Tehran denied on Saturday a US media report that it had offered a “ninestep
plan” aimed at solving its stand-off with the West over its nuclear
program.
The New York Times reported on Thursday that Iran had proposed a
plan to European officials that required the West to lift harsh oil and economic
sanctions in return for the eventual suspension of uranium enrichment by
Tehran.
Israeli officials, however, warned that neither Iran’s economic
woes nor the nascent demonstrations have forced the government to alter its
nuclear policies.
“We should be careful not to count our chickens before
they hatch,” one Israeli government official said, dismissing the notion that
Iran was on the verge – because of the economic pressure – of a tipping point
regarding its nuclear program. “From Israel’s point of view the sole criteria is
whether they are continuing to enrich uranium.”
According to the
official, the point of the sanctions is to stop the nuclear program, not to
cause demonstrations.
“Until now the sanctions have not caused the
Iranians to re-think the nuclear program,” he said. “All the evidence is that
while incurring economic hardship, the Iranians have in parallel accelerated
their nuclear program.”
The Times reported that the Iranian plan called
for a step-by-step dismantling of sanctions while Iran ended work at one of two
sites where it was enriching uranium to 20 percent. Tehran has refused to meet
those demands unless economic sanctions choking its oil exports are lifted
first, and denied on Saturday that it had made any new offers to the West to
break an impasse that has lasted nearly a decade.
“No new offer outside
of the framework of the P5+1 negotiations during the last meeting of the United
Nations has been made, and the claims of some American news organizations in
this regard are baseless,” Mehr news agency on Saturday quoted Iran’s chief
nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, as saying.
The Iranian plan described
by the Times would likely be a non-starter, as the six powers negotiating with
Iran have demanded Tehran halt its 20 percent enrichment of uranium; ship any
stockpile out of the country; close down an underground enrichment facility,
Fordow; and permit more intrusive UN inspection of its work.
The United
States Congress is considering expanding American economic sanctions against the
Islamic Republic, and on October 15 the 27 EU foreign ministers will meet to
consider ratcheting up the EU sanctions.
One Israeli official said that
while stiffer sanctions were obviously welcome in Jerusalem, Israel wanted to
see those steps accompanied by the public declaration of a red line beyond which
Iran would not be able to cross, as well as a credible military threat.
Paradoxically, the official said, “If Iran believes there is a credible military
threat, that would decrease the chances of actually having to use
it.”
Former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, meanwhile, came out
against the US publicly setting red lines on Iran, as Prime Minister Binyamin
Netanyahu has been calling for.
“Should we make a public announcement
that can be used by Israel or any country as a justification for its going to
war? That we cannot do. We cannot subcontract the right to go to war, that is an
American decision,” Kissinger said.
But, he added, the US did need to
define for itself what it meant when it said that nuclear weapons capability for
Iran was unacceptable. “We need to know for ourselves what we mean by that,” he
said. “What is the definition?” Commenting on the upcoming US elections,
Kissinger said: “I am endorsing Governor Romney... He would conduct a
responsible foreign policy. I won’t go beyond that.”
Last July, during a
keynote speech in Jerusalem at the opening of President Shimon Peres’s fourth
annual Facing Tomorrow conference, Kissinger noted that the UN Security Council
has stated for a decade that a military nuclear program in Iran was
unacceptable.
Kissinger said that while the world powers were interested
in diplomacy, “a point will be reached where they will have to define what they
mean by unacceptable, and how that should be implemented.” That moment,
Kissinger said at the conference, was approaching in the months ahead, “and it
is something we should all do together.”
Another former high-ranking
American official, former defense Secretary Robert Gates, stated on Thursday
that Washington must make it clear to Israeli leaders that the US must not
permit Israel to harm American interests.
Speaking at an event in
Norfolk, Virginia, Gates commented that the Israeli leaders must be aware they
“do not have a blank check to take action” that could harm American vital
interests.
Instead, Gates called for heavier sanctions on Iran, saying
the “results of an American or Israeli military strike on Iran could, in my
view, prove catastrophic, haunting us for generations in that part of the
world.”
He added sanctions are “our best chance going forward, to ratchet
up the economic pressure and diplomatic isolation to the point where the Iranian
leadership concludes that it actually hurts Iranian security and, above all, the
security of the regime itself, to continue to pursue nuclear
weapons.”
Gates also warned that neither Israel nor the US had the
capabilities to obliterate Iran’s atom program, and that a military operation
against the country’s nuclear facilities “would make a nuclear-armed Iran
inevitable.”
Any attack would see Iran merely “bury the program deeper
and make it more covert,” he said.