From The Asia Times
By Pepe Escobar

The United Nations Security Council deadline for Iran to stop uranium enrichment is only one week away. While for the White House escalation hysteria is the name of the game, Europe once again has nothing better to do than to demonstrate its paralysis over bottles of Bordeaux.

Top Iranian nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani, at the sidelines of the Munich security conference this past Sunday, told Javier Solana, the European Union’s top foreign-policy diplomat, that “Tehran is eady to unite all its nuclear activities in a consortium with other countries”. Larijani could only have made this offer under instructions by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Solana admitted publicly that the meeting was “constructive”.

On Monday, Larijani met with the Swiss foreign affairs minister as Switzerland offered to act as a mediator between Iran and the EU under a new proposal. The Swiss proposal is for Iran to stop feeding centrifuges with processed uranium-hexafluoride gas while negotiations resume.

On the same day, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad-Ali Hosseini, at his weekly press conference, confirmed in Tehran that all the issues in the nuclear dossier – including suspension of uranium enrichment – could be discussed again. Hosseini, stressing that Iran’s nuclear program is totally in accordance with International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) regulations, added “we are ready to consider any plan that guarantees our rights”.

The problem is that right on cue, the EU decided to implement the UN sanctions.

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