At its Thursday meeting in Vienna, the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency put to a vote a resolution proposed by the European troika and the United States regarding Iran’s nuclear facilities. The resolution was adopted with 19 votes in favor, 12 abstentions, and three votes against (Russia, China, and Niger). The resolution calls on Iran to grant IAEA inspectors, without delay, access to the facilities that were attacked during the 12-day war.
The issuance of this unjustified and illegal resolution comes despite the fact that nearly half of the Board members did not vote in favor of it, and notably, two permanent members of the UN Security Council voted against it. This resolution once again demonstrated that the Agency is an instrumental body serving Western interests, an issue that has become even more severe and serious in recent years.
Five months ago, the Agency, by issuing a biased and anti-Iran report, effectively cleared the way for Israeli and American attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities. In a strange approach, it condemned neither these attacks nor the assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists along with their families.
Nevertheless, the Islamic Republic of Iran continued its cooperation with the Agency. On September 9, in Cairo, Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, signed an agreement with Rafael Grossi, the IAEA Director General, to facilitate mutual cooperation regarding inspection procedures. Yet in a questionable move, the three European countries, backed by the United States, once again abused the dispute-resolution mechanism in the JCPOA, known as the “snapback mechanism,” and sought to revive the anti-Iran UN Security Council resolutions. However, Iran, together with Russia and China, refused to recognize this process, formally announcing that they would not abide by it, asserting that from a legal standpoint the move is invalid.
In any case, from Iran’s perspective, the West’s illegal resort to the snapback mechanism dealt the final blow to the Cairo agreement and effectively nullified it. This is precisely the point: The West now demands something that it itself destroyed. The question that must be asked of the United States is: Has Trump not repeatedly claimed the complete destruction of Iran’s nuclear facilities? If so, then what are they worried about, and what exactly do they want to inspect? Either their claim that Iran’s facilities were destroyed is true, or their so-called concerns and pretexts are.
The Western countries are not concerned about peace and stability. If they were, they would be alarmed by the nuclear activities of a regime whose hands still drip with the blood of genocide in Gaza, while at the same time being subject to no oversight whatsoever over its nuclear facilities and activities. The real issue is that the Western powers know better than anyone that the Islamic Republic of Iran has never sought nuclear weapons, and that this entire file has been political and non-technical from the very beginning.
Its only function has been to create pretexts for applying pressure and imposing illegal sanctions on Iran. What truly angers them is that a country like Iran, under the harshest sanctions and subjected to various forms of sabotage, has managed to attain this key technology and become a model for other states, proving that progress is possible without dependence on or submission to the West.
Their resentment stems from this reality, and their insistence on dismantling Iran’s indigenous enrichment industry is an attempt to enforce their bullying and coercion in the face of Iran’s determination to preserve and strengthen its national independence.
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