Tehran Feels Vindicated in Light of Report

A jubiliant Iranian leadership called today for plans for new United Nations sanctions against the country to be dropped in the face of the US intelligence report confirming it had abandoned its nuclear weapons program.

Tehran said existing sanctions had been rendered "illegal" by the report and called for them to be dropped.

The Iranian foreign ministry spokesman, Mohammad Ali
Hosseini, said the US intelligence report showed the Bush administration warnings about Iran's intentions to be "baseless and unreliable".

The report forced America's European allies, as well as fellow United Nations security council members, to re-evaluate policy towards Iran.

The report will make it harder for the US, Britain and France to persuade China and Russia to impose tougher UN security council sanctions.

China's ambassador to the UN, Guangya Wang, said the report had changed the situation. Asked whether the report made the prospect of new UN sanctions less likely, the Chinese ambassador, Guangya Wang,told reporters: "I think the council members will have to consider that, because I think we all start from the presumption that now things have changed."

While the chances of a US military strike on Iran's nuclear facilities were receding, the Israeli government continued to insist that Tehran posed a serious danger and that the US intelligence community was misreading the intelligence.

Against a background of triumphalism in Tehran, Hosseini, in a statement, said the findings destroyed the legal basis for last year's decision to refer Iran's case to the security council.

The council has passed two sets of sanctions and is currently debating a new resolution that would impose a fresh embargo.

However, Iranian officials claimed that this was now unlikely.

"One of the consequences of this report is that referring Iran's nuclear issue to the UN security council was illegal because, based on the report by US intelligence agencies, Iran had no nuclear weapons program when the issue was referred in 2006," Hosseini said.

The report was greeted as a vindication by supporters of Iran's radical president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has fought a bruising battle for control over nuclear policy with pragmatists who have accused him of
pushing Iran towards a military confrontation with the US.

Ahmadinejad's spokesman, Gholamhossein Elham, said: "Americans should pay the price for their words."

Iran has said throughout the crisis that it has embarked on a uranium enrichment process for purely civilian purposes, to help meet its electricity and other energy needs. But the US and Britain continue to suspect uranium enrichment is a first step towards securing a nuclear weapon.

US and European diplomats insisted today that the new intelligence estimate would not derail the movement towards a new set of sanctions. A senior Russian official agreed, adding the new measures could come in the next few weeks.

Britain's foreign secretary, David Miliband, said suspicions of Iran's intentions would continue as long as Tehran persisted in enriching uranium in the absence of any nuclear power stations in which the fuel could be used.

"That's why people have fears about what the enrichment is for. That's why they have fears about the dangers of weaponisation," the foreign secretary said.

On Saturday, senior officials from the five permanent members of the UN security council and Germany (constituting the six-strong contact group) met in Paris and agreed in principle on a new set of UN sanctions.

Participants said that Russia and China, which had hitherto been reluctant to tighten sanctions, had given a green light to a limited range of targeted measures. The details are being discussed by phone between the six capitals this week.

Moscow and Beijing appeared to have softened their resistance after an International Atomic Energy Agency report last month found that Iran had rapidly expanded its uranium enrichment, and in the wake of a fruitless meeting between the international negotiator on the issue, the EU foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, and the Iranian envoy, Saeed Jalili, on Friday in London.

"There were no problems with the Chinese in the room on Saturday," a western diplomat said.

A senior Russian official said today the US intelligence U-turn would not affect Moscow's support for a new sanctions resolution.

The official said that a new UN resolution could come before the end of the year, unless Iran showed a new readiness to suspend uranium enrichment.

"If Iran shows pliability and readiness to cooperate, then that would be reviewed, but I don't see any convincing evidence of that so far," he said.

Even before the new US intelligence estimate, Russia had opposed sweeping sanctions against Iran's Revolutionary Guard which Moscow sees as entirely unconnected to the nuclear issue.

A statement from the IAEA, which has long been at odds with the US on the Iran crisis, issued today claimed the new US estimate vindicated the agency's position that there was no concrete evidence of an Iranian weapons program.

"The director general [Mohamed ElBaradei] believes that this new assessment by the US should help to defuse the current crisis," the statement said, but it called on Iran to improve its transparency to the point that the IAEA could certify the peaceful intent of its nuclear ambitions.