this past week, making them wonder whether Iranian nuclear negotiators are crazy like a fox or just plain crazy.
For the better part of the week, Iranian negotiators spun all sorts of complaints and charges against the West, sparking speculation that the nuclear talks coming up next week in Moscow, might have to be postponed. Then, the Islamic Republic just dropped everything Monday.
The complaints of Western perfidy were spun by the deputy negotiator, Ali Bagheri, not by Saeed Jalili, the chief negotiator. Bagheri had been assigned earlier in the year to work with Helga Schmid, who works on the staff of Catherine Ashton, the EU foreign policy chief. Bagheri and Schmid put together the agenda for the recent meeting in Baghdad.
Last week, Bagheri started complaining that the West was undercutting the talks and consciously setting them up for failure in Moscow.
The Guardian of Britain reported that Schmid told Bagheri the Big Six countries were waiting for a response from Iran to the proposal they had handed Iran at the Baghdad talks. Bagheri responded that he was unaware of any such proposal. The Guardian said that reduced everything to “farce” since Bagheri was in the room in Baghdad when the Big Six paper was handed over. The newspaper said that Schmid then arranged to have the text re-sent to Bagheri.
Bagheri also insisted that there had to be some preparatory meetings before Moscow or the talks would go nowhere. Ashton said the people attending the Moocow talks are the people to negotiate, and the agenda was already set in the Schmid-Bagheri talks before Baghdad. But Bagheri continued to demand preparatory talks before Moscow and raise suggestions that the West was trying to scupper the Moscow session by refusing preparatory talks.
The Big Six are also rolling their eyes over Iran’s proposal. Iranian officials have repeatedly said that they presented the Big Six with a detailed five-point proposal in Baghdad and expected a response in Moscow. But Western diplomats say Jalili only talked about a five-point proposal, but never handed over any document and didn’t even list the five points in his meetings with the Big Six in Baghdad.
Diplomats are trying decipher what Iran is up to.
Bagheri has had a reputation—at least until now—as a voice of reason, flexibility and cordiality on the Iranian delegation. At one point in Baghdad, Jalili turned on his deputy and gave him a nasty dressing down, exceedingly unprofessional conduct that only made Jalili look like a jerk.
The Guardian speculated that Jalili did that to make clear who was boss and that Bagheri had adopted his new street tough attitude to improve his standing with the powers that be in Tehran. One Western official summarized for The Guardian by saying, “What’s Farsi for cover your ass?”
Then on Monday, Ashton and Jalili had a one-hour telephone conversation that appeared to resolve everything. The talk of a need for preparatory talks disappeared. Ashton issued a statement that said she and Jalili “agreed on the need for Iran to engage” on the Big Six proposal in Moscow and she conveyed the willingness of the Big Six “to respond to the issues raised by the Iranians in Baghdad.”
They will next meet in Moscow June 18-19; there will be no preparatory talks beforehand.
Some suspected the whole exercise was intended to shift the mantle of reason from Bagheri to Jalili.
The Christian Science Monitor reported that since the Baghdad meeting in May five letters have been exchanged between the two sides while Schmid and Bagheri spoke twice by telephone. The newspaper said a diplomat told it that Ashton had proposed a direct telephone call between her and Jalili for more than a week before Iran agreed to that direct contact. That diplomat described Iran’s conduct as “absurd.”