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BREAKING: Iran Reportedly Agrees to Suspend Uranium Enrichment

By Masoud Shafaee - Jul 2nd, 2008 at 5:23 pm

Following yesterday’s statement of a top adviser to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that Iran should be careful to not make “provocative remarks” over its nuclear program–an apparent rebuke to the oft-inflammatory President Ahmadinejad–there are reports emerging out of Iran today that the country is prepared to suspend uranium enrichment for up to six weeks. Just yesterday, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said that a “new trend of change is taking place and it started with Iran putting forward a package.” If these unofficial statements are confirmed, it would end three years of gridlock in negotiations that started when Iran ended its confidence-building voluntary suspension of enrichment in August of 2005.

Even since then, the group known as the P5+1 (UN Security Council permanent members the United States, UK, China, France, and Russia, along with Germany) have repeatedly insisted that Iran’s suspension of nuclear enrichment be a precondition to opening up negotiations. Iran, which contends enrichment is its legal right under international law and the NPT, has thus far refused and has faced three separate UN Security Council sanctions as a result.

With President Ahmadinejad falling largely out of favor with the country’s populace amidst an economic recession (featuring a staggering 18 percent inflation rate), Iran’s top leaders may have come to the conclusion that the controversial president is on his way out in the May 2009 elections and is putting the country at risk with his bellicose rhetoric and repeated calls for the destruction of Israel. And it may very well have been Israel’s apparent test-run of an attack on Iran over Greece last week that put the top Iranian brass over the edge.

Tags: breaking news, foreign policy, Iran, Israel, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Middle East, national security