Iran unlikely to yield to US deadline on nuclear issue

It is unlikely that Iran, being a sovereign state, will yield to the latest deadline of the United States pressurizing Iran to answer an international nuclear incentives offer or face new sanctions.

The US had given Iran two weeks time to come up with serious reply to an offer made by world powers after an international meeting in Geneva on July 19.

The P5-plus-1 has offered Iran benefits in civil energy, trade, finance, agriculture and high technology if it freezes uranium enrichment.

If Iran accepts the package, there will be pre-negotiations during which Tehran will add no more uranium-enriching centrifuges and, in return, face no further sanctions.

The US has said that Iran could expect more sanctions if it does not suspend its nuclear enrichment program as early as late August or September and may then be hit with a fourth sanctions resolution at the UN Security Council.

Iranian leadership, however, refused to accept such types of threats, saying that it is the right of Iran to develop nuclear energy to meet the demands of energy under the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) regulations.

Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki has also said that there was no deadline and that his country had already replied.

Iran being the signatory to Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) can use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. The US and West have suspected Iran of trying to build an atomic bomb.

Experts say that Washington had learnt that its past desire to isolate Tehran with increasingly stiff sanctions had failed to stop Iran from enriching uranium.

A simple glance at the western policies towards Iran’s nuclear pursuits clearly indicates the state of helplessness and frustration which in turn results in coercive approaches.

The strategy of pressurization and coercion rarely produce desired results. Admittedly such approaches may be able to influence a small weak power but a power like Iran which is blessed with enormous energy resources, dictation is likely to produce exactly the opposite result.

As the IAEA has so far failed to come up with concrete and convincing proof that Iran is making the bomb, the entire case against Iran seems to have been based on assumptions, propaganda, and piecing together some not so solid pieces of evidence.

It is well known fact that the US and Israel are pushing their European partners for a new round of UN sanctions in order to put more pressure on Iran .