Iranian Leadership Ready for "a Retreat"

Gareth Smyth in Tehran, The Financial Times:

Iranian officials on Wednesday kept up their characteristic mix of defiance and offers to resolve the dispute over Tehran’s nuclear programme through dialogue.

A statement to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, reported by agencies, said Iran was keeping open “the door...for negotiations to resolve the issue” and called for the “time...needed for this effort to bear fruit”.

But the statement also warned the US Iran – like Washington – had “the power to cause harm and pain”.

In Tehran, an official - considered a regime insider - said the country’s leadership was ready for “a retreat”.

He cited reports Iran had offered a moratorium on widescale uranium enrichment and was prepared to restrict its ‘research and development’ to between 20 and 160 centrifuges, the devices used to enrich uranium.

This would be far below the number considered a face-saving minimum by the previous Iranian negotiating team led by Hassan Rowhani, who was replaced after Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad won last June’s presidential election.

“The decision for retreat has been made, and it’s now a question of waiting for a European and US reaction,” said the official. “The important thing is now to get out of the crisis over the security council.”

He said Ali Larijani, Iran’s top security official, had been weakened internally by his turn towards Russia and his assurances before last month’s meeting of the permanent five members of the United Nations Security Council in London that referral was unlikely.

But the official added that the calculations of Iran’s leadership were being complicated by a growing concern that the real interest of the Bush administration was not Iran’s nuclear programme but in regime change. READ MORE

“The leadership has been unsure for a long while whether the US wants regime change,” he said. “If they become convinced this is what Washington wants, they are far less likely to compromise over the nuclear programme, because if there is to be confrontation, then better for it to be over the nuclear programme, where the leadership has public support, than other issues – like human rights – where they do not.

“A certain level of pressure on the nuclear issue suits Ayatollah [Ali] Khamenei [Iran’s supreme leader] because he knows he has popular backing. But if the US rejects Iran’s offer over the 20-160 centrifuges, then it will be clear Washington wants regime change and that whatever we offer, they will simply press for more.”