Bush and allies urge pressure on Iran

By Zahra Hosseinian

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran said on Tuesday it felt vindicated by a U.S. intelligence finding that it was not building an atomic bomb, but George W. Bush said Tehran remained dangerous and international pressure should continue.

The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) published on Monday took U.S. friends and foes by surprise after years of strident rhetoric from Washington accusing Tehran of pursuing a covert nuclear weapons program.

Iran said the report supported its long-standing assertion that its nuclear program had only peaceful civilian aims, such as electricity generation.

"It's natural that we welcome it when those countries who in the past have questions and ambiguities about this case ... now amend their views realistically," Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki told state radio.

The report, which said Tehran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 but was continuing to develop the capacity to enrich uranium, had an immediate impact on moves under way to tighten U.N. sanctions against Tehran.

China, which has a U.N. Security Council veto and agreed only reluctantly to earlier sanctions, said the NIE created new conditions.

"I think we all start from the presumption that now things have changed," China's U.N. Ambassador Guangya Wang said.

France and Britain joined Bush in saying international pressure must be maintained on Iran. Israel, which believes a nuclear Iran could threaten its existence, questioned the report and urged continued pressure on Tehran.

At a news conference in Washington, Bush said the report should in fact be taken as a rallying point for further pressure on Iran and it showed that the approach had been successful in the past.

He said the NIE showed Iran was still developing nuclear technology and could restart a covert weapons program.

"Iran was dangerous, Iran is dangerous and Iran will be dangerous if they have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon," Bush said.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who has spent years persuading other powers to join in anti-Iranian sanctions, told reporters traveling with her to Africa that she would continue to push for a third U.N. sanctions resolution.

In London, a spokesman for Prime Minister Gordon Brown said the report confirmed Britain had been right to worry about Iran's nuclear ambitions and showed that "the sanctions program and international pressure were having an effect in that they seem to have abandoned the weaponization element."

FRANCE BACKS SANCTIONS

France took a similar stand. World powers met last Saturday in Paris to discuss a further round of sanctions over Iran's refusal to halt uranium enrichment, a process that can produce fuel for power plants or, potentially, nuclear weapons.