TODAY.AZ / Politics

Ha'aretz: "Iran president says ready for dialogue, brands Israel 'evil regime'"

12 May 2006 [12:45] - TODAY.AZ
Iran is "ready to engage in dialogue with anybody," Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said during a live interview with Indonesia's Metro television Thursday, in response to a question about a letter he wrote to U.S. President George W. Bush.

But a short time later, Ahmadinejad, who has previously expressed doubt that the Holocast took place and said Israel should be wiped off the map, told cheering students in Jakarta that Israel is "a regime based on evil that cannot continue and one day will vanish."

The Iranian president also told the television station that any threats against his country would make talks difficult.

"If someone points an arm [weapon] at your face and says you must speak, will you do that?" he asked.

Ahmadinejad also reiterated Thursday that Iran's nuclear program is peaceful and has no military purpose.

"It has nothing to do with nuclear weapons, or military purposes," he said during the interview.

He also said it was "ridiculous" for countries with nuclear arsenals of their own to be pressing Iran to curb its effort to develop nuclear energy. He said Iran had "capabilities" to defend its interests.

The Iranian leader told the television that he was unconcerned about the possibility of United Nations sanctions, saying the West had more to lose than Iran did if the country was isolated.

"We do not need to be dependent on others," he said, adding international isolation would serve only to "motivate" the country's nuclear scientists.

Meanwhile, National Security Advisor Giora Eiland said Wednesday that if Iran eventually does acquire nuclear weapons, it would be unlikely to share them with the Islamic militants it backs in the Middle East.

Israel has supported U.S.-led diplomatic efforts to deny Iran the means for making a bomb.

It argues that a nuclear-armed Iran would be a direct threat and could embolden allied Lebanese and Palestinian militant groups to step up attacks on Israelis.

But Eiland played down speculation among analysts and Iran's foes that Tehran might also supply proxies with portable nuclear weapons such as a radiation-spreading "dirty bomb."

"I don't think they would be ready to share this knowledge," he told foreign reporters.

"Iran is the state that supports terror more than any other state," Eiland said. "They are extreme and anti-Israeli... but I didn't say they are not responsible."

Ahmadinejad says his country's reactors are for energy only, but his calls for the elimination of Israel - believed to hold the region's only atomic arsenal - have stoked global fears of a nuclear confrontation.

Israel has urged United Nations Security Council sanctions on Iran so it suspends a program that includes uranium enrichment, which would be a key step in production of any nuclear weapons. Iran says it seeks only power only for energy generation.

Eiland said that sanctions, or the threat of them, would be effective only if applied within a "matter of months," and urged that Security Council powers - which have been divided on how aggressively to confront Iran - speak in "one voice."

"The Iranians have tried to present a different picture, as if they have crossed all points of no return, as if they have managed to overcome all the technological problems, so the world has to accept the fact of [their] nuclear capability," he said.

"That is not reality, not from the technological point of view nor, at this point, from the diplomatic point of view."

Western intelligence agencies have said Iran is years away from attaining the know-how to build a bomb independently.

Like the U.S., Israel has not ruled out a military strike as a last resort against Iran. But though it set a precedent by bombing the main Iraqi reactor in 1981, Israel is not widely believed to be capable of tackling Iran's more formidable facilities alone.

According to Eiland, a nuclear-armed Iran would prompt a regional arms race, making future conflicts potential catastrophes.

"If Iran, at the end of the day, manages to achieve nuclear weapons against the will of the rest of the world... the conclusion that might be made by 1 billion Muslims over the world is that Ahmadinejad is right," he said.

"From that moment, every conflict, every crisis in the Middle East is going to take place under an Iranian nuclear umbrella," he said.

/www.haaretz.com/

URL: http://www.today.az/news/politics/26011.html

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