There is a broad consensus that Iran wants the bomb and that Iran will get the bomb, writes Lara Marlowe in Washington
PRESIDENT MAHMOUD Ahmadinejad’s speech in Tehran yesterday was a sort of recapitulation of Iran’s position throughout the entire eight-year crisis over its nuclear programme, steeped in ambiguity and bristling with self-justification and defiance.
Iran is now “a nuclear state”, Ahmadinejad boasted, saying it has enriched uranium to its highest level yet and would triple the production of 20 per cent-enriched uranium “in the near future”.
At least two giant missiles were hoisted over Azadi square, but the Iranian leader stuck to the official line: Iran seeks only civil nuclear power, not nuclear weapons.
“The Iranian nation is brave enough that if one day we wanted to build nuclear bombs, we would announce it publicly without being afraid of you,” Ahmadinejad taunted the US and Europe.
It’s been a landmark week in the Iranian nuclear saga. On Sunday, the head of Iran’s atomic energy organisation announced that the country would begin enriching uranium to 20 per cent (from an average of 3.5 per cent previously). Iran said it was carrying out the enrichment “on a lab scale” only, for use in a medical research reactor.
But Western experts say Iran does not have the capacity to package the fuel in rods for use in a reactor, and that the jump to 20 per cent represents significant progress on the way to the 90 per cent required for a nuclear device.
On Monday, Tehran invited the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna to witness the beginning of the accelerated enrichment process.
On Tuesday, President Barack Obama expressed frustration, saying, “We have bent over backwards to say to the Islamic Republic of Iran that we are willing to have a constructive conversation about how they can align themselves with international norms and rules and re-enter as full members of the international community . . . They have made their choice so far.”
Mr Obama said the US was “moving fairly quickly” on a new sanctions resolution to be considered by the UN Security Council. But the UNSC has agreed on three sets of sanctions against Iran in the past four years, to no effect.
France is strongly allied with the US on the issue, and the US had hoped to pass a resolution this month while France holds the rotating presidency of the council. That looks unlikely, because Russia blows hot and cold on sanctions, and China, which imports 13 per cent of its petrol from Iran and vies with the EU as Tehran’s leading trading partner, is downright unco-operative.
Last year, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke of “crippling sanctions” against the Islamic Republic.
The US position has now changed to “targeted sanctions”, as Washington fears that hurting ordinary Iranians would discourage anti-government protest and rally support for the regime.
Mr Obama is under domestic pressure to confront Iran. Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman yesterday introduced a Bill that would require the White House to compile a list of human rights abusers in Iran so that their assets could be frozen and they could be denied visas.
The failed vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin suggested last Sunday that Mr Obama might win re-election if he declared war on Iran.
Pressure is also coming from Israel, which according to a high-ranking US government source has given Washington an implied ultimatum: if Washington does not thwart progress towards an Iranian nuclear weapon this year, Israel may launch a military strike against Iran in 2011.
There is broad consensus that Iran wants the bomb and (as Jacques Chirac, then president of France, said in January 2007) that Iran will probably get the bomb.
In the meantime, the US and Europe brandish the ineffectual sanctions weapon, because it is the only one they have.
US diplomats have reportedly proposed to their Security Council colleagues that the Iranian Central Bank and a list of companies under the control of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) be subjected to a new sanctions resolution.
The IRGC owns vast swathes of the Iranian economy, including Tehran Airport, and is in charge of the nuclear programme.
The US Treasury this week announced its own, unilateral sanctions against Gen Rostam Qasemi of the IRGC and four companies believed to carry out mining and engineering projects for Khatam al-Anbiya, a construction conglomerate owned by the IRGC.
Both Khatam al-Anbiya and the IRGC have been subjected to US sanctions since 2007.