Iran has offered to engage in "serious talks", but hasn't definitively offered to suspend its uranium enrichment. Trita Parsi of the Washington-D.C-based Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, thinks that the Iranians are willing to bargain.
"The Iranians will likely agree to negotiations that may lead to at least a temporary suspension, but not agree to this as a precondition," Parsi told AFP after the Iranian announcement. "As disappointing as this response may be for Washington, it should not be seen as the end of the negotiating track."

The first step the United States is likely to take is to ask the Security Council to impose sanctions on Iran. But what if sanctions do not have the intended effect? Will the Bush Administration then go into Iran guns blazing?

Scholar and historian Gareth Porter thinks so. In a recent analysis written for the Inter Press Service, he contends that the Bush Administration is setting the stage for a war, and has never been interested in offering the security guarantees that Iran has been looking for as an incentive to give up its nuclear project.

"Despite the desire of other members of the P5+1 for a genuine diplomatic offer to Iran that could possibly lead to an agreement on its nuclear program, the Bush Administration's intention was just the opposite," Porter writes. "Bush's objective was to free the administration of the constraint of multilateral diplomacy. The Administration evidently reckoned that, once the Iranians had rejected the formal offer from the P5+1, it would be free to take whatever actions it might choose, including a military strike against Iran."

The Oxford Research Group determined earlier this year that as many as 10,000 people could die in a U.S. assault on Iran.

from Negotiating with Iran Is the Only Solution by Amitabh Pal Published on Friday, August 25, 2006 by The Progressive