Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has recounted several times since the U.S. and Israel began their war on the pretext that Iran was about to possess nuclear bombs, how Brazil and Turkey had negotiated a deal with Iran in 2010 which would have eliminated the danger of Iran enriching its uranium to weapons-level, which was sabotaged by a double-crossing President Barack Obama, who together with Europe, immediately slapped more sanctions on Iran. President Lula’s point is blunt: the U.S.-European sabotage of that agreement shows that the current war is based on a lie, just as the war against Iraq was based on a lie.
Lula described what happened in addressing the High-Level CELAC-Africa Forum in Bogota on March 21:
“In 2010, I went to Tehran, along with the president of Turkey, to convince the Iranian government that it could not enrich uranium to build nuclear weapons. And I went to tell the Iranian authorities, [Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei and [former Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad, that we would accept their enriching uranium to the same level that Brazil enriches uranium: for peaceful purposes, for scientific purposes. We made a deal… and when that deal was published, instead of the European countries and the United States accepting the deal, they increased the sanctions against Iran…. I had received a letter from [Barack] Obama, saying that if Mr. Ahmadinejad agreed to that agreement, everything would be fine. Well, we had Ahmadinejad sign the agreement exactly as it was in Obama’s letter.
“To my surprise, when the agreement was published, both Europe and the United States tightened the sanctions [on Iran]. A few years later, they went and made another agreement that was worse than the one we had made....
“And now they’ve invaded Iran under the pretext that Iran was building a nuclear bomb. Where are Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons? Where are they? Who found them?”
Recounting what had happened on March 12, he charged that “both European countries and the United States intensified the blockade against Iran because we were considered a Third World country, and having reached an agreement that they hadn’t been able to achieve in 20 years was deemed unacceptable. So, they didn’t accept the agreement.”
The terms of the agreement are readily available. Under it, Iran had agreed to transfer half of its low-enriched uranium (LEU) stockpile to Turkey, where Iran would retain ownership, but the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), as well as Iran, could station observers to monitor its safekeeping. In return, Iran was to receive the fuel it required for its medical nuclear research reactor from the so-called Vienna Group (France, Russia, the United States, and the IAEA).
