Western nations have been considering tough sanctions - not yet including military action - against Iran if it continues with its program to enrich uranium, a process that can produce fuel for a nuclear reactor or fissile material for a bomb. Iran contends it has a right to enrich uranium as long as it does not attempt to use it for nuclear weapons.

Bush has refused to rule out military action in response to the Iranian nuclear standoff. When asked last month whether U.S. options regarding Iran "include the possibility of a nuclear strike" if Tehran refuses to halt uranium enrichment, Bush replied, "All options are on the table." He stressed, however, the United States will continue to focus on diplomacy.

In a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan obtained by The Associated Press on Monday, Iran's U.N. Ambassador Javad Zarif called Bush's refusal to rule out a U.S. nuclear strike on Iran "illegal and insolent threats."

Zarif said the use of "false pretexts" by senior U.S. officials "to make public and illegal threats of resort to force against the Islamic Republic of Iran is continuing unabated in total contempt of international law and fundamental principles of the United Nations Charter."

The "U.S. aggressive policy" of contemplating the possible use of nuclear weapons also violates the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and other U.S. multilateral agreements, he said.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has repeatedly spoken out against Israel and threatened to wipe it "off the map."

While Israeli government and military officials had been very vocal in calling for action against Iran, they have toned down their comments in recent weeks, wishing to take a low profile as the world proceeds in its efforts to stop the Iranian program.

Officials from the five permanent U.N. Security Council members gather Tuesday in Paris to discuss International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei's report to the council that Iran was in violation of the council's demand that Tehran stop enriching uranium. The report opened the way for the council to take punitive measures against Iran, but immediate action is not likely because Russia and China are opposed to sanctions.

Israel is convinced international efforts against the Iranian program can help persuade Tehran to back down, Halutz said.

Halutz told Maariv it is not clear if Iran will be able to achieve nuclear capability by the end of the decade, as Israeli officials had predicted earlier. But if Iran does one day possess a nuclear weapon, it would constitute a threat to Israel's existence, Halutz said.

"When the Iranians will have a nuclear, military capability, then we will be able to talk about an existential threat," Halutz said. "If they have a nuclear weapon and the rulers speak as they do today, this combination will be a dangerous combination for Israel."

Teheran remained inflexible over its nuclear program despite a UN injunction giving it one month to suspend all uranium enrichment activities.

Iran said Monday that it had seen no reason to comply with and it has written to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to complain about the reported threat of a U.S. attack with or without UN approval.

The Western are seeking at the Paris meeting to a UN Security Council resolution that is expected to legally constrain Iran to obey to its obligations, diplomats said.

The closed-door talks will open the door for a foreign ministers' meeting of the six countries on May 9 in New York.

U.N. ambassadors from the United States, Britain and France are expected to introduce a resolution this week to legally oblige Iran to comply with U.N. Security Council demands it halt all uranium enrichment work.

When asked how far Russia and China, veto-wielding permanent members of the council, would support Washington, Manouchehr Mottaki told the Kayhan newspaper:

"The thing these two countries have officially told us and expressed in diplomatic negotiations is their opposition to sanctions and military attacks."

"At the current juncture, I personally believe no sanctions or anything like that will be on the agenda of the Security Council," he said in the interview.

Western diplomats say China and Russia will probably back a U.N. resolution demanding a halt to Iran's fuel work, but are not yet ready to back moves toward sanctions.

Iran has been hauled before the U.N. Security Council after failing to convince the international community that its nuclear power station program is not a front for building an atom bomb.

China and Russia both have big energy interests in Iran, the world's fourth biggest oil exporter. In 2005, more than 11 percent of China's crude imports came from Iran. Russia's LUKOIL is exploring the Anaran oilfield in western Iran.

China is also planning a multi-billion-dollar deal to buy Iranian Liquefied Natural Gas when it comes onstream in return for an upstream stake in a huge southern Iranian oilfield.

Russia has been helping Iran build its first nuclear power station at the southern port of Bushehr, a $1 billion project, and Tehran has said it is keen for foreign firms, particularly Russian, to play a role in building more reactors.

However, both China and Russia also have strong trade ties with the United States and European Union whose positions on Iran are becoming increasingly united.

On the other hand, the envoy said, Israel "has a track record of invading its neighbors, is known to possess a nuclear arsenal and continues to resist membership in the international treaty." "Can the US or Israel, following Iran, say under oath that they have not attacked or threatened any country and would not do so in the future?," he asked.

As for the previously announced Tehran-Washington talks, Zarif said Iran had "positively responded to the US call for bilateral talks on ways to help the Iraqi people achieve stability in their war-torn country," adding that the call had the support also of senior Iraqi officials.

Zarif, alluding to the cancellation of the talks, said it was not clear "why US had changed its approach after Tehran said it was ready to enter into talks with Washington on Iraq." "This will prove that they (US authorities) were not serious in their desire to hold talks as can be gleaned in their making the conditions difficult for negotiation," Zarif said.

"These are in obvious contravention of international rules and the principles of the United Nations," the letter was quoted as saying by the official news agency IRNA.

It said that "these rude threats have recently been publicised through some reports in US newspapers", and noted a report in The New Yorker magazine last month which said US military planners had even looked into using nuclear 'bunker-busters' to strike Iran's atomic facilities.

"These (threats) have entered a new stage, with the refusal of US officials to deny these reports," the letter said, calling for "serious attention" as well as "quick and firm action" from the world body.

The complaint came as diplomats from the five permanent Council members and Germany were to meet in Paris Tuesday and again at the foreign ministers level in New York on May 9, following up on an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report confirming Iran has not complied with demands to freeze uranium enrichment.

The United States and Europe are hoping a reluctant Russia and China will agree to a robust resolution that legally obliges Iran to halt the sensitive work -- which makes reactor fuel but can also be extended to make the core of an atom bomb.

But even if they succeed in reaching a consensus, Iran looked unlikely to back down.

"The struggle of the Iranian people against the United States is like the struggle between Moses and the pharaoh," commented Mohsen Rezai, the right-wing secretary of the country's top political arbitration body, the Expediency Council.

"For the Americans, it is not a nuclear issue but one of Iran progressing to become developed and powerful," he told the ISNA news agency, repeating the regime's view that the crisis is merely an extension of US ambitions to see the ouster of Iran's ruling clerics.

Iran's top national security official Ali Larijani also argued that there was "no sense" in the country returning to a suspension of enrichment.

"A suspension does not make any sense to us, because we do not think an atomic bomb can come out of a 164 centrifuge cascade," he was quoted as saying by the ISNA news agency.

Iran has installed 164 centrifuges at a pilot plant in Natanz, situated in the desert south of Tehran.

Iran argues it is so far only carrying out small-scale "research" work, and that it only wants to eventually make civilian reactor fuel. On Friday a UN Security Council deadline for the work to stop expired without Iranian compliance.

What Tehran wants is to continue enrichment and keep the case out of the Security Council, which unlike the IAEA has enforcement powers. Iran argues it only wants to generate electricity and that fuel cycle work is therefore a right enshrined by the NPT.

Iran has been seeking to split Council members by balancing threats of tough reprisals -- such as ending IAEA inspections -- if the pressure mounts and some concessions if it eases.

Russia and China are for the time being opposed to any sanctions, or a resolution invoking the UN Charter's Chapter 7 -- a reference which would open the door to political and economic sanctions and even, as a last resort, military action.

US President George W. Bush on Monday telephoned his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to discuss ways to block Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, White House spokesman Scott McClellan.

McClellan said the two leaders "committed to remaining in close contact on this important priority".

They also "reiterated their desire to conclude the US-Russia bilateral negotiations on Russia's accession to the WTO (World Trade Organization) soon," the spokesman said.

In an hour-long press conference on April 24, Ahmadinejad said Iran "is ready to talk to all world countries, but negotiation with anybody has its own conditions", and then specifically named the United States. "If these conditions are met, we will negotiate."

Ahmadinejad's remark, which was reported by the independent Paris-based Iran News Service, went unnoticed in the US media. However, the media did report the Iranian president's statement in the same press conference that talks with the US on Iraq were not necessary now that a government had been set up in Baghdad.

Although Ahmadinejad did not say what Iran's conditions for talks were, the Iranian response to the US proposal last November for bilateral talks on Iraq may be a good indication of what Tehran has in mind. When Iraqi President Jalal Talabani took the US proposal to Tehran on a visit in November, in which he met Ahmadinejad, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other top leaders, he was told Iran would agree to talks on two conditions: they would remain private and they would involve all outstanding issues between the two countries.

Despite a common view in the media, reflecting official US views, that Ahmadinejad has taken Iranian policy in a much more radical direction since he took office last August, Iranian leaders, including those who have been critical of some of Ahmadinejad's public rhetoric, have publicly emphasized that Iran's nuclear policy is not determined by the president.

In late February and early March Hassan Rohani, the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council for 16 years, stated on two different occasions that Iran's stance on the nuclear issue was decided by the state's top officials and not by the current government. "Iran's general policies do not change with new governments," he said on February 20.

Although it was the first time that Ahmadinejad had commented on the subject of talks with the US, his press-conference remark was not the first direct public indication by the Iranian government of interest in negotiations with the US on both the nuclear issue and other security questions.

On March 6, Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said, "What we are saying is that if America abandons its threats and creates a positive atmosphere in which it does not seek to influence the process of negotiations by imposing preconditions, then there will be no impediment to negotiations."

These new public signals came against a background of a quiet diplomatic campaign by Iranian officials in recent months to communicate Iran's readiness to negotiate directly with the US on broad security issues. They have sent that message through both diplomats and other prominent figures who have met with them in Tehran.

A statement published in the International Herald Tribune by former foreign ministers of the US, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, France and Luxembourg said the five European members of the group had all "met with influential Iranian officials during the past few months and found a widespread interest among them in conducting a broad discussion with the United States on security issues".

The current campaign is not the first by Iran to interest Washington in direct negotiations on security issues. In early May 2003, the Swiss ambassador in Tehran, Tim Guldimann, who represented US interests in the country, forwarded to Washington a one-page Iranian proposal that offered to meet US concerns about the nuclear issue and Iranian support for Hezbollah and other anti-Israeli groups, in return for security guarantees and an end to economic sanctions.

That negotiating initiative, which was said to have the support of Supreme Leader Khamenei and the Supreme National Security Council, was also preceded by a quiet campaign of signals by Iranian officials through both official diplomatic channels and non-official channels of Iranian interest in such negotiations, according to Paul Pillar, who was then the United States' national intelligence officer on Iran.

The Iranians apparently believed the time was ripe for negotiations, because of the potential chaos that could engulf Iraq in the wake of the US invasion, and the US need for the cooperation of Iranian-sponsored Shi'ite political parties and military groups who were responsive to Iranian advice.

Bush administration officials had also begun in late 2002 to express alarm at the progress made in Iran's nuclear program and alleged Iranian plans to develop a nuclear weapons capability. "The Iranians expected and had plenty of reason to expect that this would be a good moment to approach the United States," said Pillar.

The George W Bush administration ignored the Iranian proposal in 2003 and has publicly rejected possible talks with Iran on the nuclear issue in recent months. However, Iran's announcement in early April that it had achieved a 3.6% level of enrichment of uranium - the first step toward having a level of enrichment necessary to make a nuclear weapon - has made a negotiated solution to the issue much more urgent.

After that announcement, the two top members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chairman Richard Lugar and ranking Democrat Joseph Biden, called for direct US talks with Iran.

Some analysts familiar with the thinking of Iranian national-security officials believe they have gone ahead with partial enrichment to position themselves for broader talks with the US going beyond the nuclear issue.

"Enrichment has become a big bargaining chip," said Iranian journalist Najmeh Bozorgmehr, who has had access to top Iranian leaders in off-the-record interviews for the past several years. "They are producing facts on the ground that would give them leverage in negotiations with the United States."

Bozorgmehr, now a fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said the Iranians hoped to get the removal of sanctions, security guarantees and guaranteed fuel supply in return for concessions on the fuel-enrichment issue.

Journalist Praful Bidwai reported for Inter Press Service last week that government officials and other experts in Tehran told him there was "fairly broad agreement" that a compromise proposal on the nuclear issue and security guarantees and normalization of US relations with Iran could be negotiated.

Gareth Porter is a historian and national security policy analyst. His latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published last June.

Sanctions can be resorted to under Chapter VII of the UN Charter when considered by the Security Council to be absolutely necessary. To do so, the council would have to determine, under Article 39 of Chapter VII, the existence of any "threat to the

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peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression" caused by Iran's nuclear activities.

Yet, per the admission of ElBaradei in his report, all of Iran's nuclear activities "are covered by Agency Safeguard containment and surveillance measures". This, together with the important finding that all nuclear material has been accounted for, raises a serious questions from the prism of international law: On what basis can the Security Council invoke Chapter VII against Iran?

Surely, the IAEA's complaint of Iran's non-cooperation with its requests for "confidence-building measures" that are voluntary and non-legally binding cannot possibly suffice to grant the United States' wish for invoking Chapter VII, for to do so is to substitute superpower exigencies for international law.

Put simply, there is insufficient and/or non-existing evidence, the calculated disinformation aside, to support Western allegations of an Iranian weapons build up; these allegations, initially claiming clandestine activities, have now almost entirely focused on Iran's transparent nuclear activities without, however, being able to pin-point any discernable signs of military use via those activities.

The Israelis, however, are the sole exception. They told the London Sunday Times that they had evidence of hidden Iranian centrifuge facilities working overtime to cut the timeline for nuclear bombs shorter. Such alarmist news from Israel has been heard before aplenty, and distinctly reminds one of Israel's similar gambit with regard to Iraq in 2002-2003.

Here is the nub of the IAEA/Security Council dilemma: they have both called for "re-establishing full and sustained suspension of all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities, including research and development". And yet, in light of the absence of any "smoking gun" lending validity to the allegations of Iran's nuclear-weapon "ambitions", as well as some 2,000 man-day inspections of civil and nuclear facilities during the past three years, the legal justification for a permanent suspension of Iran's enrichment-related activities under the terms of the non-proliferation regime is simply absent.

To insist on this demand based on hitherto unfounded fears of Iran's misuse of dual-purpose technology is to set up arbitrary red lines that would be tantamount to legal nihilism.

Ironically, ElBaradei writes that "transparency measures are not yet forthcoming", this when his own report contains Iran's April 27 letter to the IAEA pledging to set up a timetable within three weeks to resolve all outstanding questions. Either ElBaradei is interested in procuring more and more cooperation with Iran or he is not, for obvious political reasons, and if he is, then his claim that Iran's transparency measures are not forthcoming must be revised.

To open a parenthesis here, whereas ElBaradei's report confirms Iran's recent claim of having successfully enriched uranium, various Washington pundits such as Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies have dismissed Iran's claim as "vacuous political posturing". Clearly, Cordesman and other policy pundits listened to attentively by the US government and the big media need to check their sources before leveling such stupefying allegations against Iran.

The mere fact that, by ElBaradei's own admission, most of the outstanding questions, such as regarding the (foreign) sources of contamination of Iranian equipment with HEU (highly enriched uranium), have been successfully resolved in Iran's favor represents yet more cold water on the furnace of sanctions on Iran.

Indeed, the existence of small "gaps" in knowledge mentioned in ElBaradei's report hardly reinforces the momentum toward sanctions, in view of the fact that Iran is not alone and the IAEA's annual reports are filled with complaints of non-compliance by dozens of member states.

The issue is that Iran should not be subjected to punitive sanctions for exercising the same rights enjoyed by the Permanent Five members of the Security Council as well as Germany, Brazil and Japan. To do so would be to undermine the very legitimacy of the UN and its most powerful organ, which has yet to recover fully from the United States' Machiavellian manipulations with regard to Iraq three years ago.

Mindful of such a distinct possibility, Kofi Annan, the UN's secretary general, has on more than one occasion warned that the Iran crisis could be detrimental for the United Nations and that the issue should remain within the IAEA. Similarly, Russian officials have warned that the Security Council should not try to replace the IAEA.

Also, within the General Assembly, there is considerable opposition to the ill-advised recommendations for sanctions on Iran which, if implemented by the Security Council, may in effect negatively affect the UN's global image, as a surrogate of US power, and its ability to perform its functions with respect to peace and security in the Middle East and beyond.

Yet, US officials have yet to show any signs of grasping the potentially adverse consequences, for the UN as well as the future of the Middle East, if their meritless push for UN sanctions is adopted. Their current drive needs to be rethought in the light of a more sound grasp of the existing alternatives.

But assuming for a moment that the US and its European allies somehow manage to get Chapter VII invoked at the Security Council, which is bound to cause further ire in Iran and, indeed, the entire Muslim world and most if not all of the Non-Aligned Movement, then Iran's non-compliance with the initial token sanctions will put the council in serious jeopardy.

Either it will not escalate the pressure with tougher sanctions, in which case Iran's case will be yet another example of the council's impotence, or it will seek Iran's compliance by imposing more and more "smart" sanctions that will be, in effect, legally dumb and, as a result, accentuate the UN's perception as a superpower pawn. The members of the Permanent Five (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States) and Germany are due to meet this week to discuss what action to take.

Iran's enrichment knowledge is a fait accompli and Iranian centrifuges are spinning irrespective of the United States' wish to "stop even one centrifuge from rotating", to echo a US official at last year's nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) conference in New York. Henceforth, the world should accept to live with Iran's nuclear capability and do what is necessary to make sure that Iran's pledge of non-military diversion of its peaceful program is verified through the IAEA's instruments. It is noteworthy that last spring, French President Jacques Chirac, in his meeting with Iran's chief negotiator, fleetingly consented to Iran's enrichment right, only to buckle under external pressure.

Of course, the weaknesses of the US-EU's legal hand at the Security Council is the main reason there is a growing talk of sanctions "outside the UN" by a so-called "coalition of the willing". Again, any such sanctions would be contrary to international law and, most likely, incapable of garnering Iran's forfeiture of its NPT-based right to an independent fuel cycle, only causing commercial and financial setbacks for any country lured or coerced into this coalition.

The possibility that any of Iran's neighbors, including Turkey, which has burgeoning economic relations with Iran and cooperates with it within the multilateral framework of the Economic Cooperation Organization, would join such a coalition is rather remote.

As a result, the US and its European Union allies are about to take the "unnecessary" Iran crisis to the next level, portending first and foremost a diplomatic disaster for them, and for the well-spring of international laws and regimes.

A more prudent approach would be to use persuasive diplomacy with Iran, to put Iran's security anxieties to rest and induce greater and greater nuclear transparency in an atmosphere devoid of military threats. Only then can the outside world feel reasonably secure that Iran's nuclear-weapon potential will remain latent; otherwise, if the pattern of escalating pressures continues, then the most likely scenario will be one of "self-fulfilling prophecy" wherein a potential nuclear state sets aside its own declared antipathy to nuclear weapons and embraces them under unreasonable external pressures.

Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and co-author of "Negotiating Iran's Nuclear Populism", the Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu. He is also author of Iran's Nuclear Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.