Iran raises stakes in war of nerves over enriching uranium

The game of cat and mouse between Washington and Tehran - and let's face it, it's between those two with the rest of us acting as observers - took a decidedly tricky step yesterday, with Tehran warning that it will take "illegal" steps if any further sanctions are imposed upon the regime.

So far, Iran has refused to stop enriching uranium - which it has every right to do under the nuclear non proliferation programme - despite being subject to two rounds of travel, arms and financial sanctions for this refusal. There is now a possible third round of sanctions which could be imposed in September and Iran are warning that if the US insists on going ahead with this round of sanctions, then all bets are off.

"If there is another resolution, we will react with whatever we have," the senior official told western journalists. "So far we have answered legally, limiting [UN] inspections, and reducing cooperation with the IAEA within the legal framework.

"But if there is no legal option left, it is obvious we will be tempted to do illegal things. What is very important to us is our dignity, and we are prepared to act."

Should Bush and Co push ahead with a third round of sanctions then it appears likely that Ahmadinejad will break away from the NNPT altogether, just as North Korea did, as he is at the moment being punished for behaviour that is perfectly legal under the NNPT.

However, unlike North Korea, the Iranian spokesman insisted that Iran have no intention of building a nuclear bomb:

He argued it would make Iran less secure, and pointed out that both the founder of the Islamic republic, Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini, and his successor, the current supreme leader, Sayyid Ali Khamenei, had issued a religious fatwa against possessing the bomb."We can exit from the non-proliferation treaty, but we can never exit from a fatwa," he said.

His comments came only hours after the chief negotiator, Ali Larijani, promised that Iran would finally answer all the IAEA's unresolved questions about its nuclear activities. "All the areas and all the questions will be answered. We have no problem with that," he said in an interview in Tehran. Those outstanding issues include an Iranian explanation for how its officials were found to have instructions on how to form enriched uranium into hemispheres, of the sort used in a nuclear bomb.

Mr Larijani laughed off the significance of the documents. He said: "I would find it strange for someone to make a bomb with a couple of pieces of paper. If a country wanted to make a bomb, it could get the information on the internet."

Iran have vowed to give a comprehensive account of its nuclear past to the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and to allow UN inspectors to visit a heavy water reactor being built near the central town of Arak.

However, it is still clear that the cat and mouse game between the two is coming to an important impasse, with Tehran making it clear that any further sanctions will signal that all bets are off.

Now a stance like this will be music to the ears of some of the Cheney administrations hawks, who are itching to attack Iran and please their Israeli counterparts, so one can only presume that Tehran are making this stance clear in the hope of influencing Russia or China to alter their support for this US sponsored motion when it reaches the UN come September.

I personally think a US attack on Iran would be one of the most foolish steps that the US could possibly take, but it is already well reported that there are many in the administration who are adamant that they should do so before they step down in two years time.

Tehran obviously think that the US are too tied down in Iraq to carry through on their threat. So the stakes have been noticeably raised.

The madmen surrounding Dick Cheney will be salivating at the opportunity before them, but even nutcases should pause and reconsider before pressing the go button this time. A war with Iran, at a time when the US are already stretched to breaking in Iraq, is the last thing the US needs.

Should the US push ahead and attack, the myth of the US as an invincible superpower may very well be destroyed in exactly the same way as Israel's invincibility was put to bed in Lebanon last summer.

And should this happen, it will occur for the exact same reasons. Olmert was goaded into going further and further because the US saw what was occurring as "a great opportunity". In the end it was a disaster for Israel which saw Olmert's personal popularity plummet to 3%, a position from which he has never recovered.

Olmert's problem during the "great opportunity" was that it quickly became obvious that he didn't actually have a plan. I wonder if Cheney and his chums have any actual plan for what occurs after they launch their air strikes? I suspect they don't. After all, it's quite obvious from the diaries and autobiographies of British politicians and spin doctors that there was a discernible and worrying lack of any plan for what occurred after the invasion of Iraq. And we all know how well that worked out, don't we?

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Tags: Iran, US, Russia, China, nuclear non proliferation programme, sanctions, Tehran, Bush, Ahmadinejad