TEHRAN, 15 August 2005 — An increasingly defiant Iran called yesterday for Europe to open talks on Tehran’s desire to enrich uranium, a precursor process for nuclear weaponry, and rejected a veiled Bush administration threat of military action as psychological warfare. The new Iranian president, meanwhile, named a government replete with hard-liners, a move that looked certain to further deepen Iran’s confrontation with the West.
While Iran insists it would only use enriched uranium in nuclear reactors to generate electricity, Tehran’s past concealment of portions of its nuclear program has created distrust in the West and stoked suspicions in Washington that Iran would build nuclear weapons once it has the necessary materials.
Earlier this month, after prolonged talks with Britain, France and Germany during which Tehran put uranium conversion on hold, Iran rejected a package of aid measures, including offers of nuclear fuel in exchange for a promise to abandon plans for uranium enrichment.
Conversion of uranium is the last step in processing the radioactive ore before it is enriched to become reactor fuel or the material for nuclear weapons. After rejecting the European offer, Iran resumed uranium conversion at its nuclear facility in Isfahan. The UN nuclear watchdog agency responded with a resolution calling on the Iranians to again put the process on hold.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad unveiled his Cabinet list yesterday, proposing 21 hard-liners to fill ministries after the former Tehran mayor’s surprise victory in June. No one on the government list, which the conservative Parliament was expected to approve quickly, was known to back democratic reforms. All were seen as followers of Iran’s conservative supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the final say on all state matters.
The proposed foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, is a conservative lawmaker who has criticized Iran’s nuclear negotiations with the Europeans and called for an even tougher stance without concessions.
Several other proposed ministers are either members of the Revolutionary Guards, or have a history of cooperating with the Guards and security agencies, which take a hard-line position on the nuclear issue.
A former hard-line deputy intelligence minister, Mostafa Pourmohammadi, was named as interior minister. Ahmadinejad also named as intelligence minister Gholam Hossein Mohseni Ejehei, a cleric whom reformist journalists regard as an unyielding opponent of press freedom.
The proposed Cabinet contained only one member of the outgoing government of former President Mohammad Khatami, a reformist who tried to moderate the Islamic social code and build bridges to the West. The centrist politician Mohammad Rahmati was held over as transportation minister.
“All those who worked against Khatami’s reformist agenda have now been nominated to sit in the government,” reformist writer Ali Reza Rajaei said. “Most of them are either former military commanders or people in close touch with security agencies.”
