Iran pulls back concessions it was willing to make when Bush was President

Amir Taheri:

What a difference a presidency makes.

Eight years ago, Muhammad Javad Zarif — now Iran’s foreign minister, but at the time its UN ambassador — penned a New York Times op-ed about his country’s nuclear program. This week, he wrote another.

The changes are telling.

Back then, Zarif claimed Iran was prepared to take 11 major steps to help resolve the dispute over its nuclear program:

•  Present the new atomic agency protocol on intrusive inspections to the Parliament for ratification and continue to put it in place, pending ratification.
•  Permit the continuous on-site presence of International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors at conversion and enrichment facilities.
•  Introduce legislation to permanently ban the development, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons.
•  Cooperate on export controls to prevent unauthorized access to nuclear material.
•  Refrain from reprocessing or producing plutonium.
•  Limit the enrichment of nuclear materials so that they are suitable for energy production but not for weaponry.
•  Immediately convert all enriched uranium to fuel rods, thereby precluding the possibility of further enrichment.
•  Limit the enrichment program to meet the contingency fuel requirements of Iran’s power reactors and future light-water reactors.
•  Begin putting in place the least contentious aspects of the enrichment program, like research and development, to assure the world of the Islamic Republic’s intentions.
•  Accept foreign partners, both public and private, in its uranium-enrichment program.
•  Establish regional consortiums on fuel-cycle development that would be jointly owned, operated by countries possessing the technology and placed under atomic agency safeguards.

He claimed that “outstanding issues in connection with the uranium enrichment activities, laser enrichment, fuel fabrication and heavy-water research reactor program have been resolved.”

Needless to say, Iran did none of those things. Instead it speeded up its nuclear program, increased the number of centrifuges for uranium enrichment from 200 to almost 20,000 and built 12 new nuclear sites, including the underground one at Fordo.
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There is more.

Clearly they have abandoned all of those concessions in their negotiations with Obama.  It is likely that they never intended to honor them to begin with.  They are not honorable people.  They believe it is proper to deceive to get their way.   But at lest they were fearful of what George Bush would do in response to their program.  Bush would have probably done more anyway if Democrats had not acted to scuttle his approach, and now they are left with a much worse situation on their watch.

Iran decided to become a nuclear power in the 1980's shortly after the US accidently shot down a passenger plane believing it was one of their fighters.  This was during the fight with Iran in what was called the "tanker war" while Iran was also fighting Iraq.