fuel for Iran

New issue of Foreign Affairs: Greg has already commented here on Kenneth Pollack and Ray Takeyh's Taking on Tehran . I will confine myself to noting the latest news on the deal between Russia and Iran on the supply of nuclear fuel :

According to the AFP news agency, Iran was initially reluctant to agree to Russian demands for all spent fuel to be returned, citing the risks involved in transporting it. But Russia insisted on the guarantee to ensure no spent fuel was diverted for the manufacture of weapons.

Provided the safeguards are adequate, this seems to satisfy most of the outlines for a resolution of the problem, as put forward by Carnegie and others. That is, that Iran should be allowed a peaceful nuclear programme, but allowing them to enrich uranium themselves is too risky and the fuel should be supplied by and returned to an outside power. That was always likely to be Russia. Condi's background in Soviet analysis could come in useful after all!

The US objections seem to me to be unreasonable. I looked in The New York Times on Saturday, but couldn't see anything on this. The quotation above is from the BBC report.

Update (1 Mar), more free goodies: continuing controversy in Red-Handed by Mitchell B. Reiss, Robert Gallucci, et al.on North Korea's nuclear programmes.

And The Flip Side of the Record by Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson on "The Sources of American Legitimacy" (previously discussed here):

To prove that the United States ought not to respect international law, Kagan maintains that such respect is not part of the nation's record since 1945.