(Filed: 14/08/2005)
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.
Technicians working at the Isfahan uranium conversion 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.
"We needed six to 12 months to complete the work on the centrifuges," said Mr Musavian, chairman of the Iranian Supreme National Security Council's foreign policy committee. He made his remarks on August 4 - two days before Iran's foreign ministry rejected the European Union offer of incentives to abandon its uranium enrichment programme.
Critics of the regime will see his comments as confirmation that Iran never contemplated giving up its programme, despite top-level diplomacy involving Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, and his French and German counterparts.
The US was always pessimistic about the talks' chance of success. Yesterday President George W Bush refused to rule out using military force to press Iran into giving up its nuclear programme, which Washington suspects is a front for weapons-making. "All options are on the table," Mr Bush told Israeli television.
Mr Musavian, whose remarks were translated by the Middle East Research Institute based in Washington, was responding to criticism from Iranian hardliners that Teheran should never have entered into the EU negotiations.
He said that until then, Iran had dealt solely with the UN-backed International Atomic Energy Authority, which had given it a 50-day deadline to suspend uranium enrichment on pain of referral to the UN Security Council.
"The IAEA give us a 50-day extension to suspend the enrichment and all related activities," he said. "But thanks to the negotiations with Europe we gained another year, in which we completed the [project] in Isfahan."
The plant, about 250 miles south of Teheran, carries out an early stage of the cycle for developing nuclear fuel, turning yellowcake into UF4 and then into UF6, a gas essential to enrichment.
"Today, we are in a position of power," Mr Musavian said. "Isfahan is complete and has a stockpile of products." Mr Musavian also said that Iran had further benefited from sweeteners offered by the EU, including the invitation to enter talks on Iran joining the World Trade Organisation.
Iran is facing possible referral to the Security Council after scientists began breaking seals at the Isfahan plant, a precursor to resuming the research it agreed to suspend during the EU talks.
The Foreign Office declined to comment on Mr Musavian's rem-arks. Last week it said Iran made a "serious mistake" by opting to resume uranium conversion.
Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the IAEA, is due to report on Iran's renewed nuclear activities on September 3, which could trigger a Security Council referral.
lol
Quote;
The Chinese have their own problems with Islamic separatists.
The chinese will not coddle the islamaist like the west does. They will line they up and shoot them by the 10's of thousands if they get out of line.
ping
It was written as a warning...unfrotunately, too many things in there are playing out in real life.
Recent history? Like when the week or day before 9/11 the Chinese visited and opened relations with the Taliban?
That series was written as a fictional warning about what might transpire...this stuff is actually happening.
Are there any Chinese Freepers? It might be useful to open lines of communications beyond the Bamboo Curtain.
Trouble
World War III participants are choosing up sides?
Nice honor guard SKS's
Tell me more...
I've always thought that the US should have a one China policy, and that China would be Taiwan. Accomodating the red Chinese was a big enough error and then Beelzeflubba started shipping them our technology and jobs. More Clinton legacy..
Not hardly, but it is the first time the Chinese have ever openly held military talks with a regime we are currently close to war with.
The chinese had "advisors" in afghanistan helping the taliban. The fall of the berlin wall was just halftime.
It's not just Clinton. This is a continuous line of policy that goes back to Nixon. The theory that was initially peddled was that building up China would provide an effective counterweight to the USSR. It's the whole "enemy of my enemy" idiocy that has never gotten us anything but trouble.
Hasn't worked so far. :-)
After 400 armed uprisings, the Uighurs still have not settled into the notion of being Chinese subjects.
From the article: Until about 10 years ago, Beijing interfered little in the lives of its Muslim population. But this changed when Chinese authorities concluded that there was a clearly defined religious dimension to Uighur separatism, an opinion not without merit. Separatists, as a rule, base their position on religious grounds. Consider the following passage from an audiocassette illegally distributed by separatists in Uighuristan: "Allah directly states that the unbelievers, who insult those who are faithful to Muhammad, will be eliminated by the Mujahideen. This is why the liberation of our Motherland from the Chinese aggressors is our objective enlightened by Islam. The elimination of Muslims, expropriation of their land and property, allows us to pursue armed resistance. Whether we want it or not, a long and bloody struggle awaits us. We shall be killed by the Chinese aggressors. Each Muslim should study military affairs. There is no aggressor who would be willing to liberate the land just because we throw tomatoes at him. Those who enter with arms will leave by arms. Allah prescribed this path to us, just like prayers and zakat." The Uighurs are crazier than Bin Laden's death loving fools for Allah. The article is well worth reading, should you get the chance. Causes me to wonder just how many other widening cracks there are in the Chinese social/political/economic fabric.
Tell me more...
Not as far fetched a notion as it may at first appear, IMHO. Two reasons for my not-so-expert speculation:
From the article:
According to the head of the Committee of National Security of Kazakhstan, Nurtay Duratbaev, the organization was preparing to commit terrorist acts. Several witnesses testified at trail that - following instructions from Maksum - the cell was planning an attack targeting the American military base in Kyrgyzstan. Pakistani authorities' subsequent confiscation of blueprints showing the location of the US Embassy, the American military base, and a synagogue in Kyrgyzstan from Uighur members of IPT provided additional, albeit indirect, confirmation of an IPT plot.
These people are threats to both the U.S. and China.
Nor would this be the first time post WWII that China and the U.S. were almost military allies in the face of a common threat. During the 1971 Pakistani-India troubles, Nixon was prepared to support the Chinese against the Soviets with air support which would include bombing Russian troops and facilities. From the State Department Historian's office:
Later in the afternoon of December 9, Nixon applied further pressure on the Soviet Union. The Soviet Minister of Agriculture, Vladimir Matskevich, was in Washington and Nixon received him for what Matskevich assumed was a courtesy call. Instead, to his surprise, Nixon delivered a stern warning that the crisis on the subcontinent was poisoning the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union. He asked "are short-term gains for India worth jeopardizing Soviet relations with the U.S.?" (257) On Nixon's instructions, Kissinger saw Vorontsov on December 10 and warned him that the United States had "treaty" obligations to Pakistan, established in 1959 and confirmed by President Kennedy, that required the United States to come to Pakistan's assistance in the event of aggression. The United States, he warned, intended to honor those commitments. (268)
The other element that Nixon wanted to see come into play in a belated effort to prevent India from crushing Pakistan was a threat from China. In a conversation with Kissinger in the Oval Office on December 10, Nixon instructed Kissinger to ask the Chinese to move some forces toward the frontier with India. "Threaten to move forces or move them, Henry, that's what they must do now." (266) With those instructions, Kissinger went to New York the evening of December 10 and met with Huang Hua, China's Permanent Representative to the United Nations. He briefed Huang Hua on Gandhi's position and on the threat to West Pakistan as perceived in Washington. He told Huang Hua about the carrier force moving toward the Bay of Bengal. And, using diplomatic language, he relayed Nixon's request for Chinese military moves in support of Pakistan. Kissinger added that Nixon wanted China to know that if China took such action, the United States would oppose the efforts of others to interfere with China. There were no qualifications to Kissinger's diplomatically worded but clear assurance that the United States would be prepared for a military confrontation with the Soviet Union if the Soviet Union attacked China. (274)
On December 12, Nixon had to contemplate the implications of the assurance offered to the Chinese two days earlier. During the course of a conversation between Nixon and Kissinger in the Oval Office about the need for a military move by China to reinforce the impact of the arrival of the U.S. carrier off East Pakistan, Kissinger's deputy Alexander Haig entered with word that the Chinese wanted to have a meeting in New York. That was startling news. Kissinger said the Chinese had never initiated contact in New York. Suddenly it seemed likely that the China was going to move militarily against India. That raised the likelihood that the Soviet Union would be given an excuse to strike China. Kissinger said: "If the Soviets move against them and we don't do anything, we will be finished." Nixon asked: "So what do we do if the Soviets move against them? Start lobbing nuclear weapons in, is that what you mean?" Kissinger responded: "If the Soviets move against them in these conditions and succeed, that will be the final showdown...and if they succeed we will be finished." He added that "if the Russians get away with facing down the Chinese and the Indians get away with licking the Pakistanis...we may be looking down the gun barrel." In the end, they concluded that the projected confrontation with the Soviet Union would not involve a nuclear exchange. Kissinger felt that to preserve credibility, the United States, if necessary, would have to support China with conventional forces: "We have to put forces in. We may have to give them bombing assistance." Kissinger saw the danger of war between the Soviet Union and China as a strong possibility, with the Soviets looking for "a pretext to wipe out China," but Nixon concluded at the end of the discussion that "Russia and China aren't going to go to war." (281)
As badly as the Chinese need the oil, they are even more xenophobic than the Russians. IMHO, they'll want to keep their land buffers, like Xinjiang, intact. Seems to me they have both an economic and a military incentive to see things go our way in Iraq and, to a lesser extent, even in Iran. They just don't want us too close to the buffers.
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