IAEA Chief Exhorts Iran's Critics to Avoid Threats of Force

By George Jahn
September 18, 2007
Washington Post
Original Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/17/AR2007091700416.html

VIENNA, Sept. 17 -- The chief U.N. nuclear inspector urged Iran's harshest critics Monday to learn from the Iraq invasion and refrain from hype about a possible military attack, calling force an option of last resort.
Mohamed ElBaradei also said nations critical of his last-ditch effort to entice Iran into revealing past nuclear activities that could be linked to a weapons program should wait until the end of the year, when the deadline for Iran to provide answers runs out.

By November or December, we will be able to know if Iran is acting in good faith or not, he said.
ElBaradei, speaking outside a 144-nation meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which he heads, invoked the example of Iraq in urging an end to threats of force against Iran, including one by France over the weekend.
I would not talk about any use of force, ElBaradei said, noting that only the U.N. Security Council can authorize such action. There are rules on how to use force, and I would hope that everybody would have gotten the lesson after the Iraq situation, where 700,000 innocent civilians have lost their lives on the suspicion that a country has nuclear weapons. [Other estimates based on news reports put the number of civilians killed in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion at fewer than 80,000.]
On Sunday, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner warned that the world should prepare for war if Iran obtains nuclear weapons and said European leaders were considering their own economic sanctions against the Islamic country.
Kouchner, speaking on RTL radio, said that if Iran produced such a weapon, we must prepare ourselves for the worst.
On Monday, French Prime Minister Franżois Fillon sought to play down Kouchner's comments, saying, Everything must be done to avoid war.
Alluding implicitly to the United States and its Western allies, Iranian Vice President Gholamreza Aghazadeh accused unnamed countries of forcing the international community onto the unjustified, illegal, deceptive and misleading path . . . by imposing restrictions and sanctions.
He also again ruled out scrapping Iran's uranium enrichment program, telling delegates that Iran would never give up its inalienable and legal right in benefiting from peaceful nuclear technology.