Doug Lorimer
The 35-member board of governors of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) began meeting in Vienna on November 25 to review Iran's compliance with the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT).
The board will consider a report by IAEA director-general Mohamed ElBaradei, circulated to diplomats on November 15, that states that all the nuclear material that Iran has declared to the agency in the past year has been accounted for, "and therefore we can say that such material is not diverted to prohibited [weapons] activities".
On November 15, Iran reached an agreement with Britain, France and Germany to suspend the uranium enrichment at its nuclear facilities in Isfahan and Natanz, despite this activity not violating of the NPT.
"Iran's acceptance of suspension is a political decision, not an obligation [under the NPT]", Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson Hamid Reza Asefi said, adding that the suspension was "the best decision under the current circumstances".
ElBaradei's report said that Iran had asked IAEA inspectors to police its commitment to the enrichment freeze.
While Iranian officials insist that uranium enrichment is simply part of their country's nuclear energy program, US officials have cited it as "evidence" to support their claim that Tehran is secretly developing nuclear weapons in violation of the NPT.
US officials want the IAEA board to refer Iran's nuclear programs to the UN Security Council for possible imposition of international economic sanctions, thus laying the diplomatic groundwork for a future Iraq-style invasion of Iran.
Like Iraq, Iran is classified as a "rogue state" by Washington — a state that denies US corporations a free hand to exploit its resources. Like Iraq before the US-led invasion, Iran has immense oil reserves and a nationalised oil industry. And again, like pre-invasion Iraq, Iran has granted lucrative oil and gas export contracts to the US capitalist rulers' European and Japanese rivals.
On November 18, outgoing US Secretary of State Colin Powell — who brazenly lied to the UN Security Council about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction — told reporters he had seen intelligence that Iran was trying to fit nuclear weapons to its missiles. "I'm talking about information that says that they not only had these missiles, but I'm aware of information that suggests they were working hard as to how to put the two [missiles and nuclear weapons] together", Powell said.
The next day, the Washington Post reported that Powell's claim was "based on an unvetted, single source who provided information that two US officials said yesterday was highly significant if true but has not yet been verified". The Post's report also noted that "UN nuclear inspectors who have been investigating Iran for nearly two years have found no evidence that Tehran possesses a nuclear warhead design or is conducting a nuclear weapons program".
On the eve of the IAEA board meeting, Powell again accused Iran of having a nuclear weapons program, even dishonestly claiming that the UN nuclear watchdog had obtained evidence of it. In a November 25 interview with the US ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl, Powell claimed that "many nations ... thought we were overreacting during the first couple of years of this administration when we called attention to [Iran's] nuclear programs. Finally, the International Atomic Energy Agency got evidence of it and dissidents started providing information that made it clear the Iranians were doing things that the world did not know about and were troubling."
The "dissidents" Powell was presumably referring to are from the National Council of Resistance of Iran, a front for the People's Mujahideen of Iran (PMI), which on November 17 claimed at a Paris press conference that Tehran was designing a nuclear warhead for its long-range missiles and had obtained weapons grade uranium from Pakistan. NCRI spokesperson Frank Soleiman said Iran was aiming to make a nuclear bomb by the middle of next year.
The PMI is classified by the US State Department as a "terrorist organisation" because of its long record of bombings against Iranian government officials. In the 1980s, the PMI collaborated with Saddam Hussein's regime to wage war on Iran.
From Green Left Weekly, December 1, 2004.
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