Ignatius reported this in his Friday column as if it were something new. However, President George W. Bush announced publicly four different times that the United States did not question Iran’s civil nuclear power program.
Bush took that stand a half dozen years ago after Iran signed an agreement with Russia to allow Russia to take back the spent fuel from the Bushehr nuclear power plant. Before that, Washington had not accepted the Bushehr plant out of concern Iran would keep the spent fuel, which can be reprocessed into weapons-grade material.
Bush then made the public declaration of acceptance of Bushehr and repeated it on at least three other occasions.
Obama has said nothing publicly about Bushehr and Iran’s civil program.
According to Ignatius, Obama sent a message to Supreme Leader Khamenehi saying Washington would accept an Iranian civil nuclear program if Khamenehi backs up his repeated public claims that Iran would never pursue nuclear weapons. If the Ignatius report is true, it is actually a step backward from what Bush said. Bush never made his acceptance conditional.
Ignatius said the message was oral and conveyed through Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who met Obama in Seoul earlier this month and then visited Khamenehi in Iran a few days later.
Ignatius said Obama was silent about whether the United States would agree to accept any uranium enrichment by Iran. However, the UN resolutions on Iran demand that it halt all enrichment and official US policy is in line with those resolutions. The US could not change its position without the agreement of the other major powers to amend the Security Council resolutions.
Ignatius treated Khamen-ehi’s pledge that Iran would never build nuclear weapons as something new and a possibly important initiative by Iran. Actually, Khamenehi issued a fatva declaring that nuclear weapons are un-Islamic a decade ago and Iranian officials have said repeatedly that Iran would never build nuclear weapons. There was nothing new in Khamenehi’s latest remarks.