"... off to a better start than any of us had a right to expect"

Gary Sick in the Daily Beast/ here

" ... By all accounts, instead of being a food fight leading to a total breakdown, the Geneva talks were serious, businesslike, and even cordial. The top U.S. negotiator, Undersecretary of State William Burns, had a one-on-one meeting with Iranian top negotiator Saeed Jalili, in which they reportedly talked substantive issues. That is something that had not happened in thirty years. During the latter years of the Clinton presidency, Iranian officials conducted desperate evasive maneuvers to avoid any direct contact with American officials, and during the first six years of the George W. Bush administration, American officials did the same with their Iranian diplomatic counterparts. The orders on both sides to avoid official contact at risk of one’s professional career seem to have been relaxed, at least for this occasion.

What did this meeting actually produce? Iran agreed to permit inspections of its new site. The Western negotiators came up with a clever ploy to permit Iranian low-enriched uranium (LEU) to be sent to Russia for further enrichment, probably from about 5 percent to about 20 percent, and then transported to France to be fabricated into fuel rods to feed the Iranian research reactor (ironically given to Iran by the United States in an earlier day), which is used to produce isotopes used for medical purposes. This had many dimensions. First, it reduced the Iranian LEU stock below the level required to produce a nuclear device. Second, it established the principle that Iranian enrichment could be conducted outside the country. But third, it promised to provide Iran with uranium enriched well above the level required for nuclear power reactors (but not yet at the level required for bomb-building). And lastly, it tacitly acknowledged Iran’s right to produce enriched uranium. Nothing in the reports we have seen to date indicate that the Western interlocutors insisted on the previous red line that Iran should abandon its enrichment program.

Finally, the two sides agreed to meet again later this month. At a minimum, that suggests that they believed there was more to be discussed........ We can hope that the Western negotiators keep their eye on the fundamental objectives of these talks. Instead of drawing new red lines, which are typically ignored by the Iranians and which have proved both futile and counterproductive, we need to pursue two clear goals. First, we need to insist on maximum inspection and monitoring of all aspects of Iran’s nuclear activities. Secondly, we should attempt to minimize Iran’s development of the precursors of a nuclear weapon. In other words, we should install an early warning system that will tell us with some confidence if Iran decides to depart from its obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty and build a bomb; and we should seek to maximize the time between such a decision and the moment when Iran could actually produce a deliverable weapon......

The process that has been started is going to be neither short nor serene. It is, however, the only game in town. And it is off to a better start than any of us had a right to expect."