How they see us: Why can’t Iran enrich uranium?

last updated 8 January 2015

The West is once again flouting international law, said Reza Ramezani in Resalat (Iran). The latest round of talks between Iran and the West ended this month in stalemate. The U.S. and other powers want Iran to abandon all enrichment of uranium and buy power-plant reactor fuel from other countries instead, so we won’t have the ability to enrich uranium to weapons-grade. But the Non-Proliferation Treaty explicitly grants us the right to control our own enrichment process, as long as we allow inspectors in. The West keeps trying to exploit that requirement, arguing that we must allow inspectors into all kinds of military facilities that have nothing to do with our nuclear programs. Apparently “Westerners not only do not abide by laws, but they see themselves as being above the law.”

The U.S. is simply unreasoningly hostile toward Iran, said Mohammad Kazem Anbarlui, also in Resalat. In an address last month for the Persian new year, President Obama quoted an Iranian poet and urged us to “plant the tree of friendship” and “uproot the sapling of enmity”—as if Iran were the one threatening the borders of the U.S. So are we supposed to believe that Americans traveled thousands of miles across the ocean and slaughtered thousands of Muslims with their “weapons of mass destruction” in order to surround us with an orchard of friendship in Afghanistan to our east and Iraq to our west? Warmth and affection, I suppose, are the reasons why they have “mobilized and equipped forces” in Turkey and Azerbaijan, to our north. The U.S. has a nuclear arsenal that can destroy the world many times over. Yet it claims to fear our peaceful nuclear program. Only blind hatred toward Iran can explain this paradox.

Even the recent focus on North Korea is part of America’s anti-Iran push, said Hossein Shariatmadari in Kayhan(Iran). The first two nuclear tests by North Korea only brought “a diplomatic frown” from the West—so why has this third test, done two months ago, prompted “such noise and ruckus”? The answer is that the U.S. has failed to make its case at the negotiating table with Iran. At the last round of talks, it “had no choice but to admit defeat when faced with the strong technical and legal documents” proving that Iran is already in compliance with treaties governing nuclear activities. In fact, that’s why the U.S. blocked Iran’s suggestion to open the meetings up to the press. So now it is trying to stir up hysteria about nuclear weapons by invoking an imagined threat from tiny North Korea. Every time a Western leader mentions the North Korean situation, he follows it with a caution that this proves Iran must never be allowed nuclear weapons. “If you didn’t know better, you would think it was actually Iran that did the nuclear test.”