Arash Aramesh

Last week, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad issued conflicting statements about whether Iran was willing to accept the uranium enrichment exchange program, which was proposed by the 5+1 states. First, he said that Iran was willing to work with the international community based on an agreement proposed last year, which required Iran to send 3 percent of its enriched uranium abroad and receive 20 percent enriched fuel in return. This would have significantly reduced Iran’s ability to enrich large amounts of uranium at home to build a nuclear bomb.

But by the end of the week, Ahmadinejad had shifted his position, apparently because of pressure from other hardliners and conservatives. On Saturday, Iran’s pro-government Kayhan daily published an editorial penned by Chief Editor Hossein Shariatmadari, who is also Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s representative at Iran’s largest state-run newspaper. In his editorial, Shariatmadari wrote, “Our dear brother Mr. Ahmadinejad believes that if they [5+1] do not return Iran’s uranium, they will have broken the law.” Shariatmadari argued that the President’s comments resulted from naiveté because the West simply cannot be trusted.

According to Kayhan, Ahmadinejad was wrong in his assessment that, “Some countries have truly accepted the idea of cooperating with Iran, which has caused Israel to become upset.”

Shariatmadari, who has been one of Ahmadinejad’s firm supporters, criticized the president because according to most conservatives, Iran has the right to enrich inside the country and not bow down to foreign pressure. Many high-ranking Iranian officials and senior conservative leaders are believed to be opposed to outsourcing uranium enrichment. According to Fars news agency, which has ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Ali Larijani, the conservative speaker of the parliament, said on February 6 that the West was trying to deceive Iran on the nuclear negotiations, and he accused the West of political fraud.

On February 8, Ahmadinejad ordered the director of Iran’s Atomic Energy Agency to go ahead with enrichment for what IRNA, Iran’s official news agency, called, “research and scientific purposes.” Many observers believe that the conservatives backed by Khamenei pressured Ahmadinejad into backing out of a possible uranium exchange deal with the West.