Seems to have gotten lost in the news, but there's been more detailed developments from the meeting in Geneva between the P5+1 and Iran.

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Gary Sick's blog at the Daily Beast

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-10-02/real-progress-with-iran/full/

If you have any doubt that the Geneva meetings with Iran were surprisingly productive, just go back and look at the commentary the day before they began. Even allowing for the fact that the United States and its negotiating partners (the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany–the P5+1–plus European Union negotiator Javier Solana) were trying to lower expectations to the political equivalent of absolute zero, it was still difficult to find anyone who anticipated anything like real progress. Yet that is what happened.

Iran had issued a bland five-page document that scarcely mentioned the nuclear issue. They insisted that the newly discovered Qom enrichment site was not only perfectly legal but utterly routine. They let it be known that they had no intention of discussing their own nuclear program in these talks. Yet, from the accounts we have so far, it appears that Iran came prepared to make concessions about Qom, permitting IAEA inspections to begin within the next two weeks or so. As for their nuclear program, almost nothing else seems to have been discussed.

The United States blustered that it was preparing “crippling sanctions” to be imposed on Iran if they did not “come clean” about their nuclear activities. In the end, it appears that sanctions were not a significant topic, and the Western side was prepared to make some significant concessions of its own.

By all accounts, instead of being a food fight leading to a total breakdown, the Geneva talks were serious, businesslike, and even cordial. The top U.S. negotiator, Undersecretary of State William Burns, had a one-on-one meeting with Iranian top negotiator Saeed Jalili, in which they reportedly talked substantive issues. That is something that had not happened in thirty years. During the latter years of the Clinton presidency, Iranian officials conducted desperate evasive maneuvers to avoid any direct contact with American officials, and during the first six years of the George W. Bush administration, American officials did the same with their Iranian diplomatic counterparts. The orders on both sides to avoid official contact at risk of one’s professional career seem to have been relaxed, at least for this occasion.

What did this meeting actually produce? Iran agreed to permit inspections of its new site. The Western negotiators came up with a clever ploy to permit Iranian low-enriched uranium (LEU) to be sent to Russia for further enrichment, probably from about 5 percent to about 20 percent, and then transported to France to be fabricated into fuel rods to feed the Iranian research reactor (ironically given to Iran by the United States in an earlier day), which is used to produce isotopes used for medical purposes. This had many dimensions. First, it reduced the Iranian LEU stock below the level required to produce a nuclear device. Second, it established the principle that Iranian enrichment could be conducted outside the country. But third, it promised to provide Iran with uranium enriched well above the level required for nuclear power reactors (but not yet at the level required for bomb-building). And lastly, it tacitly acknowledged Iran’s right to produce enriched uranium. Nothing in the reports we have seen to date indicate that the Western interlocutors insisted on the previous red line that Iran should abandon its enrichment program.

Finally, the two sides agreed to meet again later this month. At a minimum, that suggests that they believed there was more to be discussed.

Both sides evidently came prepared to behave civilly, to make some small but important concessions, and to initiate a process of negotiation that has been on ice almost since the moment that George W. Bush decided to declare Iran (which had just finished working closely with the United States to establish a new government in Afghanistan) a charter member of the Axis of Evil...

From the blog of Marc Lynch at Foreign policy

http://lynch.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/10/05/quiet_success_on_iran

The Obama administration really should get some credit for its quiet, effective diplomacy on Iran. Surrounded by a hawkish commentariat and facing a muddled Iranian domestic situation, the Obama team has managed to formulate a policy which brought Iran to the diplomatic table facing an unusually united international front. And by resolutely staying out of Iranian domestic affairs, it managed to engage diplomatically without particularly strengthening or endorsing the Ahmadinejad government. It has also quietly continued its diplomatic outreach to Syria, with the unusual visit to Washington of the deputy Foreign Minister rather firmly squashing the wave of autopsies for America's Syria outreach.

None of this guarantees success on any front, and there's a long way to go. But it's pretty notable that Obama inherited from the Bush hawks a strong, confident, rising Iran which is now backed into a diplomatic corner, regionally on the defensive, and domestically in crisis...


Reza Aslan, an Iranian-American writer and scholar.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-10-02/naive-obama-gets-iran-results/

Maybe President Obama wasn’t so naïve to think it is a good idea to talk to your adversaries.

After one day of negotiations between Iran and the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany, Iran not only has relented to international pressure to open its recently revealed uranium enrichment plant near the city of Qom to U.N. inspectors, it has gone one step further, vowing to ship nearly its entire stockpile of low enriched uranium—2,600 pounds of material, or about 75 percent of Iran’s entire cache—to Russia and France for processing. The processed nuclear fuel would then be shipped back to Iran where it would be used, again under U.N. monitoring, to produce medical isotopes. Iran even has offered to buy the processed fuel directly from U.S. companies as a first step toward normalizing trade relations.

The agreement means that Iran would no longer have enough uranium to make a nuclear weapon.

Although the idea of processing Iran’s enriched uranium somewhere outside the country was floated years ago, reports from Geneva, where the high-level talks took place, indicate that it was the Iranians who brought up the plan, possibly as a confidence-building measure to ensure that talks with the U.S. will continue through the end of the year...