America's short not-so-happy visit to the Iran talks

Condi Rice has informed us that the recent attempt by the US to engage in talks with Iran was a failure.  From the AP:

At the meeting, Iran had been expected to respond to a package of incentives offered in exchange for halting enrichment of uranium, which can be used to fuel atomic weapons. The Bush administration broke with long-standing policy to send a top diplomat to support the offer.

However, Rice said that instead of a coherent answer, Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili delivered a “meandering” monologue full of irrelevant “small talk about culture” that appeared to annoy many of the others present at the table in Geneva.

Can anybody be surprised?  Let’s review for a moment who Jalili is – a religious fanatic and close ally of Ahamdinejad whose PhD thesis is called “Paradigm of Political Thought of Islam in the Holy Quran”.  He is said to have written Ahmad’s nutsy and rambling letter to President Bush. Remember that? He is also the author of something called the “Foreign policy of (the) Prophet of Islam”.  According to Reuters, he “specializes in monologue” rather than debate and is a hardline veteran of the Iran-Iraq War who has almost no diplomatic experience.  We can safely assume Jalali is also a believer in all the psychotic end days nonsense about the Mahdi.

This is whom we were negotiating with.  John Bolton was quite upset about our engaging in these talks not more than a week ago, but John has gotten the last laugh quickly.  When asked if the US would return in two weeks to hear Iran’s reply to the Western proposal for a six week moratorium on nuclear enrichment (Iran hasn’t even deigned to address the issue), Rice was dismissive.  “I think we’ve done enough to demonstrate that the United States is serious and to assure our partners that we’re serious,” she said.

Barack Obama take note.