Doug Lorimer
The UN Security Council unanimously approved a statement on March 29 urging Iran to suspend its uranium enrichment research activities, despite the fact that such activities are allowed under the 1970 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and Iran's 1974 NPT safeguards agreement with the UN's Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
The legally non-binding statement calls on IAEA director-general Mohamed ElBaradei to report on Iran's response within 30 days.
The statement was agreed to only after the US, Britain and France made significant concessions to Russia and China, the other two permanent members of the council. On March 29, Reuters reported: "Western ambassadors said the five nations reached agreement only after a provision stating that the council was responsible for international peace and security was removed at Russia's insistence. Russia and China both feared such a statement could later be used as a legal basis for sanctions or a military strike against Iran."
Speaking to reporters after the 15-member Security Council approved the statement, John Bolton, the US ambassador to the UN, criticised Russia and China for insisting on the paragraph's removal. The Russian ITAR-TASS news agency noted that the clause "would create a formal pretext for activating Article 7 of the UN Charter that envisages the use of force".
This was what Washington wanted from the statement — a declaration by the Security Council that Iran's nuclear program poses a threat to "international peace and security", giving the council's endorsement to US claims that Iran has a nuclear weapons program and is therefore in violation of its obligations under the NPT.
As with Iraq, Washington is waging a propaganda campaign about a "secret" Iranian WMD program to provide justification for a future invasion. Already having invaded oil-rich Iraq, seizure of Iran's nationalised oil resources would give the US a stranglehold over the largest and potentially most profitable oilfields in the world.
Despite two years of thorough inspections of Iran's nuclear facilities, the IAEA has found no evidence of a weapons program. On March 25, Associated Press reported that inspectors are becoming increasingly exasperated with the claims made by US officials.
"IAEA officials", AP reported, "normally refuse to be identified as such when discussing sensitive topics such as disputes with leading IAEA board members, such as the United States. But reflecting exasperation, a senior agency official dropped such reservations Saturday as he called the US claims that an agency briefing on the advances made by Iran on enrichment was a bombshell 'pure speculation and misinformation'.
"'It comes from people who are seeking a crisis, not a solution' to the confrontation over Iran, the official said."
According to AP, following a briefing given by IAEA officials to the five permanent members of the Security Council, "The information on where Iran was on enrichment and where it was headed was not new, but the US officials claimed 'the ... IAEA was blown away by [Iran's] progress and had the US redefining its timeline' for Iran's capacity to make its first nuclear weapon down to three years, the diplomat told the Associated Press. Just last year, US officials cited intelligence estimating Iran would need 10 years for its first bomb."
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, April 5, 2006.
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