On Wednesday, just hours before the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany reached agreement on new sanctions against the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Khomeinist leadership came out with its strongest show of defiance yet.
In a rare interview, given wide publicity by the state-owned media, former Foreign Minister Ali-Akbar Velayati warned that the Islamic republic would under no circumstances agree to suspend its uranium enrichment program.
Since the UN insists that Iran should suspend its uranium enrichment program before it can return to talks about an eventual settlement of the dispute, Velayati was, in fact, heightening the current tension. His interview was intended as a detailed answer to another interview by a former Khomeinist official. The official in question is Muhammad Khatami, a mullah who preceded Ahmadinejad as president of the Islamic republic. In his interview, Khatami had proposed that the regime pay “a certain price” to defuse the situation and avoid UN sanctions. Since the suspension of uranium enrichment had been negotiated under his administration, it was clear what Khatami meant by “a certain price.”
Last year, when Ahmadinejad triggered the current crisis by resuming uranium enrichment, some apologists of the Khomeinist regime claimed that he made the move solely to attract attention. The fact that Ahmadinejad had unilaterally scrapped an agreement reached with the European Union trio of Britain, France and Germany after years of negotiations was dismissed as a bump on the road.
All that the firebrand demagogue wanted, we were told, was to force the United States into talks with the Islamic republic. The whole issue was thus transformed into one of a showdown between a plucky little Third World nation that wants to be independent and the American “hyperpower” that wants to dictate to everyone.
Iran has no need of enriched uranium because it has no nuclear power stations and is unlikely to have any in the near future. (The lone nuclear power plant that Russia is building in southern Iran was supposed to come on stream next year. However, the Russians have now effectively abandoned the project, pending the outcome of Tehran’s duel with the United Nations.) Thus, it is not hard to assume that the enriched uranium is being produced for something other than generating electricity.
Ahmadinejad built his strategy on three claims.
The first was that Iran’s economic development depends on nuclear energy. This is manifestly false because Iran’s current plans to build nuclear power stations aim at producing just over 10 percent of the nation’s need for electricity. And, that is assuming that all the 22 nuclear power plants are actually built over the next two decades. Iran’s natural gas resources, the second largest, and its oil reserves, the third largest in the world, will continue to provide more than 80 percent of the energy it needs for decades, if not centuries ahead. If anything, nuclear energy, which is costly to produce and even costlier because of its long-term environmental effects, is an uneconomic proposition in the case of a country like Iran. Ahmadinejad’s second claim was that the US was forming an OPEC-like cartel to control the supply of enriched uranium, needed to produce nuclear fuel, and thus have a stranglehold on future energy markets. But, that claim, too, is hard to sustain.
At present, 31 countries produce nuclear energy but only 10 have uranium enrichment facilities. Even if Iran develops such facilities, it would remain dependent on the outside world for supplies of raw uranium. Iran’s own reserves are sufficient for the needs of a single nuclear power plant for just seven years. In any case, the European trio has already proposed building uranium enrichment facilities in Iran as a joint venture and under strict international supervision.
Ahmadinejad’s third claim was that the US as a major power with global ambitions was in terminal decline and, once George W. Bush was out of the White House, would cut and run from the Middle East, allowing the Khomeinist regime to emerge as the new regional superpower.
By now, it must be clear to everyone that the fear of seeing nuclear bombs in the hands of the Khomeinist regime is not an American invention. In the past two weeks, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, British Premier Tony Blair and all three leading candidates in the current presidential campaign in France have made it clear that they would not allow the mullahs to get the bomb. Even Russia under Vladimir Putin and China under Hu Jintao, while trying to keep channels open, have refused to split the Security Council in order to please Ahmadinejad. As for Iran’s neighbors, recent conversations with Turkish and Arab leaders have convinced us that they see the Islamic republic’s nuclear ambitions as an existential threat. Echoing Ahmadinejad, Velayati says that the Islamic republic can live with “whatever sanctions” the UN might impose. At some point, however, the people of Iran will realize that they are being asked to pay a high price so that the Khomeinist leadership does not lose face.
Ahmadinejad had hoped to manage the crisis as one concerned with foreign policy. Khatami’s remarks, however, show that the confrontation with the UN has now become an issue of domestic Iranian politics, splitting the Khomeinist elite itself.
Those who had argued that UN sanctions would have no effect on the Islamic republic might want to take a closer look at the situation. The Khomeinist regime, tough talk from Ahmadinejad not withstanding, is beginning to feel the pressure.
