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Iran Meets With Major Powers In Switzerland Thursday

EU High Representative Javier Solana
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There’s a lot of intrigue and not many details about Thursday’s meeting of Iran, France, Germany, the UK, Russia, China and the United States. In the last week, the existence of a secret Iranian nuclear facility has been disclosed, and Iran has test-fired a number of missiles — some that could reach Europe and Israel. And tomorrow, Iran will sit down to talk with several major powers to talk about it.

Let’s start with what we know. EU High Representative Javier Solana and Saed Jalili, “the Iranian chief negotiator for nuclear questions,” are the respective leads for each side. The American delegation will be led by William Burns, the under secretary of state for political affairs. Russia is sending deputy foreign minister Sergey Ryabkov.

The meeting will reportedly be held at the Hotel de Ville in Geneva, while a press center will be set up by the Swiss Department of Foreign Affairs at the Hotel Intercontinental.

Press Secretary Robert Gibbs allowed for the possibility Wednesday that there “could be additional meetings” after Thursday’s talks, but stressed that it’s “dependent on what we hear tomorrow from the Iranians.” A good first step, Gibbs said, is for the Iranians to give inspectors “full and unfettered access to this facility.”

“This is not for talk for talk’s sake,” Gibbs said. “There is a specific agenda, and specific problems that need to be dealt with and if they’re not dealt with responsibly by the Iranians, stronger measures will be developed and implemented.”

So what exactly does that mean? There are a number of possibilities. On Sunday, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said there was “a pretty rich list” of sanction options. It’s been suggested that such sanctions would likely target Iran’s gasoline imports and insurance firms that underwrite that industry.

But as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said on MSNBC today, “We can’t just have the U.S. sanctioning. It has to be multilateral.” There’s been a lot of uncertainty among lawmakers and pundits in recent days about whether China will be on board for tough sanctions.

In the meantime, Albright said, “Nothing is going to be solved in this first set of talks. This is the beginning.”

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