Rooyesh

An Iranian Revolutionary Guard general who is banned from traveling abroad by the U.N. Security Council visited Russia without any difficulty, Iranian state television reported on its Web site Monday. Gen. Mohammad Baqer Zolqadr, who is also deputy interior minister for security affairs, was one of 15 Iranians listed in U.N. Resolution 1747 that the Security Council approved unanimously in March to punish Iran for failing to stop enrichment of uranium — a process that can produce the material for nuclear bombs.Zolqadr was quoted on the state TV Web site as saying that his six-day journey to Moscow, which ended Monday, showed “the ineffectiveness of the resolution.”The resolution calls on all governments to ban visits by the 15 individuals and says that should such visits occur — presumably for exceptional circumstances — the countries should notify a U.N. committee. “Despite resolution 1747 which imposed a travel ban on some members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, including me, I traveled to Russia and no restriction was applied,” the Web site quoted Zolqadr as saying.

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Iran’s vice president said Monday the country has begun “industrial scale” production of enriched uranium, the fuel required for nuclear reactors. “Now we are entering the mass production of centrifuges and starting to launch industrial scale enrichment, another step toward the flourishing of Islamic Iran,” Vice President Gholamreza Aghazadeh said at a ceremony at Natanz.Aghazadeh, who heads Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, did not elaborate. Industrial-scale enrichment is the term Iran uses to mean a capability to produce greater levels of nuclear fuel — which would suggest Iran has increased the number of centrifuges working at Natanz.The announcement came as Iran celebrated the one-year anniversary of its first success in enriching small amounts of uranium at its Natanz enrichment facility in central Iran. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad prepared to announce new progress in the key process that the United Nations has demanded Iran halt.

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No one in Western intelligence is quite sure who made the final decision to release the British captives this week. But the Iranians themselves have a fair idea, and the nation’s fiery president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, seemed to leave little doubt about it. “The pardon of the British sailors signified the Supreme Leader’s kindness,” Ahmadinejad told a meeting of Iranian officials in Tehran on Friday. The president was referring to the black-turbaned cleric who presided over the gathering: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Khamenei, a 68-year-old whose right hand was left paralyzed in a 1981 assassination attempt, has a tough job. He is the constitutionally designated leader of a modern state ruled by religious laws devised 1,400 years ago. And he must placate both the modern and the medieval sides of the schizoid Iranian state—a task that has grown increasingly complex in the 28 years since the Islamist revolution toppled the Shah of Iran. Despite Khamenei’s association with conservative factions within the Iranian government, he is known to be a pragmatic man who is much more in touch with the society than people give him credit for.

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