Diplomats have said the United States could seek to persuade Iran's European trade partners to sanction Tehran if it fails to win support for wider sanctions at the council.

Under sharp questioning from Democrats who said President George W. Bush appeared intent on war with Iran, Bolton dismissed as "fiction" news reports that the United States has covert forces in Iran. He said Bush was focused on diplomatic remedies.

Washington says Iran is pursuing a nuclear program to develop weapons, while Tehran insists it is only for civilian energy needs.

Bolton, along with U.N. ambassadors from France and Britain are expected to introduce a new Security Council resolution this week. It would require Tehran to abandon uranium enrichment, invoking Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter, making compliance mandatory.

Bolton raised the prospect that Russia and China could abstain rather than veto the Chapter 7 resolution.

"While it would be desirable to have a unanimous Security Council when we adopt this resolution under Chapter 7," Bolton said, "it's not impossible that we would proceed without them."

AT ODDS ON U.N. CHANGES

As the Bush administration presses for U.N. action on Iran and to quell the violence in Sudan's Darfur region, the hearing focused on whether U.N. sanctions can be effective given the corruption in the oil-for-food program in Iraq.

"We need an effectively functioning U.N. We need a U.N. that can handle major sanctions programs," Bolton said, pressing the administration's case for sweeping reforms at the international body.

He complained that developing nations last week adopted a resolution "which, for all intents and purposes, tanks" U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan's management reform plan.

Bolton said he hoped those nations, which he said provide around 12 percent of the U.N. budget, realize "that repudiating the countries that contribute the overwhelming bulk of the U.N. budget isn't a way to win friends and influence people."



Under questioning by Democrats, Bolton said he had not read an article in the New Yorker magazine that the United States had covert military operations in Iran "because I don't have time to read much fiction."

He also rebuffed persistent questions from Democrats on whether in his previous post as the State Department's top arms control diplomat, he had a role in writing administration documents making now discredited assertions about Iraq's pursuit of nuclear weapons.

"I'm sorry to disappoint you, Congressman. I had no role in this issue," Bolton told Rep. Henry Waxman of California, top Democrat on the Government Reform committee.

The Paris talks were the first among senior representatives of Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States, as well as Germany, since the International Atomic Energy told the Security Council last Friday that Iran was in breach of a UN demand to halt uranium enrichment.

Nicholas Burns, the number three in the US State Department, said after the meeting with counterparts from the other countries that "all agreed that the Iran nuclear programme should be suspended, and agreed to begin Security Council debate and start negotiating a resolution for suspension".

But he also voiced frustration with permanent Security Council members Russia and China which are opposing the United States and its EU allies.

"It's time for countries to take responsibilities, especially those countries that have close relationships with Iran," he said.

The United States, backed by Britain, France and Germany, fear Iran is on the path to building a nuclear arsenal under cover of developing atomic energy and wants to invoke Chapter 7 of the UN's Charter -- a passage that would open the way for sanctions and eventually even force as a way to freeze its activities.

But Moscow and Beijing, which are major trading partners with oil-rich Iran, are calling instead for a softer approach.

The US ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, said Tuesday that if a tough resolution was stymied, his country was ready to form a coalition of allies to impose sanctions outside of a UN mandate.

"If we were faced with a veto by one of the permanent members, if for whatever reason the council couldn't fulfill its responsibilities, then I think it would be incumbent on us, and I'm sure we would press ahead to ask other countries or other groups of countries to impose those sanctions," Bolton told a congressional committee in Washington.

French foreign ministry spokesman Jean-Baptiste Mattei said the six countries involved in the Paris meeting agreed that Iran's nuclear program "is not compatible with the demands of the international community" and were concerned at its development.

He added: "It has been agreed to pursue discussions, in particular in New York, with the aim of reaching a firm decision from the UN Security Council and addressing a clear message to Iran."

But Iranian Foreign Minister Manuchehr Mottaki said earlier Tuesday there was no question -- "absolutely not" -- of Iran suspending its uranium enrichment work, and he predicted China and Russia would block the threat of UN sanctions.

"There is a very wrong assumption held by some that the West can do anything it wants through the Security Council," he told the hardline Tehran daily Kayhan.

At the same time, the head of the Iran's Atomic Energy Organisation, Gholam Reza Aghazadeh, said Iran had succeeded in enriching uranium to a higher level of purity than previously achieved.

The grade reached -- 4.8 percent purity -- would not be exceeded because "this level suffices for making nuclear fuel," he said.

The clerical regime has insisted its nuclear activities are exclusively for developing atomic energy.

Purity of more than 90 percent is required to produce the fissile core of an atom bomb -- a weapon Western intelligence assessments say Iran is at least seven years from being able to build.

Nuclear reactors used to produce electricity need uranium enriched to five per cent purity.

Meanwhile, the United States, Britain and France were set on Wednesday to brief the United Nations Security Council on a proposed resolution aimed at getting Iran to halt its nuclear program.

Despite Iran's protestations to the contrary, Western allies are concerned the Islamic country's ambitions go beyond nuclear power generation to nuclear weapons.

However, Russia and China are likely to oppose the resolution. Both countries are concerned it would be a step toward sanctions, or even military action against Iran.

A vote has yet to be scheduled.

While a reactor needs fuel enriched to five per cent, a nuclear warhead needs uranium enriched to 90 per cent.

"We can analyze Iran's relations with Europe both in the economic, political fields and the international cooperation, then we will see that Europe adopted inapposite and illogical gestures from the beginning of the revolution and has sustained those gestures," Mottaki said on Tuesday in an interview with the daily paper Kayhan.

"Under the U.S. leadership, Europe has always put accusations which are against Iran in their list," said Mottaki.

When referring to the alleged breakage of the good relationship between Iran and Europe by Iran's new government, the minister dismissed the allege, saying "European countries have never toned down their unfriendly approach toward Iran, and have always been covetous on Iran's markets with greedy and avarice."

"These relations have always benefited the west and we have no break with them in economic relations," he stressed.

The European countries are Iran's biggest trade partners, who import oil, carpet and some other agriculture products, such as pistachios from Iran.

Commenting on Iran's sensitive nuclear issue and an attempt by the U.S., Britain and France to introduce a resolution in the United Nations Security Council to compel Iran to halt the uranium activities, Mottaki vowed that Iran would never give in to pressures.

"We will never return suspension of the uranium enrichment work. It's very wrong some people believe the west could do anything it likes through the use of a tool called Security Council," said Mottaki.

The foreign minister made these remarks when envoys from the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany were meeting in Paris to discuss the current situations.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Mohamed ElBaradei submitted a report on April 28 to the UN Security Council, saying Iran had ignored the council's non-binding demand to suspend all uranium enrichment by the April 28 deadline. The IAEA has prompted calls from Western powers for tougher Security Council action against Iran.

Foreign ministers of five permanent members of the UN Security Council -- the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China --plus Germany are scheduled to meet in New York on May 9 to discuss response to ElBaradei's report.

Tuesday's meeting in Paris was meant to prepare the ground for the New York meeting of foreign ministers of the six nations.

Iran announced in earlier April that it had produced low-grade enriched uranium by launching 164 centrifuges at the uranium enrichment facility in the central town of Natanz.

That marked a technical leap in the process for nuclear power plant construction, which immediately aroused strong international concern.

Iran has been insisting that its nuclear program is fully peaceful.

The Bush administration appears to be psyching itself up for a safe strike against Iran either by itself or via the Israelis, whose new leaders have referred to the Iranian president as a psychopath and a new Hitler. Why has Washington manufactured this crisis? The hypocrisy of Bush, Blair, Chirac or Olmert - their own states armed with thousands of nuclear weapons - making a casus belli of what are, by all accounts, primitive gropings on Iran's part towards the technology necessary for the lowest grade of nuclear self-defence, hardly needs to be spelled out. So long as these powers are allowed to enlarge their nuclear armouries unimpeded, why should Tehran not?

The country is not only ringed by atomic states (India, Pakistan, China, Russia, Israel), it also faces a string of American bases with potential or actual nuclear stockpiles in Qatar, Iraq, Turkey, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. Nuclear-armed US aircraft carriers and submarines patrol the waters off its southern coast. Historically, Iran has every reason to fear outside threats. Its elected government was overthrown with covert Anglo-American aid in 1953, and the secular opposition destroyed. From 1980 to 1988, the western powers abetted Saddam Hussein's onslaught, in which hundreds of thousands of Iranians died. More than 300 Iraqi missiles were launched at Iranian cities and economic targets, especially the oil industry. In the war's final stages, the US destroyed nearly half the Iranian navy in the Gulf and, for good measure, shot down a crowded civilian passenger plane.

For the clerical state, the war on terror has been the best and the worst of times. Oil prices have soared. Enemy regimes on both sides, Baghdad and Kabul, have been overthrown. The Iraqi Shia parties that they have been fostering for years are now in office. Washington has been reliant on their help to sustain its occupations both there and in Afghanistan. Yet social tensions in Iran are high. In this context, the nuclear issue is one of the regime's few unifying projects. It is worth recalling that the Iranian nuclear programme began under the Shah with technology offered by the Americans. Khomeini put the project on hold, considering it un-Islamic. Operations were restarted, with Russians later taking over construction of the light-water reactors at Bushehr begun by the West Germans in the 1970s. From the start, Iran, like Germany, the Netherlands or Japan, has wanted its programme to take in the full nuclear cycle, including uranium enrichment; Russia has several times threatened to impose conditions on fuel deliveries. Enrichment centrifuges were surreptitiously imported from neighbouring Pakistan; not the process, but the failure to report it, was in contravention of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) agreements.

There is no evidence that Iran is much closer to nuclear weapons now than was Iraq in September 2002, when Blair and Cheney assured the world that Baghdad represented a "genuine nuclear threat". Reports in 2003 by a somewhat demented sect, the Mojahedin e-Khalq, of preliminary nuclear research at the Natanz installation were no such proof. But in the competitive scramble by European powers to enhance their standing with Washington after the invasion of Iraq, France, Germany and Britain were keen to prove their mettle by forcing extra agreements on Tehran. The Khatami regime immediately capitulated. In December 2003, they signed the "Additional Protocol" demanded by the EU3, agreeing to a "voluntary suspension" of the right to enrichment guaranteed under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

Within three months, the IAEA was condemning them for having failed to ratify it; in June 2004, its inspectors produced examples of Iranian enrichment work, perfectly legal under the NPT, but ruled out by the Additional Protocol. Israel has boasted of its intention to "destroy Natanz" - the contrast to its stealth bombing of Iraq's Osirak reactor in 1981 a measure of the new balance of forces. In the summer of 2004, a large bi-partisan majority in the US Congress passed a resolution for "all appropriate measures" to prevent an Iranian weapons programme and there was speculation about an "October surprise" before the 2004 presidential poll. Plans were thus well advanced before Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's victory in the June 2005 Iranian presidential election.

Ahmadinejad reaped the vote against Khatami's miserable record between 1997 and 2005. Economic conditions had worsened and Khatami was prepared to defend the rights of foreign investors, but not those of independent newspapers or protesting students. Manoeuvring ineffectually between contradictory pressures, he exhausted his moral credit. Contrary to some reports, Ahmadinejad has not so far imposed any new puritanical clampdown on social mores. Instead, the most likely constituency to be disappointed is Ahmadinejad's own: the millions of young, working-class jobless, crammed into overcrowded living conditions, in desperate need of a national development policy that neither neoliberalism nor Islamist voluntarism will provide.

Nor is fundamentalist backwardness exhibited in the denial of the Nazi genocide against the Jews and the threat to obliterate Israel, a basis for any foreign policy. To face up to the enemies ranged against Iran requires an intelligent and far-sighted strategy - not the current rag-bag of opportunism and manoeuvre, determined by the immediate interests of the clerics.

Clearing the way for the overthrow of the Iraqi Ba'ath and Afghan Taliban regimes and backing the US occupations has bought no respite. The US undersecretary of state has spoken of "ratcheting up the pressure". Israeli defence minister Shaul Mofaz has said that "Israel will not be able to accept an Iranian nuclear capability, and it must have the capability to defend itself with all that this implies, and we are preparing." Hillary Clinton accused the Bush administration of "downplaying the Iranian threat" and called for pressure on Russia and China to impose sanctions on Tehran. Chirac has spoken of using French nuclear weapons against such a "rogue state". Perhaps it is simply high-octane rocket-rattling, the aim being to frighten Tehran into submission. Bullying is unlikely to succeed. Will the west then embark on a new war? If so, the battlefield might stretch from the Tigris to the Oxus and without any guarantee of success.

· Tariq Ali is the author of Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity

And yet the U.S. and Israel behave as if they are about to be attacked by a formidable enemy. They scold and threaten, huff and puff, flex their muscles and brandish their weapons as if facing an imminent danger to their very existence.

Instead of putting their formidable power to work reducing tensions and resolving conflicts - as they should be doing - they go about stoking the fires of anger and hate, apparently unaware that the destabilization they cause must in due course engulf them too.


'Destabilization' is, in fact, too mild a term to describe the profound disturbance to the regional and global order which the United States and Israel are creating by their violently hostile approach to the Islamic Republic of Iran and to the Islamic resistance movement Hamas, which the Palestinians democratically elected as their government.

Demonisation and vilification, international isolation, sanctions, boycotts and military strikes, these are just some of the policies and threats directed at both Iran and Hamas. In the United States, pro-Israeli groups, such as the powerful Jewish lobby AIPAC, and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the influential think-tank AIPAC created, are beating the drums of war against Iran, while Israel has led the world-wide campaign to boycott Hamas. Shimon Peres, Israel's wolf in sheep's clothing, even travelled to the Vatican to persuade the Pope to join the boycott!

In the past week or so, as Palestinian groups continue their pinpricks of Israel with a few harmless home-made rockets, Israel launched repeated air strikes and fired more than one thousand artillery shells at the northern Gaza strip, killing at least sixteen Palestinians, including several children. It has killed about 50 Palestinians and wounded many more since the Palestinian elections last January. Last Tuesday, the Israeli Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz warned that 'Our operations are going to intensify!' The real scandal is that the rich Arab Gulf states have not rushed to help the bankrupt Palestinian government.

In the case of Iran, U.S. air and sea strikes at hundreds of targets - including the use of tactical nuclear weapons - are being seriously considered in the more demented higher reaches of the U.S. government, according to Seymour Hersch, the usually well-informed American journalist writing in the current issue of the New Yorker magazine.

Not daring to stand up for its own values, the European Union has shamefully joined in the pressure on Iran and the boycott of Hamas. Reeking of hypocrisy and double standards, the chorus raised is that Hamas must renounce violence, recognize Israel's right to exist and abide by past agreements.

The truth is that Hamas has honored a truce for the past 15 months in spite of Israel's ceaseless attacks and killings. It has declared itself ready for Quartet-sponsored peace talks with Israel which, if successful, would inevitably lead to mutual recognition. But Israel refuses to negotiate with a Hamas government, has severed all political contacts with it, has demonized it as a 'terrorist organization', and has withheld some $50m a month of the Palestinians' own money raised from taxes and customs dues. Needless to say, Israel has violated every agreement concluded with the Palestinians.

Enormously powerful and yet paranoid with fear, the U.S. and Israel act as if the possession - and indeed the use - of overwhelming force is the only guarantee of their security. Dialogue and diplomacy, mutual accommodation, the search for a balance of power, the mediation of international institutions - all these traditional instruments for conflict resolution have been discarded and, as a result, the world has become a very dangerous place.

Iran claims to have successfully enriched small quantities of uranium for research purposes, up to a low level of 3.5 per cent, appropriate for use as nuclear fuel in power stations, such as the Bushehr plant now under construction by Russia. Does this Iranian achievement constitute a threat to either the U.S. or Israel? No objective expert thinks so, and certainly not the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and its chief Muhammad AlBaradei, who is this week visiting Tehran.

Should the U.S. attack Iran to put a halt to its nuclear program? The usually sober New York Times this week denounced as 'reckless folly' the possibility of such an American war.

Iran has pledged that its nuclear program is for purely peaceful purposes. It cooperates closely with the IAEA. It has signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the so- called Additional Protocol, which allows for intrusive and surprise inspections of its nuclear facilities. Under the NPT rules, Iran has every right to master the uranium fuel cycle in order to produce nuclear fuel. Even if it wished to build a nuclear weapon - which is by no means certain - this would require many more years of work.

So why the fuss? Why the hysteria? Rehashing the tired old cliché, General Dan Halutz, Israel's chief of staff, declared this week that a nuclear Iran was a 'threat not only to Israel but to the entire free, democratic world.' He was thus echoing the overheated rhetoric of John Bolton, that finger-wagging neocon scare-monger, surely the worst envoy the United States has ever sent to the United Nations.

The war in Iraq, ruthlessly promoted by pro-Israeli neocons, has resulted in a strategic catastrophe for the United States - with the painful end still not in sight. A war in Iran would set the region on fire; unleash a world-wide wave of anti-U.S. and anti-Israeli terror; expose U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan to devastating attack; put intolerable strain on the trans- Atlantic relationship between Europe and the U.S.; endanger the oil flow from the Gulf; and trigger a world economic recession. In the view of Zbigniew Brzezinski, former President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, it could put an end to America's role in the world.

Washington should stop its senseless sabre-rattling and instead engage Tehran in wide- ranging political talks leading to diplomatic relations, security guarantees and a recognition of Iran's important place in the Gulf. Israel, in turn, should talk to Hamas, not seek to destroy it. Peace and integration into the region are of far greater value than a few kilometers of stolen territory on the West Bank.

Commenting on Iran's claim to have enriched uranium, Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary declared this week that 'This is a regime that needs to be building confidence with the international community. Instead they're moving in the wrong direction.' With greater lucidity, he might have offered this advice to his own government and that of its Israeli ally.

-Dr Patrick Seale is a leading British writer and consultant on the Middle East and is the author of many books including "Assad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East".

Senior officials from the U.N. Security Council's permanent members -- Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States -- plus Germany discussed how to curb an Iranian program that Western nations say conceals a drive for atomic warheads.

"The participants discussed the steps to come in the United Nations Security Council," a French Foreign Ministry statement said after the dinner.

"The three European political directors presented the broad lines of a draft resolution aimed at giving mandatory force to the IAEA's (U.N. nuclear watchdog) demands, in particular those which deal with the suspension of activities linked to the enrichment and reprocessing of uranium."

Iran refuses to back down from what it calls its right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes.

Driving home that message, the head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, Gholamreza Aghazadeh, said his country had now succeeded in purifying uranium to 4.8 percent, at the top end of the 3 to 5 percent range for fuel used in nuclear power plants.

"Enrichment above 5 percent is not on Iran's agenda," Aghazadeh told the students' ISNA news agency.

Iran has previously said it had enriched to more than 4 percent, far below the 80 percent level needed for bomb-making.

It has used a test cascade of 164 centrifuges to enrich uranium so far and is building two similar cascades. It says it will start installing 3,000 centrifuges later this year -- which could yield enough material for one bomb within a year.

The United States and Israel have vowed to deny Iran nuclear weapons. Washington has not ruled out military action if diplomacy fails and Tehran has sworn to retaliate if attacked.

TARGETING ISRAEL

"We have announced that wherever America does something evil, the first place that we target will be Israel," ISNA quoted a senior Revolutionary Guards commander, Rear Admiral Mohammad-Ebrahim Dehqani, as saying on Tuesday.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called for the Jewish state to be "wiped off the map".

Iran's deputy oil minister said there was "some possibility" of a U.S. attack on his country over its nuclear program.

"I am worried. Everybody is worried," Mohammad Hadi Nejad-Hosseinian said in New Delhi after talks on a proposed $7 billion pipeline from Iran to India via Pakistan.

Concerns that Iran's dispute with the West could lead to disruption of its oil output pushed oil prices above $74 a barrel, close to the record of $75.35 touched last month. [...]