World leaders, as well as Americans close to George Bush’s administration, called for calm over Iran’s nuclear programme on Sunday amid persistent reports that the United States is considering a military attack.
In his Easter message from the Vatican, Pope Benedict spoke of ”international crises linked to nuclear power” and urged: ”May an honourable solution be found for all parties, through serious and honest negotiations.” United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan also cautioned against a rush towards confrontation, saying that military action against Iran would only worsen an already tense situation.
”I think the issue is being handled properly by the International Atomic Energy Agency,” Annan said in an interview with Spanish newspaper ABC. ”I still believe that the best solution is a negotiated one, and I don’t see what a military operation would resolve. I hope that a negotiating spirit prevails and that the military option is just fruit of speculation.”
Perhaps more significantly for the Bush administration, there were also warnings from several prominent figures in the US.
Republican senator Richard Lugar urged less haste in taking action against Iran and suggested direct talks between Washington and Tehran ”would be useful”. Lugar, who is chairperson of the influential senate foreign relations committee, told ABC TV there was a need ”to make more headway diplomatically”.
Former White House counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke also joined the fray, arguing armed conflict with Iran could backfire and prove even more damaging to US interests than the war with Iraq.
Iran would probably respond with terrorist attacks against the US and could also hamper American efforts in Iraq, he wrote in an article for the New York Times, co-authored with Steven Simon, a former state department official. Far from toppling the government in Tehran, bombing would also be likely to guarantee the regime’s survival for ”decades more”.
Although Bush has dismissed reports of war planning as wild speculation, the article warned: ”The parallels to the run-up to war with Iraq are all too striking: remember that in May 2002 President Bush declared that there was ‘no war plan on my desk’, despite having actually spent months working on detailed plans for the Iraq invasion.
”Congress did not ask the hard questions then. It must not permit the administration to launch another war whose outcome cannot be known, or worse, known all too well.”
Speculation about a US attack intensified last week when Iran announced that it had successfully enriched uranium for the first time using 164 centrifuges, a small but significant step towards production of material that can be used either for weapons or generating electricity in a nuclear reactor.
Iran, which insists that its activities are for civilian purposes only, has rejected a call from the UN Security Council to stop enriching uranium by April 28.
Officials from Britain, France, Germany, Russia, the US and China will be meeting in Moscow on Tuesday to review the situation. ”It is part of a regular series of meetings to discuss the next steps,” said a British Foreign Office spokesperson who declined to elaborate. ”These meetings happen all the time and we can’t really give a commentary on each one.”
In Tehran talk of strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities has prompted a rush to volunteer for ”martyrdom missions”, particularly against the US and Britain.
”Because of the recent threats we have started to register more volunteers since Friday,” Mohammad Ali Samadi, spokesperson for the Committee for the Commemoration of Martyrs of the Global Islamic Campaign, told Reuters. – Guardian Unlimited Â