New York – The United States and European nations whose diplomatic advances were rebuffed by Iran worked Sunday to present a case against the Tehran regime to the United Nations nuclear watchdog agency meeting this week.
The Bush administration’s lead diplomat on Iran, Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, met with representatives of Germany, France and Britain a day after Iran’s new hard-line president used a U.N. speech to proclaim his country’s “inalienable right” to produce nuclear fuel.
In a fiery speech to the U.N. General Assembly, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad defiantly rejected the European offer of economic incentives in exchange for Iran giving up its uranium-enrichment program.
Ahmadinejad denied that his nation had any intention of producing nuclear weapons. To prove that, he offered foreign countries and companies a role in Iran’s nuclear-energy production.
It is not clear what effect Ahmadinejad’s remarks will have on the International Atomic Energy Agency, whose member nations were lobbied heavily by the Bush administration ahead of a meeting beginning today in Vienna.
But French Foreign Affairs Minister Philippe Douste-Balzy told the General Assembly on Sunday that France, Germany and Britain have “proposed to Iran a constructive approach to open a way to a new relationship” with the international community.
“That relationship currently is compromised by the concerns raised by (Iran’s) nuclear program,” he said.
Noting that the three European negotiating partners blocked referral to the Security Council in 2003, Douste-Balzy told reporters later: “I believed that it was time to negotiate, and we believe that it is now time to turn a new page in relations between Iran and the international community.”
The United States accuses Iran of hiding nuclear-weapons ambitions behind its civilian nuclear-energy program, and wants the U.N. Security Council to review Iran’s record. The Security Council could impose punitive sanctions.
