Iran nuclear swap

Articles on the just announced Iranian nuclear swap in Turkey. In the LA Times, Juan Cole also has a good short summary, the actual agreement, an article that says:
The main difference between the deal Iran has just agreed to and the U.N.-drafted version, AP reports, is that if Iran does not receive the fuel rods for its medical research reactor within a year, Turkey will be required to "quickly and unconditionally" return the uranium to Iran. Iran had feared that under the initial U.N. deal, if a swap fell through, its uranium stock could be seized permanently. If the West is operating in good faith, then this difference between the agreements shouldn't matter.

Furthermore, Iran dropped an earlier demand for the fuel exchange to happen in stages and is now willing to ship abroad its nuclear material in a single batch. It also dropped an insistence that the exchange happen inside Iran as well as a request to receive the fuel rods right away.

"There is no ground left for more sanctions or pressure," Turkey's Foreign Minister said.

Also, the role of rising powers Turkey and Brazil, which are emerging powers and also assert more and mode independence from Washington.

Importantly, the US tried to discourage the deal, since of course if diplomacy works, that invalidates Washington's militaristic approach. A few hours later, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton telephoned Davutoglu and sought to discourage the Turkey-Brazil initiative. A state department spokesman said she had warned him that any summit in Tehran would be just a ploy, "an attempt to stop Security Council action without actually taking steps to address international concerns about its nuclear programme". Clinton, however, may not have been on the same political page as the White House. As she was speaking in Washington, Turkish officials in Ankara were telling journalists at an off-the-record briefing that they had received quiet encouragement from President Obama to press ahead with their mediating effort. This may have been a planned divergence of official American opinion designed to pressure Iran; just as possibly, it reflects Clinton's continuing isolation from the inner-circle of American foreign policymaking on crucial world issues.