Did the U.S. Just Give Iran What They Wanted on Immediate Sanctions Relief?

As CNN reports that France is threatening to walk away from the P5+1 talks, Iran’s Press TV is reporting that Iran has secured its demand of getting sanctions lifted when an agreement is signed.

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Over the past few weeks, various officials in Iran — including the senior nuclear negotiator, a supermajority of parliament, and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — have said there will be no concessions from Tehran on sanctions and demanded all sanctions on the Islamic Republic be lifted before Iran signs a deal.

Now, Hamid Baeidinejad, the director general for political and international security affairs at Iran’s Foreign Ministry and a senior member of the negotiating team, tells his home country’s media that they were successful.

“Sanctions have many aspects, there are unilateral sanctions, US sanctions, EU sanctions, UNSC sanctions… I should say that many of these aspects have been resolved, but still there are some limited areas that also need to be resolved, and we are now concentrating on those remaining technical aspects with regard to the sanctions,” Baeidinejad told Press TV.

The report said Baeidinejad “added that oil, gas, and banking sanctions will be lifted as soon as a comprehensive deal is implemented, noting, ‘The termination of oil sanctions, gas sanctions, financial banking… many of them have been resolved… But still there are a limited number of areas that are still under negotiations, which we hope we can resolve them and then we can admit that the whole issue of sanctions is resolved.’”

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“We are now concentrating on some limited aspects of issues related to the overall sanctions, particularly sanctions of the UNSC, and only we are concentrating on those limited aspects now,” Baeidinejad added, according to the report.

The deadline for a framework agreement was supposed to be today, but it was extended by a day.

France has recently criticized the rush to a deadline as incentive to rush into a bad deal, and French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius has insisted his country “wants an agreement, but a robust one that really guarantees that Iran can have access to civilian nuclear power, but not the atomic bomb.”

White House press secretary Josh Earnest wouldn’t get into details of negotiations today, stressing “nothing is agreed to until every element of the agreement has been agreed to.”

Earnest did tell reporters today that they still favor “the phased reduction in sanctions after Iran over a period of time demonstrates sustained commitment to the agreement.”

“And that is the way that we believe the agreement should be structured. There’s not — there’s some difference of agreement about this in Iran. Iran would like to see those sanctions removed right away, because they’re having a debilitation impact on their economy,” he said.

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“But the United States, again, given Iran’s past history, and their questionable compliance with previous international agreements, we’re gonna make sure that Iran demonstrates sustained compliance to the agreement before we even contemplate removing the kinds of congressional sanctions that have been so effective in compelling Iran to the negotiating table.”

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