'Freeze For Freeze': A New Way Out on Iran?

The EU, Condi and El-Baradei are up to no good, again. NEWSWEEK:

A U.S.-European proposal may allow Tehran to continue with some uranium enrichment. Is this the way out of the Iran nuke impasse? U.S. and European officials are still very angry at Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, for appearing to concede that Iran’s uranium-enrichment program is here to stay. “Every time he gets up there, he comes out with Iranian talking points,” snipes one Western diplomat. But NEWSWEEK has learned that the British recently drafted a proposal that shifts the West’s “red line” closer to El Baradei’s position as a way of breaking the stalemate in the talks. The draft proposal, which is being circulated among the governments but has not yet been formally submitted to Iran, calls for a “freeze for freeze” rather than an outright suspension of enrichment. The “freeze” concept is similar to the “timeout” that ElBaradei first called for last January. In order to get talks started, both ideas effectively permit Iran to continue with the uranium enrichment it is doing already, but they demand that Tehran freeze further construction of centrifuges and reprocessing of nuclear material, in exchange for a reciprocal freeze on further U.N. sanctions. That seems to mark a concession by the Europeans and Americans, who had previously insisted that Tehran suspend all enrichment activities before they would come to the table to negotiate a broader agreement. Washington and the so-called “EU-3”—Britain, France and Germany—also pushed through two U.N. Security Council resolutions insisting on suspension.