Iran Already Rejecting Carefully Considered Big Six Plan

That didn't take long. Iran is already rejecting the plan proposed by the Big Six (EU-3, US, Russia and China). Go figure.

The remarks by Mohammad Saeedi, deputy head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, suggested Tehran may have already decided to reject offers of incentives and negotiations from six of the world's top powers in return for ending atomic fuel activities.

"Iran is determined to go ahead with its nuclear enrichment work for peaceful purposes," Mohammad Saeedi, deputy head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, told students news agency ISNA. "The Iranian nation will not let us give it up."

The White House urged Iran to study a basket of incentives, approved by the U.S., British, French, German Russian and Chinese foreign ministers at a Vienna meeting on Thursday, before officially responding.

European officials will give Iranian officials a detailed presentation of the incentives in the next couple of days and a formal answer was hoped for within weeks, White House spokesman Tony Snow said.

Asked about Iran's insistence that it would not give up uranium enrichment, Snow said: "As we've said, we think it's fair to give the government of Iran an opportunity to review carefully everything in the package. We understand people may make statements, but we want to give them time to study this."

Decision-making in Iran can be drawn out by a complex political structure with ultimate power resting in the hands of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Iran, the world's No. 4 oil producer, says it wants to enrich uranium only to the level required for use in atomic power reactors and has no interest in making highly-enriched uranium, a key ingredient in warheads.

Iran wants nuclear weapons, and considers any restriction on that capability to be unacceptable. And yet there are people who still think that negotiators and diplomats will somehow figure out how to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons without using the immediate threat of force upon any violation of an agreement signed between the parties?

Russia and China don't want to upset Iran, with whom they're working closely to secure oil supplies. They want to delay any kind of military action should inspectors discover that Iran is working on a weapons program, despite Iran's publicly stated intentions to do so.