Exactly ten years ago today the Iranian opposition group, Mujahideen al-Khalq (MeK), revealed the full details of a uranium enrichment plant at Natanz and a heavy water plant at Arak in Iran. Since then Iran and the international community- since 2006, the P5+1 (the U.S., Russia, China, the UK, France and Germany) -have been locked in a diplomatic battle that has ground to a stalemate.
The P5+1 has managed to sanction Iran’s oil exports, isolate the country from the international banking system, and make it an international pariah. Iran, meanwhile, has managed to enrich uranium to twenty percent, which involves most of the expertise required to enrich to weapons-grade levels. It runs several thousand centrifuges (the equipment needed to enrich uranium) at its Natanz plants and has a large stockpile of low-enriched uranium [LEU] from which it could conceivably manufacture a nuclear weapon.
Neither side will budge; the specter of an Iranian bomb is closer than ever.
We have come ten years without a solution because there has been a failure to understand, on a fundamental level, what Iran wants and how it seeks to achieve it. The roots of Iran’s nuclear program lie not in physics but in Iranian history. From Russia’s nineteenth century invasions of Iran to the 1953 British and American-led coup that overthrew the democratically-elected Iranian Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, foreigners – so the Iranian narrative goes – have sought to “dictate” to Iran. During the 1979 Islamic Revolution that overthrew the Shah of Iran and replaced him with the Ayatollah Khomeini, crowds walked through the streets carrying banners of Mossadegh and chanting “Margh-bar Amrika” (Death to America). The 1953 coup, already iconic in the national consciousness, wa
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