In a hastily called press conference Sept. 25, during the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh, President Barack Obama stated: “Iran is breaking rules that all nations must follow—endangering the global non-proliferation regime.”
 Obama, Sarkozy and Brown—all leaders of states with nuclear weapons—accuse Iran of being a “nuclear threat,” Pittsburgh, Pa., Sept. 25. |
During the same press conference, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said that Iran was “taking the international community on a dangerous path.” British Prime Minister Gordon Brown predicted “the level of deception by the Iranian government, and the scale of what we believe is the breach of international commitments, will shock and anger the whole international community.”
Iran’s testing of its medium- and long-range missiles conducted on Iranian soil—the kind of test that has been conducted routinely by dozens of countries for decades—gave rise to another round of condemnations as a “provocative act.”
Given the tone of these statements, and the urgency by which the press conference was called, one would think that the Western imperialists had discovered a stockpile of nuclear weapons in Iran. But a look at the facts reveals that the new plant in Iran is not even a violation of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, much less a grave danger to world peace.
Obama started his statement by saying: “[T]he United States, the United Kingdom, and France presented detailed evidence to the IAEA demonstrating that the Islamic Republic of Iran has been building a covert uranium enrichment facility near Qom. …” But on Sept. 21, four days prior to Obama’s statement, Iran had already declared the new facility through a letter to the International Atomic Energy Agency. So this was not the revelation of a great secret by Obama and his imperialist partners. They were merely restating—though in a highly provocative way—what Iran had already declared.
In its declaration to the IAEA, Iran reported that the new facility would be used for uranium enrichment to be used for civilian purposes, and that the site would become operational in 18 months. Provisions of the NPT require signatories to declare uranium enrichment sites six months before coming online.
More stringent reporting requirements are called for under the “Additional Protocol” to the NPT. Iran never ratified the Additional Protocol but voluntarily committed to it until 2007, when it withdrew from it. With the refusal of imperialist powers to recognize Iran’s right to develop nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, as called for by the NPT, it made no sense for Iran to sign up for a voluntary protocol and subject itself to more stringent requirements.
Is the new facility evidence of a weapons program?
Iran has declared its readiness to open the new site to inspections by the IAEA, hence removing any possibility of weapons conversion. The IAEA has already accounted for all of Iran’s nuclear material as not having been converted to weapon’s grade uranium—90 percent plus. So the purpose of building the new facility near the city of Qom cannot possibly be to build a nuclear bomb.
With the United States and Israel openly stating for years that bombing Iran’s nuclear sites is an “option on the table,” it is obvious why Iran would want several sites for uranium enrichment—sites that would be hard to target. Iran’s Vice President Ali Akbar Salehi explains: “This site is at the base of a mountain and was selected on purpose in a place that would be protected against aerial attack. That’s why the site was chosen adjacent to a military site.”
It is instructive to look at the powers crying foul the loudest. The United States, France and Britain each have thousands upon thousands of nuclear weapons, ready to be deployed within minutes. All three countries are in violation of the NPT, ratified in 1968, requiring nuclear-armed states to eliminate their nuclear weapons. Israel is not even a signatory of the NPT and has an estimated 200 nuclear warheads. All of these countries are accusing Iran of pursuing a nuclear weapons program, while after years of inspections the IAEA has not revealed a shred of evidence to support this accusation.
Negotiations
On Oct. 1, direct negotiations between Iran and the United States, Britain, France, China, Russia and Germany were launched. The United States and its imperialist allies have stated that they will pursue further sanctions against Iran if the negotiations reach an impasse.
Obama’s willingness to negotiate directly with Iran has been seen as a major foreign policy shift. But engaging in negotiations, in and of itself, is not an indication of a peaceful foreign policy. If what is brought to the negotiating table is a series of ultimatums, of the kind that were presented to Yugoslavia in 1999 at Rambouillet in the build-up to the bombing of that country, the negotiations will have been designed to fail.
The real reason Iran is targeted by the U.S. ruling class and its junior partners is that it refuses to follow imperialist dictates and charts an independent path. The campaign for regime change in Iran has taken on a variety of forms—promotion of human rights and “democracy,” implementing sanctions, threatening military strikes and now negotiations. But all of these tactics pursue the basic goal of replacing the Islamic Republic of Iran with a client state that will open up Iran to multinational capital and make its oil and gas available for plunder by big oil.
It is the task of revolutionaries and progressives in the United States to actively oppose these imperialist policies.
