Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said Tehran declared Thursday “no agreement will be signed today and the six world powers are not due to sign any agreement today” despite P5+1 comments that a deal “is close but elusive.”
Zarif added there might be a joint statement by midnight “if everything goes well.”
Iran has made mincemeat of President Barack Obama’s threat to “walk away” from the negotiations if a framework agreement was night signed by midnight March 31. In the end, the president phoned U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Energy Earnest Moniz to tell them to hang in there if there were signs of progress.
Obama sounded tough in the American media, which said that the president told his representatives in Lausanne to tell Iran they indeed would “walk way” and leave sanctions in place, figuring that threat might make Iran a bit more flexible.
Iran is not that stupid not to figure that Obama would try to play games as Tehran is not twisting him around its little nuclear finger.
The truth was in a statement attributed to an official and reported by The York Times. He said:
They were turning our own deadline against us to see if we would give ground.
Perhaps one day, President Obama will give the orders to Kerry and Moniz to pack their bags and go home, and then maybe Iran will compromise. Or maybe it won’t.
In either case, Iran is making the West sweat it out and lose lots of political points back home, especially in Washington.
If Obama and the other nations in the P5+1 are giving Iran more time to put up or shut up, they won’t look so incredibly naïve if not ignorant, but Iran has a few points in its favor.
The talks have been extended for two days, and if Zarif’s statement of “no agreement” today comes true, the negotiations will drag on into Friday, if not longer.
You don’t have to read Zarif’s lips to understand his mind. He stated loud and clear Thursday:
We have always stated that there could be only ONE agreement which could go into effect at the end of the talks on July 1 if everything goes well.
The capital letters in the word “ONE” were published by the Iranian regime’s Fars News Agency.
Of course, he is playing games. There is nothing he would love more than a framework agreement that is so ambiguous that Iran can put Kerry and his Western partners through the wringer again in June, somewhere around a minute before midnight of a final agreement.
Zarif toyed with everyone with fantastic double talk:
[All issues] more or less resolved, but of course this does not mean that all issues that are to be touched in the final agreement have been specified. We are supposed to reach consensus and the delegations will start working on the text in the near future.
Things might grow difficult when drafting starts; now we believe that problems have almost been resolved.
After assuring everyone that progress is being made, he made out the West to be the real obstacle to a framework agreement, saying that “progress in talks depends on political will, and there has always been a problem with the political will of the opposite party.”
Iran also is playing to the hilt its advantage of conducting task with several delegations. Fars reported, “He [Zarif] said negotiations have become more complicated since several delegations are now meeting each other for bilateral and multilateral talks to discuss ‘their concerns, viewpoints and probably different approaches from both legal and political views.”