Iran unbending on uranium enrichment in answer to six-power incentives offer

debkafile‘s political sources report that Tehran has given no ground on international concerns in its reply to the six-power proposals for ending the long nuclear standoff. Iran offers nothing but more negotiations, its standard gambit for spinning out time to achieve progress on its nuclear bomb program.
The New York Times of July 5 quotes Tehran as stating: “The time for negotiations from the condescending position of inequality has come to an end,” in its response to the incentives package offered by the five UN Security Council members plus Germany. The letter makes no reference to the six powers’ proposal of preliminary talks to start with a mutual six-week “freeze” – both on a fourth round of UN Security Council sanctions and on the expansion of Iran’s uranium enrichment program.
Further hardening its position, Tehran’s reply to the proposals presented last month by Europeam Union foreign executive Javier Solana denounces such sanctions as “illegal.”
By failing to address the “freeze-for-freeze” approach, in which high hopes of a more accommodating Iranian approach had been pinned, Tehran has put an end to the optimistic intimations disseminated by Washington, Europe and Israeli officials in the last two weeks. Some American sources were even certain that a closed Iranian parliamentary conference Monday, June 30, had endorsed the mutual freeze offer.
debkafile‘s Iranian sources add: The Iranian reply to Solana demonstrates that Tehran was not intimidated by the implied threats of an imminent US and/or Israel attack on its nuclear facilities published in the last two weeks; neither is Iran deterred from continuing to enrich uranium by the prospect of more sanctions.
Even in accepting the offer of negotiations, the Islamic Republic stiffly denied any world power the right to strike a “condescending position.” Its tough-minded chief nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili was named to lead the delegation in comprehensive negotiations.