The Americans pulled out all the stops to launch “another hostile action” against the Islamic Republic, said Tehran’s Jomhuri-ye Eslami in an editorial. They put severe pressure on the International Atomic Energy Agency to pass a resolution demanding that Iran stop building our new uranium enrichment facility near Qom. Thanks to “intense and continuous American diplomatic efforts at the highest levels,” the resolution was even supported by Russia and China, two countries that had previously been sympathetic to our efforts. What’s more shocking, outgoing IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei signed off on it, even though just two weeks ago he had put out a report “calling Iran’s nuclear plans normal and healthy.” In fact, during his 12 years as director of the agency, ElBaradei has never found “any evidence for nonpeaceful motives in Iran’s nuclear activities.” Yet now that his term is coming to an end, he has caved to the Americans and politicized his agency. Iran will have to reconsider its cooperation with the IAEA.
We can expect the IAEA to get even tougher on us, said Davoud Hermidas Bavand in E’temad. The agency will soon be headed by Yukiya Amano, a Japanese diplomat with “stronger Western leanings” than ElBaradei. Iran should have struck a deal with the IAEA months ago, when the U.S. and other nations proposed sending Iran’s uranium to Russia to be enriched to 20 percent purity, which is enough to power a nuclear reactor but not to make a bomb. The Iranian objection has been that there’s no guarantee we would get the uranium back, since Russia has broken agreements with us before. But there are other options we could have pursued, such as sending the uranium to Turkey. Now it may be too late. “The opportunity for talks is getting tighter and tighter every day, and the possibility of a compromise may be lost.”
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