Iran signalled a confrontation with the West yesterday by rejecting a European Union offer to help it to build a nuclear energy programme in return for scrapping operations that could lead to the production of nuclear weapons.
Another interpretation would be the West has deliberately provoked a confrontation with Iran.
n a terse address to parliament Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s conservative new president, said that such constraints would constitute a breach of his country’s rights. “We respect international norms but we will not agree to outside diktats that are illegal and violate the rights of Iran,†he said.
“Some governments have been trying to deprive our nation of its inalienable rights and that produces resistance in our people . . . I don’t know why some countries cannot understand that the Iranian people will not succumb to force.”
How dare those uppity Iranians not do what the West orders them to do.