Robert Gates says Iran’s response to nuclear proposal is disappointing

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and a conservative official in Tehran found something they could agree on Saturday, as each dismissed the Iranian foreign minister’s suggestion that a deal was near on Iran’s nuclear program.

Gates said he was disappointed in Tehran’s response to a months-old proposal backed by the Obama administration in which Iran would exchange a limited quantity of low-enriched uranium for fuel plates to use in a Tehran medical reactor.

“I do not have the sense we are close to an agreement,” he said at a round-table meeting with journalists in Ankara, where he also suggested that Washington’s patience had limits.

“The longer that this goes on and the longer they continue to enrich, the value of the Tehran research reactor proposal as a reassurance to the international community diminishes,” Gates said.

Speaking Saturday at a security conference in Munich, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said his country could accept the Tehran reactor proposal, but suggested that there was some give-and-take on how much uranium could be enriched.

“It is very common that in business the buyer talks about quantity and the seller about the price,” Mottaki said. “We would inform the parties about our requirements. It may be less, it may be more” than the 2,650 pounds of uranium to be sent to Russia and France under the terms of the United Nations-backed proposal presented last year.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Tuesday that the government was open to the fuel exchange proposal, surprising some analysts. But hard-line news media associated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard rejected any possibility of a nuclear swap, while the powerful speaker of parliament took to the airwaves Saturday to denounce any deal.

“The Western governments are apparently seeking to sell out Iran’s enriched uranium under the pretext of its exchange with higher-enriched materials,” said Ali Larijani, according to state radio.

“You are after a kind of political deception,” he said, addressing the West. “You intend to swindle Iran out of its enriched materials.”

Iran says its nuclear program is only for peaceful civilian uses, but the West and Israel allege that Tehran is pursuing a weapons program.

Some consider the flurry of contradictory messages from Iran to be a maneuver aimed at diverting attention from Iran’s domestic political crisis, and at giving the Chinese and Russians diplomatic cover to avoid joining the West in imposing tougher sanctions.

But others say Ahmadinejad and his allies want to make a deal with the West but are being thwarted by more powerful hard-liners in the Iranian political establishment.

“I’m sure Iranian leaders are divided about the nuclear fuel exchange deal,” one Tehran analyst said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “Ahmadinejad and Mottaki have given the green light for the deal to go ahead, while today [the newspapers] Kayhan and Jomhouri Eslami have sharply criticized Ahmadinejad and opposed the deal.”

He noted that the heads of both newspapers are directly named by supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Western officials who had gathered in Munich for the annual security conference said time was running out for the proposal, which was intended to create diplomatic breathing room by bringing Iran’s nuclear fuel stockpile below the threshold for making a nuclear weapon.

“Our hand remains stretched out,” German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said. “But it is so far hanging into the empty space.”

With Western patience eroding, Gates pressed the case for stepped-up sanctions, arguing that the nations negotiating with Iran had always agreed to apply pressure if engagement failed.

“The purpose of the pressure would be to bring Iran back to the negotiating table to negotiate seriously about constraining the program,” Gates said in Istanbul. “The reality is they have done nothing to reassure the international community that they are prepared to comply with the [Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty] or stop their progress toward a nuclear weapon.”

Efforts to impose broad, painful international sanctions have been thwarted by China and Russia, both of which have veto power on the U.N. Security Council. Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi brushed off talk of fresh sanctions on Iran, which has been punished several times for its continued production of nuclear fuel.

“In order not to complicate the situation, it is better to concentrate on dialogue,” he said Friday in Munich.

But Gates said he was an optimist and would continue to push for Chinese cooperation on sanctions.

“There will still be an effort to engage with China,” he said. “And I personally don’t believe that door has closed.”

julian.barnes@latimes.com

Damianova is a special correspondent. Times staff writer Borzou Daragahi in Beirut contributed to this report.