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Sarkozy: Tough Line On Iran
The International Atomic Energy Agency has issued another damning report on the mysteries of Iran's nuclear programme.
In response, France's new President Nicolas Sarkozy has quickly taken a hard line, calling for tougher sanctions to be introduced if Tehran continues with its refusal to comply with UN Security Council demands.
The Jerusalem Post describes the President as aligning France with US against International Atomic Energy Agency boss Mohamed ElBaradei. ElBaradei said earlier this week that it may be too late to stop Iran's enrichment programme, and instead the nation should be allowed to continue running a smaller scale monitored programme of nuclear enrichment.
Interestingly, Sarkozy did not take this line previously: He has been strongly against Iran's development atomic weapons, but there seemed to be a consensus developing among European states that Tehran should be allowed to continue its energy programme unhindered. Perhaps as President - traditionally the major player in French foreign policy - he has become party to sobering facts about Iran's motives.
Socialist runner-up was widely considered to have made a foreign policy gaffe when she argued that Iran should not be allowed to build nuclear power stations, never mind nuclear weapons.
French intelligence reports provided grounds for another clash with ElBaradei. French Foreign Ministry spokesman Jean-Baptiste Mattei said that ElBaradei's reference to French intelligence reports on Iran's bomb-making facilities were out order: "the IAEA director-general referred, in one of his public statements, to analyses from French intelligence services over the time that it would take Iran to have access to a nuclear weapon," Mattei said. "We aren't in the habit of releasing national intelligence analyses publicly - much less through an international organization."
Nevertheless, opponents of Iran's nuclear programme will have had their suspicions confirmed by Mr ElBaradei's latest report on Iran's progress. The IAEA reported yesterday that Iran not only continued to defy calls to stop its uranium enrichment programme, but had expanded its efforts.
Furthermore, Tehran continued to block the efforts of the agency to investigate suspicious activity in the programme. The IAEA said it was concerned about its "deteriorating understanding" of those parts of the project that Iran prevents inspectors from observing.
The J-Post publishes some of its concerns, and they make damning reading. Iran has failed to explain: "Iran's possession of diagrams showing how to form uranium into warhead form; unexplained uranium contamination at a research facility; information on high explosives experiments that could be linked to a nuclear program and the design of a missile re-entry vehicle."
Sarkozy warned in an interview with a German publication that if Iran developed nuclear weapons, Israel and Southeastern Europe would be threatened.
