Clinton Issues New Demands For ‘Commitments’ From Iran

Demands Iran 'Come Clean' on Non-Existent Weapons Program

Speaking today on ABC News, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton set the stage for the predicted failure of the mid-April P5+1 talks in Turkey. She issued a series of demands that were the condition for avoiding war with Iran.

Among those demands were a series of unspecified “concrete commitments from Iran,” including an explicit demand that they “come clean on its nuclear program.” This is in spite of the repeated reports from the US and Israeli intelligence communities that Iran has no nuclear weapons program.

Iran cannot even theoretically produce publicly the evidence of a program it doesn’t have in the first place, and this is just the latest reason that the anticipated talks will be another high profile
opportunity for dissembling, and not diplomacy.

The talks have been presented by US officials as the “last chance” for Iran to avoid an attack by either the US, Israel, or some combination thereof, and since the talks were initially agreed to by Iran have been presented as doomed to failure. It doesn’t seem likely that there will even be a meaningful topic of discussion for the two sides, with the US expected to simply shake its fists angrily for two days, and both sides to come home insisting they made some key rhetorical point.

One might imagine this makes the talks a colossal waste of everyone’s time, but the US at least has proudly touted the last few rounds of “designed to fail” talks as a whopping success, integral in getting international support (or in the case of China and Russia acquiescence) on imposing new sanctions and making more threats against Iran.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.