The Bush administration is planning to push for tougher economic and political sanctions against Iran for defying international demands to stop enriching uranium by the end of the month.
“There will have to be some consequence for that action and that defiance,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warned last week. “We will look at the full range of options available.”
Such an escalation in diplomatic pressure was set into motion when Iran announced last week that it was pressing forward to aggressively pursue its nuclear ambitions. Tehran then rebuffed a last-minute appeal by Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, to stop the enrichment program.
That request was first made on March 29, when the United Nations Security Council gave Iran 30 days to stop the enrichment and resume nonproliferation talks with the international community. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has responded with taunts.
“Our answer to those who are angry about Iran obtaining the full nuclear cycle is one phrase,” he told Iran?s state-run news agency last week. “We say: Be angry and die of this anger.”
Ahmadinejad personally announced the go-ahead for the enrichment program at a lavish ceremony in which vials of uranium were brandished by dancers prancing across a stage.
John Bolton, U.S. ambassador to the U.N., called the announcement “a significant adverse development.”
“It is obviously ignoring what the council asked them to do, going in exactly the opposite direction,” he said.
The request by the council, which came in the form of a presidential statement, was aimed at enlisting Iran?s voluntary cooperation. When the council meets later this month, after receiving the latest IAEA report on Tehran?s intransigence, it will be under intense U.S. pressure to take stronger steps.
“We can?t go to the Security Council and have another presidential statement,” Rice told radio host Sean Hannity last week. “We just can?t.”
Rice now is telling the council that it?s “time for action.”
“The Security Council has the ability to compel a state to act through, for instance, a Chapter 7 resolution,” she said. “Now, what that means is that there are enforcement actions. For instance, you could have freezes of assets, political isolation.
“You could have a number of means to make it very difficult for the Iranians to continue this policy unless they?re prepared to face real isolation,” she said.
Rice dismissed as “wild speculation” news media reports that the Pentagon is planning an attack on Iran. And yet she hinted that the controversy over those reports adds teeth to the administration?s diplomatic threats against Tehran.
“The Iranians need to know that the president has options,” she said.
Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher was less equivocal.
“We are not heading for a military conflict with Iran,” he told a news outlet in Kyrgyzstan. “We are on a diplomatic path with Iran.”
