THE CONTINUING WAKE-UP CALL

Posted at 10:09 p.m. ET

One of the things we want to do at Urgent Agenda is to remind readers that there are other issues, besides our election and the financial crisis, that require our constant attention.  One of them, clearly, is Iran.

My friend Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi alerts me to a Ken Timmerman article at NewsMax, about negotiating with Iran.  It's pretty stark stuff, especially as the source is a French diplomat who's actually tried to reason with the mullah regime.  A copy of this should be sent to each one of Barack Obama's four or five thousand foreign-policy advisers, at least the ones who haven't been thrown under the bus.

Barack Obama can talk about negotiating with Iran until he’s blue in the face, but a top French official who has been there and done that contends that any efforts by a future president to open direct talks with Iran would be a waste of time.

“Good luck” is the advice that Therese Delpech would offer to the next U.S. president if he wanted to negotiate with the Tehran regime.

And this is from the French.  Not exactly guys who run from the negotiating table.

“We’ve been negotiating with the Iranians since 2003, five years,” the nuclear adviser to French President Nicolas Sarkozy told Newsmax during a visit to Washington. “We came to the conclusion that they are not interested at all in negotiating, but in buying time for their military (nuclear) program.”

Will someone please let the Democratic Party in on this?

Obama has pledged frequently that, if elected president, he would open direct talks with Tehran “without preconditions,” in an attempt to talk the Iranian regime out of its nuclear weapons program.

But such talks would be a fool’s errand, Delpech said in a scarcely veiled reference to the Democrat.

And...

“At no point in the five years of our talks with the Iranians have they ever asked” for the type of concessions Obama and his advisers say they are prepared to offer Tehran, she said.

“They never said, ‘If only we would get security guarantees form the Americans, if only we would get economic investment from the Americans, if only they wouldn’t tell us we are part of the axis of evil’ – you name it. They never made any of those statements, at no point at all,” Delpech said.

I wonder if we'll see this diplomat quoted in the mainstream media.  Why am I not holding my breath?

“So if you want to try for another deal, the big deal (with Iran), believing that this will be a new departure and you will succeed where we failed, good luck!” she said.

Finally...

French nuclear expert Delpech also expressed surprise that anyone was still talking about the much-disputed National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran that concluded in December 2007 that Iran had shut down its nuclear weapons program in late 2003.

“I thought the NIE was dead,” she told Newsmax. “It was killed by the (International Atomic Energy Agency) itself, which is ironic, because the IAEA is not generally that harsh on Iran.”

She referred to a closed-door session in February in which the agency’s safeguards chief, Olli Heinonen, produced internal Iranian government documents that showed ongoing nuclear weapons work in Iran well after the intelligence estimate said it had been stopped.

You may be sure that certain elements of the left will still use that NIE whenever it suits them.  To them, the cause is greater than the facts.

Mr. Obama has some illusions to conquer.

October 10, 2008.