Dear Ms Mohammadi,

Radio Zamaneh has declined to publish my following Comment which I have been submitting to it since 18 September 2008; the reason for this unacceptable behaviour remains unclarified to this date (Radio Zamaneh has as yet to respond to my e-mail message in which I have enquired about the prevailing censorship at Radio Zamaneh).

Be it as it may, as you can readily verify, all aspects mentioned in this Comment turn out to coincide with the statements by Dr Akbar Etemad. Before reproducing this Comment here below, for completeness I present the addresses to which I have been submitting this Comment since 18 September:

http://radiozamaaneh.com/news/2008/09/post_6376.html

http://radiozamaaneh.com/alavi/2008/09/post_269.html

http://radiozamaaneh.com/news/2008/09/post_6357.html

http://radiozamaaneh.com/alavi/2008/09/post_272.html

http://radiozamaaneh.com/news/2008/09/post_6376.html

As should be evident, by suppressing my Comments Radio Zamaneh is acting in clear contravention of its advertised charter.

BF.

My Comment:

Of course, Mr Solana is entitled to say what he deems appropriate, but a careful study of the latest IAEA report reveals that this report does not contain anything that could possibly have made Russia and China "quite worried", as AP alleges Mr Solana to have stated. The interested can read the relevant IAEA report here:

http://www.isis-online.org/publications/iran/IAEA_Iran_Report_15September2008.pdf

Before going into some technical details, it is important to mention that the word "quite", as in "quite worried", is ambiguous and some exploit this ambiguity to their advantage (some also use the word without realising its ambiguity). The word "quite" means both "wholly" and "to a considerable degree", with the former being the older and stricter sense of this word and the latter the prevailing one, especially outside very formal contexts. The following example illustrates that "to a considerable degree" is itself a very stretchable notion. When a person says "I am quite well", that person may even mean "I am not well at all"; a person who truly feels well would unambiguously express this feeling by saying “I am very well”. Given this fact, one is just left to surmise the actual meaning of "quite worried" in the case at hand. As the latter example shows, "quite worried" may even be interpreted as meaning "not worried at all"! One should note that English is not the mother tongue of Mr Solana and, frankly, his spoken English leaves much to be desired.

For the interested, the AP report at issue can be read here:

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5iiOLaZllqCaJlPXVHul3bdrg3QYwD9393M4G0

Now as for the details that allegedly have made China and Russia "quite worried", these details have been summarised in items 23 and 24 in the Summary section of the above-mentioned IAEA report. Reading these details, one clearly sees the anomaly of the Western powers unashamedly playing the roles of law givers, prosecutors and judges, all at the same time. One is reminded of the distasteful adage “Might is right”.

Any person with a modicum of knowledge regarding nuclear energy and nuclear devices should know that implosion devices of which Iran is accused of having experimented with in the past, are simply of no use in conjunction with highly-enriched U-235: the bulk modulus of Uranium is relatively too large for it to be compressed substantially whereby considerably to reduce the critical mass of U-235. And IAEA must know better than any other organisation that Iran only enriches Uranium, and this to 4%, and not other fissile materials that are more compressible than Uranium. In other words, even if Iran has in the past experimented with implosion devices, the insistence by IAEA on a clarification by Iran of these experiments are just utterly irrelevant in the context of the present stand-off between the West and Iran. Russia and China, now allegedly “quite worried”, must also know better.

To any unbiased observer, what we are witnessing is just the continuation of the time-honoured Big Game that has marred Iran’s social, political and economic fabric in the course of the past couple of centuries. It the olden days, we had two powers imposing their will on Iran; in its modern manifestation, this Game involves five + one powers doing the same thing as previously done by two powers, with Iran being in the same old sorry position. The intensification of the economic sanctions already imposed on Iran are certain to cause untold miseries for a large number of people in Iran whose livelihoods depend on their daily incomes, that is those whose loss of incomes even for one day leads to their hunger and further deprivation of a dignified life.

One should read the IAEA report carefully to realise what hypocrisy is at work here. For instance, for Iran to "provide transparency", IAEA demands to interview some individuals involved in some experiments that clearly have some military dimensions. Aside from the fact that such demand has no legal basis in the International Law, no state worth the name is prepared to expose the identities of the individuals involved in her highly classified research efforts; if their identities are disclosed, these individuals are in real danger of being kidnapped for interrogation or even simply assassinated. In other words, IAEA is asking disclosure of what amount to Iran’s vital state secrets, knowing full well that Iran cannot and will not meet the demands. To portray subsequently this not-disclosing of state secrets as signifying lack of transparency on the part of Iran, is just the height of hypocrisy. This is of course not to say that Iran were a transparent country, as the case of Mr Ali Kordan has made it abundantly evident to all.

BF.

ps) The above Comment has been published on 19 September 2008 at the following address:

http://icga.blogspot.com/2008/09/iaea-declares-gridlock-with-iran.html

BF.