Rice says Iran referral to UN “only a matter of time”

Iran Focus: London, Dec. 17 – United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Friday that it was “only a matter of time” before Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons file was sent to the United Nations Security Council.
Iran Focus

London, Dec. 17 – United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Friday that it was “only a matter of time” before Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons file was sent to the United Nations Security Council.

Asked during an interview on the Tony Snow Radio Show whether the U.S. would take pre-emptive action to prevent Tehran from deploying a bomb if it refused to negotiate, Rice said that it was “best not to speculate about what happens, except to say that we have an international consensus that it’s not acceptable for them to have a nuclear weapons program”.

She said that Iran was not a country that was “accustomed to isolation”. “And I don’t know how well a President of Iran will do if it is clear that his policies have driven Iran into national, into international isolation”, she said, referring to hard-line Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

“But let me say something about the Iranian people. They deserve better than this. They don’t deserve to be isolated and their government should not take them there”.

When asked, Rice was quick to say that the Washington supported “democracy forces in Iran”.

Condemning Ahmadinejad’s remarks that the Holocaust never took place, the U.S. Secretary of State said, “But no president of a country, a UN member, should speak this way about any other member of the UN. And I remember just recently, I was looking at a piece about how the things he’s saying about the Holocaust have only been said by really kind of marginal groups, skinheads and the like. No sitting leader has denied the existence of the Holocaust”.

Rice also called Iran the “largest state sponsor of terrorism”.

“They are just 180 degrees out of step with everything that’s going on in the Middle East. And they’re doing the same thing to the Iraqi people in stirring difficulty in the south of Iraq. So it’s going to have to be — we’re going to have to find a way to deal with Iranian policy”.