Doug Lorimer
An "emergency" meeting of the UN's Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, was convened on February 2 to consider a resolution sponsored by the EU-3 (Britain, France and Germany) to ask IAEA director-general Mohammed ElBaradei "to report to the Security Council of the United Nations" on steps Iran needs to take so that "outstanding questions can best be resolved and confidence built in the exclusively peaceful nature of Iran's [nuclear] program". Such a move could open the way for possible Security Council punitive "action" against Iran.
The IAEA board's meeting followed a deal struck at a meeting in London on January 30, where the foreign ministers of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — agreed to refer Iran's IAEA file to the Security Council provided no action was taken by the UN body before the regularly scheduled IAEA board meeting, due on March 6.
The January 30 Los Angeles Times reported that Shi Yanchun, a retired Chinese ambassador to Yemen and Syria, said Beijing and Moscow hope that this delay will give them time to find a diplomatic solution to the crisis. However, by agreeing to support Iran's referral to the Security Council, Moscow and Beijing have provided Washington with a propaganda coup, enabling US officials to claim that the "international community" agrees with the White House's claims that Iran has a secret nuclear weapons program.
Any of the Security Council's five permanent members, all nuclear-armed states themselves, can veto an action voted by the full council membership. It is still not clear how Russia and China will vote if the question of international sanctions against Iran comes before the Security Council.
Russia and China are major trading partners of Iran. Russia is building Iran's first nuclear power plant, which is due to become operational at the end of this year, and Iran supplies 12% of China's oil imports. On the other hand, the capitalist governments of China and Russia do not want a diplomatic confrontation with Washington. The US is China's major export market, and Moscow wants to get Washington's support for US oil companies to help modernise Russia's oil and natural gas industry.
Since January 2002, when US President George Bush branded Iran, along with Iraq and North Korea, part of an "axis of evil" that was seeking to acquire nuclear weapons and use them to threaten the US, Washington has been pushing for the IAEA board to refer Iran's nuclear program to the Security Council.
As with its allegations that oil-rich Iraq had a secret arsenal of "weapons of mass destruction", the White House's allegations against oil-rich Iran are aimed at laying the diplomatic and propaganda basis for convincing the US public to support a future Iraq-style invasion of Iran. The aim of such an invasion would be to install a pro-US regime that would enable the big US oil corporations to take control of Iran's nationalised oil and gas industry.
In his January 31 State of the Union speech to the US Congress, Bush declared that the "Iranian government is defying the world with its nuclear ambitions". This was the same lie that Bush used to justify Washington's invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
Holding up Iraq, a country now held in subjugation by 140,000 US occupation troops, as an example of how Washington has brought "liberty" to that nation, Bush declared that "liberty is the future of every nation in the Middle East". He added: "The same is true of Iran, a nation now held hostage by a small clerical elite that is isolating and repressing its people."
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad struck back the next day, vowing to resist the pressure of "bully countries" and saying Tehran will continue its nuclear energy program. He warned that Security Council referral would lead Iran to cease its voluntary cooperation with the IAEA — which would mean ending snap IAEA inspections of Iran's nuclear facilities — and only fulfil its legally binding obligations under its 1974 safeguards agreement with the IAEA.
While the White House gives the impression that Iran is on the verge of building a nuclear weapon, a claim uncritically parroted by most of the Western corporate media, a joint assessment made last year by US intelligence agencies estimated that even if Iran wanted to build a nuclear weapon, it would take at least 10 years for it to do so.
The August 2 Washington Post reported that the latest National Intelligence Estimate had concluded that "Iran will be unlikely to produce a sufficient quantity of highly enriched uranium, the key ingredient for an atomic weapon, before 'early to mid-next decade', according to four sources familiar with that finding".
From Green Left Weekly, February 8, 2006.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.