Major powers back to drawing board on Iran

WASHINGTON - The Iran nuclear crisis was in double deadlock last night - in the UN Security Council where China and Russia are blocking stern punitive action against Teheran, and bilaterally between the US and Iran after the White House flatly dismissed a 17 page letter from Mahmoud Ahmedinejad to President George W.Bush.


Speaking in Florida yesterday, Mr Bush did not even mention the missive from his Iranian counterpart - believed to be the first such communication between leaders of the two countries since they severed relations in the wake of the 1979 US embassy hostage crisis.


White House officials said the letter was no more than an extended lecture.


In it Mr Ahmedinejad scolds the US for lying over the reasons for the Iraq war, for its support of Israel and even for supposedly keeping secret "various aspects" of the 2001 terrorist attacks.


It generally chides Mr Bush for acting in an un-Christian manner, and points to the "ever increasing global hatred of the American government."


It does not even directly address the nuclear issue, and the uranium enrichment programme that is at the heart of the West's fears that the Islamic regime is secretly pursuing a nuclear weapons capability.


The closest it comes is to complain that any technological and scientific achievement in the Middle East "is portrayed as a threat to the Zionist regime."


Was not scientific R&D a basic right of nations, the Iranian President asks - a reiteration of Teheran's defiant stance from the outset.


"We do not aim to use the letter for the nuclear discussions because we have enough legal justifications for the nuclear issue," Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said, according to the official IRNA news agency.


Ahmadinejad said on Tuesday he was waiting for Bush's reaction to the letter, but US officials have dismissed the missive as a ploy to divert attention in the nuclear dispute.


"We don't need lengthy letters from the Iranian president," the US ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Gregory Schulte, told a news conference in Geneva.


"What they need to do is to suspend (enrichment) activities that have given the international community such concern. They need to start cooperating fully with the IAEA."


The IAEA, the UN nuclear watchdog, says it cannot confirm Iran's aims are wholly peaceful because Tehran has not been transparent. But it has found no hard proof of an arms project.


Iranian chief nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani said in Greece that a long-standing proposal for Tehran to enrich uranium on Russian soil still offered a possible way out of the stand-off.


"As far as the Russian plan is concerned ... our position is that it can go ahead but they have to give us more time to get a positive result with the Russians," Larijani told reporters.


Past talks have foundered because Iran has demanded to keep some enrichment at home, something Western states rule out.


As the text of the letter became known, the fault lines in the UN re-emerged as both China and Russia made clear their opposition to a harsh Security Council resolution against Iran, which the US and its European allies had been hoping to secure this week.


Beijing and Moscow fear that the Chapter 7 resolution sought by Washington could open the way to sanctions against Iran and ultimately military action - just as the US claimed resolution 1441 in 2002 was authority for the invasion of Iraq the following year.


The prospects for agreement this week "are not substantially good," a US official said after a dinner of the foreign ministers of Britain, France, the US, Russia, China and Germany - the first appearance on the international stage of Margaret Beckett in her new role as UK Foreign Secretary.


However a meeting of senior officials of the five veto-holding security council powers in New York agreed last night that European diplomats would draw up new proposals spelling out incentives for Iran to comply with UN demands, a western diplomat said.


The proposals are to be presented to EU foreign ministers in Brussels next Monday.


In Greece, Ali Larijani, Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, insisted that his country had no plans to pull out of the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty, committing signatories who do not have nuclear weapons to pursue nuclear power exclusively for civil ends.


He also said that the proposal that Russia enrich uranium on Iran's behalf - that Teheran had earlier seemed to reject - was still a possibility., "though time would be required."


- INDEPENDENT, REUTERS