French Official: “To be blunt, Iran is not Iraq revisited,”

Via "friday-lunch-club"

"...Il faut ...sinon "

Reuters/ here

".... Some people shudder with deja vu at the mention of Iran’s nuclear program. For years, officials at the Vienna-based IAEA warned that the campaign against Iran was Iraq all over again. Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog, often spoke of the need to avoid the mistakes of Iraq by not jumping to conclusions about Iran’s atomic program, which Tehran insists is a peaceful one that will produce only electricity, not bombs.

Speaking at New York’s Columbia University this week, France’s U.N. ambassador, Gerard Araud, made clear that Iran’s nuclear program couldn’t be more different from Iraq’s phantom weapons of mass destruction. The concerns about Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, he said, are shared across the globe.... “To be blunt, it’s not Iraq revisited,” he said. “It’s not the West, the North, against Iran. It’s the international community at large which is expressing its concerns.” Araud noted that four of the six countries leading efforts to persuade Iran to halt its uranium enrichment program had actively opposed the war in Iraq — France, Germany, Russia and China....

French-U.S. cooperation on Iran is nothing new. Even while former French President Jacques Chirac and his chief diplomats were working hard to block the U.S.-British push for war in Iraq, ....“For several years intelligence sources have been collecting evidence of a covert military program (in Iran),” the French presentation said. “France’s assessment is now that this country may obtain a sufficient quantity of fissionable materials to manufacture a nuclear weapon within a few years.” The French presentation, it said, “was coordinated with the American one.”

These days France is considered the most hawkish of the four Western powers discussing a possible fourth round of U.N. sanctions on Iran. U.S. and French negotiators have circulated informal papers outlining possible new steps to their colleagues in Britain and Germany. The French paper, diplomats told Reuters, calls for harsh U.N. Security Council measures against Iran’s energy sector, which the French say is being used to finance Tehran’s nuclear and missile programs. The United States, afraid of angering Russia and China or undermining the robust opposition movement in Iran, is not actively pushing for limits on gasoline imports or similar measures. (Diplomats say that the French proposals will eventually be scrapped in order to secure yes votes from reluctant Russia and China, both of which have vetoes on the 15-nation Security Council, like the United States, Britain and France.)

Araud made clear that the French hawkishness is not an attempt to bully Iran or topple its government. “We are not in the regime change game,” he said, adding that their goal was not to spark a new war but to avert one. Failure to persuade Tehran to alter its nuclear policy, he suggested, might be disastrous. It could invite an Israeli military attack and further destabilize the already unstable Middle East."

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