Iran Focus: London, Apr. 20 United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Wednesday that Washington was seeking international partners to put political and economic pressure on Iran for refusing to heed the call by the United Nations Security Council to suspend its sensitive nuclear activities.
Iran Focus
London, Apr. 20 United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Wednesday that Washington was seeking international partners to put political and economic pressure on Iran for refusing to heed the call by the United Nations Security Council to suspend its sensitive nuclear activities.
Rice told an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations in Chicago that U.S. President George W. Bush doesn’t take his options off the table in tackling the Iranian nuclear issue.
She said that Washington was hoping to mobilise and unify the international community around the view that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon and that in order to dissuade Tehran from such a goal the international community must be prepared to use political and economic measures at hand.
I think that we have options at our disposal that are not even necessarily fully within the Security Council. You know that there are states that have been saying that if we don’t get meaningful measures inside the Security Council, perhaps a coalition of the willing will think about other financial or political measures that could be taken, Rice said.
We don’t have any problem, any quarrel with the Iranian people. The problem is that the Iranian leadership, the regime, is isolating itself with its behaviour. You can simply read the statements of any government in response to what the Iranians just did to see that the Iranians are isolating themselves, Rice said.
Because of a track record of 18 years in which they were not clear and not transparent with the International Atomic Energy Agency [civil”> nuclear power cannot include the ability to enrich and reprocess on Iranian territory, because when you learn to do that you’ve learned the key technology to making a nuclear weapon.
The world wants Iran to adhere to its obligations and that’s why the United States, in coordination with its allies, is seeking and probably will have to seek Security Council resolution to that effect, she added.
