Commentary by U.S. Alliance for Democratic Iran
Ahmadinejad’s government is clearly a lot better at spinning centrifuges than it is at spinning the IAEA report released last Friday. The report paves the way for the third round of UN Security Council sanctions due for vote on Saturday and ayatollahs’ spinning of the report as a “great and historic victory” is mocked in Iran.
The clerical regime’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei who is bent on solidifying and expanding political dominance of the faction representing the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) weeks before the March parliamentary elections, joined the “nuclear victory” bandwagon. Few days after the IAEA report, he reaffirmed his support for his hand-picked president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the IRGC’s handling of the nuclear program.
Apparently Iran’s nuclear officials were confident the report was going to give them “a clean bill of health”. Ahmadinejad and his aides, in a rush to break the news of a “historic victory”, deceitfully declared that the IAEA had “closed the nuclear case.” An early Friday news headline from Tehran read: “Defiant Iran upbeat ahead of nuclear report.”
According to the Los Angeles Times, “Iranian newspapers received printed directives from the country’s Supreme National Security Council… advising journalists to write about the IAEA report as a great national success.” Ahmadinejad’s office even ordered the IRGC’s suppressive Bassij Force to take a break from its daily routine of cracking down on dissidents to distribute “nuclear victory sweet”.
The state-run euphoria, however, did not last long. A more careful reading of the report made it abundantly clear to Ahmadinejad’s government that a third round of sanctions was immanent. Last Saturday he warned of "firm reprisals" against any country leading the way to impose new sanctions, adding that Iran was "not joking".
The IAEA report was more than emphatic on the uranium enrichment, the central issue of the nuclear stand-off with Tehran. It said: “Contrary to the decisions of the Security Council, Iran has not suspended its enrichment related activities… In addition, Iran started the development of new generation centrifuges. Iran has also continued construction of the IR-40 reactor and operation of the Heavy Water Production Plant.” In plain language, the ayatollahs’ regime was in blatant violation of the three binding UNSC resolutions.
On Monday, "serious and substantial” documentation from “multiple sources” were presented to the IAEA Board of Governors indicating continued nuclear weapons work by Tehran beyond 2003. Documents showed "detailed work put into the designing of the warhead, studying how that warhead would perform, how it would be detonated and how it would be fitted to a Shahab-3 missile."
Meanwhile, the disclosures by Iran’s main opposition coalition, the National Council of Resistance, just days before the release of the IAEA report, stroke a similar alarm. It exposed the establishment of “a new command and control centre for the program [making nuclear warheads] coded-named Lavizan-2 at Mojdeh on the southeastern outskirts of Tehran last April, near the site of a previous facility razed after its exposure,” according to Reuters. The NCRI said that “the Iranian government was also actively pursuing production of nuclear warheads at a complex code-named B1-Nori- 8500 at Khojir about 12 miles further southeast.”
And according to the Wall Street Journal, the NCRI’s chief diplomat, Mohammad Mohaddessin, revealed that at a “facility at Khojir, a defense-ministry missile- research site on the southeast edge of Tehran, is developing a nuclear warhead for use on Iranian medium-range missiles.”
The IAEA report also raised the nuclear weaponization issue. “The one major remaining issue relevant to the nature of Iran’s nuclear programme is the alleged studies on the green salt project, high explosives testing and the missile re-entry vehicle. This is a matter of serious concern and critical to an assessment of a possible military dimension to Iran’s nuclear programme,” the report said.
Evidently short of time to come up with manufactured and forged documents to whitewash these violations – as was evidently the case with some old pending question raise by the IAEA – Tehran “stated that the allegations were baseless and that the information which the Agency had shown to Iran was fabricated.”
The IAEA did not buy that. The report concluded by saying that “in the light of the many years of undeclared activities in Iran and the confidence deficit created as a result,” the Director General “urges Iran to implement all necessary measures called for by the Board of Governors and the Security Council to build confidence in the peaceful nature of its nuclear programme.”
That’s a diplo-speak for saying that given Tehran’s many years of lies and deception, the regime must abide by the UNSC resolutions and come clean on remaining questions dealing with secret facilities making nuclear warhead and other weaponization activities. (USADI)
