IRAN: Tehran won’t budge on enrichment, officials say
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The news surprised no one.
Over the weekend, an official close to Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, ruled out any halt to its ongoing enrichment of uranium as a precondition for international talks, dashing whatever faint hopes there were for a quick resolution of the crisis over Iran’s nuclear program.
Ali Akbar Velayati is a senior foreign policy adviser to Iran’s ultimate political and spiritual authority. He told state media that while Iran accepted talks over its controversial production of enriched uranium, which can be used to power an electricity plant or, if highly augmented, a nuclear weapon, “We want talks without any precondition on the enrichment issue,“ he said in remarks broadcast on state television.
As everyone knows, the United States is leading a campaign to pressure Iran to halt its uranium enrichment program. It signed off on a package of proposed incentives meant to lure Iran into giving up its drive to toward mastering the enrichment of uranium in exchange for economic and political goodies. Iran delivered its response Friday.
But anyone who was hoping for an Iranian U-turn was disappointed.
On Saturday, government spokesman Gholamhossein Elham, a loyalist to the faction of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, reiterated Iran’s longstanding position that it won’t stop producing nuclear material, a highly technical process that involves running uranium gas through spinning centrifuges.
Iran rejected a similar package of proposals in 2006 for the same reason, a move that led to three sets of relatively mild U.N. Security Council sanctions.
The U.S. and Israel have not ruled out war, and Iran too has been thumping its chest.
— Borzou Daragahi in Beirut
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