The site is about 20 miles southeast of the Iranian capital, Tehran. IAEA director general Mohammed ElBaradei said his inspectors will visit Parchin “within days or weeks.” On January 9, the Iranian government said the inspectors will be permitted to take samples of soil in the military base.

Since 2002, Washington has been campaigning against Iran’s right to develop its nuclear power industry, insisting the country’s atomic energy program is secretly aimed at building a nuclear bomb. The Iranian government has countered that nuclear power is needed for peaceful purposes, in order to develop the country’s economy. Tehran argues that power generated from nuclear plants would allow it to meet the country’s growing energy needs while reducing dependency on petroleum and at the same time exporting more oil in order to use the hard currency earned from such sales for development of industry and infrastructure.

In October 2003, under intense pressure, Tehran decided to open some nuclear facilities to IAEA inspection. In November 2004, Tehran agreed after negotiations with the governments of France, Britain, and Germany, to put a hold on enriching uranium, one of the steps necessary to produce fuel for nuclear power plants. At the time, Tehran said the agreement meant only a temporary suspension of uranium enrichment, which is not prohibited under the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty that Iran has signed. Following this, the IAEA did not request Iran’s case go before the UN Security Council for possible sanctions at its meeting in November, as Washington has been pushing for.

ElBaradei subsequently told the Associated Press he will “continue to keep the board updated” on Iran, but expects the investigation of Iran to drop to “routine reporting” over the next six months. Rather, he said, north Korea should be viewed as “the No. 1 security threat.”

According to the New York Times, ElBaradei said “that applying slow, constant pressure on Iran would yield more results than immediately taking the country to the UN Security Council for sanctions, the path the Bush administration has advocated. ElBaradei has never publicly accused Iran of hiding a weapons program, as the Bush administration has, and instead has asked Iran to allow inspectors access to a lengthening list of sites.”

The UN weapons chief’s failure to cooperate fully with Washington has led to an open U.S. campaign to remove ElBaradei from the post. According to the January 8 Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the U.S. government’s goal is to remove him by June, “opening the way for a replacement more to the Bush administration’s liking—one harder on Iran and other nations on the U.S. nasty list.” The Seattle daily reported that Washington has wiretapped ElBaradei’s phone conversations “in attempts to show he was demonstrating favoritism toward Iran in his investigation of its nuclear activities.” To remove ElBaradei from the IAEA executive position would require support from 12 other member states of the group’s 35-nation board of governors.

Some commentators in the big-business media are raising the possibility of a military strike in the near future to cripple Iran’s nuclear program. In a column in the December 4 Financial Times, Philip Coggan noted that a military attack on Iran “does not mean an invasion. The U.S. could mount air strikes to try to eliminate Iran’s nuclear facilities or it could encourage Israel to do so. Twenty years ago, Israel attacked a nuclear power plant in Iraq.”

Others disagree that such strikes could effectively cripple Tehran’s potential to build nuclear arms. An article by David Sanger in the December 12 New York Times said, “The Iranians remember Osirak, the site of a lightning Israeli air strike against an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981 that set back Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions by a decade. American and European intelligence officials say Iran has taken the lesson to heart, spreading its nuclear facilities around the country, burying some underground and putting others in the middle of crowded urban areas.”  
 
 
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