“If you engage a superpower, you feel you are a superpower. And now the haggling in the Persian bazaar begins. We are negotiating over a carpet that we’re not sure exists, and that we don’t want to exist. And if at the end there never was a carpet it’ll be the negotiation of the century.” -- Giandomenico Picco (the United Nations representative who helped to negotiate the ceasefire that ended the Iran-Iraq War in 1988) on Iran's suspected nuclear weapons program, 2006
Sources
The New Yorker, 2006-07-10
