The two-day marathon talks between Iran and the “Iran Six” nations in Istanbul has been wrongly misinterpreted by Western media as a total failure, following the premature expressions of “disappointment” by the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton.
For sure, the talks did not yield any immediate results and there are “serious differences” between the two sides, to paraphrase a United States diplomat quoted in the Western media. But, contrary to the deluge of negative commentaries, the talks neither “collapsed” as claimed by news agency reports, nor were they bereft of room for optimism.
Indeed, Tehran’s reaction, reflected in President Mahmud
