Iran’s nuclear program will be discussed at conference on Iraq: Powell

AFP: An upcoming conference on Iraq will be a chance to talk with Iran about its nuclear program at a time of intense world pressure on Tehran to renounce nuclear military activity, US Secretary of State Colin Powell said here Tuesday.
The conference will be held at Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, at the end of November, and Iran has been invited. AFP

MEXICO CITY – An upcoming conference on Iraq will be a chance to talk with Iran about its nuclear program at a time of intense world pressure on Tehran to renounce nuclear military activity, US Secretary of State Colin Powell said here Tuesday.

The conference will be held at Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, at the end of November, and Iran has been invited.

“All the neighbors of Iraq will attend,” Powell said on a visit to Mexico, as well as China and the G-8 nations (US, Russia, Japan, Canada, France, Germany, Britain and Italy).

“And I expect that I would be talking to everybody at that conference…and so we will have an opportunity to be together and talk, but we haven’t arranged any particular meetings,” he said.

Although Powell said “nothing has been set up yet, therefore there is no agenda to discuss yet,” he told the Financial Times of London the conference would be “the first opportunity to talk to the Iranians … and we’ll see what develops.

“I think the nuclear issue is an important one to resolve in one way or another, but there are other aspects of the Iranian behavior that are troubling — support for terrorist activity — and we’ll just have to see whether or not there are openings here or not,” he said in an interview with the paper.

The conference in Egypt is scheduled to coincide with the November 25 deadline set by the International Atomic Energy Agency for Iran to furnish guarantees that it is not developing a nuclear program for military use.