Bush Blocked Iran Nuke Deal

[marmar]

Bush Blocked Iran Nuke Deal
June 6, 2012

A former top Iranian negotiator says Iran offered the West a deal in 2005 that would have eliminated the possibility of Iran developing a nuclear bomb, but the plan was blocked by hardliners in George W. Bush’s administration who rejected any right of Iran to process uranium, Gareth Porter reports for Inter Press Service.

By Gareth Porter


France and Germany were prepared in spring 2005 to negotiate on an Iranian proposal to convert all of its enriched uranium to fuel rods, making it impossible to use it for nuclear weapons, but Britain vetoed the deal at the insistence of the United States, according to a new account by a former top Iranian nuclear negotiator.

Seyed Hossein Mousavian, who had led Iran’s nuclear negotiating team in 2004 and 2005, makes it clear that the reason that offer was rejected was that the George W. Bush administration refused to countenance any Iranian enrichment capability, regardless of the circumstances. Mousavian reveals previously unknown details about that pivotal episode in the diplomacy surrounding the Iran nuclear issue in memoirs published Tuesday.

Mousavian, now a visiting research scholar at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School, had been a top political aide to former president Hashemi Rafsanjani and head of the foreign relations committee of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council during his political-diplomatic career in Iran.

Mousavian had been entrusted with Iran’s most sensitive diplomatic missions, including negotiations on a strategic understanding with Saudi crown prince Abdullah in the early 1990s and with U.S. officials on Afghanistan and Al-Qaeda in 2001 and 2002, his memoirs reveal. But he was arrested by the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad administration on charges of “espionage” in April 2007. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://consortiumnews.com/2012/06/06/bush-blocked-iran-nuke-deal/