To: FCNL Key Contacts
From Joe Volk
Re: Report on Trip to Iran
February 22, 2007
Tehran, Iran. Our religious delegation returned this afternoon from another marathon day of meetings with religious and government leaders to the news that Iran has failed to comply with the United Nations Security Council resolution demanding the suspension of its uranium-enrichment program.
The headlines in U.S. newspapers talk about missed deadlines and stalemates. But sitting here in Iran, we see a different picture. The international process led by the United Nations is producing results: the Iranians are willing to begin negotiations to return their nuclear program to full international safeguards. On Wednesday, our delegation met at the foreign ministry with the deputy foreign minister of Iran. He began by telling our interfaith delegation of 13 religious leaders from the United States that this was the first time a U.S. group – religious or otherwise – had met with Iranian officials in the foreign ministry since the Iranian revolution in 1979.
I asked the deputy foreign minister about Iran’s nuclear program. In his response he repeated what Iran has already said publicly: the Iranian government is developing nuclear power to meet its country’s growing needs for energy, and Iran is prepared to suspend enrichment activities and negotiate with the international community to ensure that its nuclear program complies with international safeguards. But he added that Iran will not comply with the UN Security Council demand to suspend its uranium enrichment program as a precondition for talks.
What he said tracks very closely with what Mohammed El Baradei, the respected head of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) who won the Nobel Peace Prize last year, is saying. El Baradei is the man who knows the most about Iran’s nuclear program because his inspectors have been in and out of Iran for years. He is the person who announced this week that Iran is not complying with the UN Security Council resolution. The Security Council will have to decide the next steps. But I was impressed that El Baradei sees hope for progress if both sides will come to the negotiations table. He has proposed a time out, or simultaneous suspension of Iranian uranium enrichment and UN sanctions that could open up space for diplomatic negotiations.
Our delegation is not here to negotiate with Iran – we are a religious delegation reaching out to encourage a dialogue between our two nations in the hope of averting a war. We see an openness to negotiations here in Iran.
Sadly, the United States has not demonstrated a similar openness. The U.S. government has refused for many years to enter into any type of negotiations with Iran, focusing instead on a program of sanctions, isolation, and threats of regime change. In statements eerily familiar to the prelude to war in Iraq, the Bush administration is now also warning that Iran may soon have nuclear weapons. But the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, British intelligence and even the U.S. intelligence agencies say Iran is years away from producing nuclear weapons, with still time to talk.
The U.S. government has this process backwards. You don’t have an agreement first and then negotiate; you negotiate leading to an agreement to bring Iran’s nuclear program back under nuclear safeguards. That’s what Iran wants, that’s want El Baradei says would work, and that’s what we see as possible.
The Bush administration simply will not listen to these arguments or even enter a room at the foreign ministry to negotiate with Iran. So we at FCNL believe Congress must act to insist that the president not go to war with Iran without a full public debate and congressional approval.
