The Obama administration is reportedly preparing proposals that would drop a longstanding American demand that Tehran rapidly shut down nuclear facilities during the early phases of negotiations over its atomic program. The Europeans are also involved in the proposals that would allow Iran to continue enriching uranium for some period during the talks, the New York Times reported, citing officials involved in the confidential strategy sessions That would be a sharp break from the approach taken by the Bush administration, which had demanded that Iran halt its enrichment activities, at least briefly to initiate negotiations. President Barack Obama had promised during the presidential campaign to open negotiations with Iran “without preconditions.” Administration officials declined to discuss details of their confidential deliberations, but said that any new American policy would ultimately require Iran to cease enrichment, as demanded by several United Nations Security Council resolutions. “Our goal remains exactly what it has been in the UN resolutions: suspension,” one senior administration official told the New York Times. Another official cautioned that “we are still at the brainstorming level” and said the terms of an opening proposal to Iran were still being debated. If the United States and its allies allow Iran to continue enriching uranium for a number of months, or longer, the approach is bound to meet objections, from both conservatives in the United States and from the new Israeli government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. If Obama signed off on the new negotiating approach, the US and its European allies would use new negotiating sessions with Iran to press for interim steps toward suspension of its nuclear activities, starting with allowing international inspectors into sites from which they have been barred for several years. First among them is a large manufacturing site in downtown Tehran, a former clock factory, where Iran is producing many of the next-generation centrifuges that it is installing in the underground plant at Natanz. “The facility is very large,” one United Nations inspector said last week, “and we have not been inside since last summer.” Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency, whose inspectors would be a critical part of the strategy, said in an interview in his office in Vienna last week that the Obama administration had not consulted him on the details of a new strategy. But he was blistering about the approach that the Bush administration had taken, the New York Times said. Now, he contended, Obama has little choice but to accept the reality that Iran has “built 5,500 centrifuges,” nearly enough to make two weapons' worth of uranium each year. “You have to design an approach that is sensitive to Iran's pride,” said Dr. ElBaradei, who has long argued in favor of allowing Iran to continue with a small, face-saving capacity to enrich nuclear fuel, under strict inspection. __
