Security Council's Iran Effort Gets Mixed Reception

UNITED NATIONS — Even as Secretary of State Rice and five other foreign ministers agreed yesterday in Berlin on measures to slightly increase the diplomatic pressure on Iran, a former senior American diplomat, John Bolton, warned Israelis that the Bush administration is unlikely to act to halt Tehran's nuclear race, and he urged Jerusalem to strike militarily.

Hailed by Washington as a blueprint for a Security Council resolution that contains "new elements," the Berlin agreement among the foreign ministers of the five permanent members of the Security Council and Germany in fact only sharpens the language of existing sanctions slightly, several U.N. diplomats said yesterday.

They said China and Russia, which have resisted the American-led attempts to implement a policy of imposing "incremental" punitive measures against Iran, successfully blocked most of the new ideas for economic sanctions proposed by America and its European allies — France, Britain, and Germany.

The Berlin pact "sends a strong message to Iran that it needs to comply with U.N. Chapter 7 resolutions," a State Department spokesman, Gonzalo Gallegos, said. Chapter 7 is the U.N. charter's passage that makes Security Council resolutions mandatory and enforceable. The two previous resolutions on Iran invoked only specific paragraphs of Chapter 7, and like them, the new resolution is expected to remain "non-mandatory," China's U.N. ambassador, Wang Guangya, told The New York Sun.

Previous council resolutions that took Iran to task for its refusal to heed the council's demand to suspend enrichment of uranium included restrictions on travel against several named Tehran officials involved in the enrichment program. During the months-long negotiations that led to yesterday's agreement in Berlin, America wanted to tighten that restriction and turn it into an outright travel ban.

Instead, as Mr. Wang predicted yesterday, the new proposed resolution would revert to language urging countries to "exercise vigilance" in allowing those officials to enter their territory. Several other diplomats said that similar non-mandatory language is applied to economic measures, including those restricting commerce with a small number of Iranian banks.

Even after yesterday's agreement in Berlin, there is "no rush" for the council to adopt a new Iran resolution, Mr. Wang added. "It took several months for the six to agree, so you must give more time for the elected members," he said, referring to the 10 non-permanent members of the council, which was joined this year by countries such as Libya and Vietnam that have little experience in high-wire international diplomacy.

"Maybe there will be another resolution but it will be even more toothless than the previous two sanction resolutions," Mr. Bolton said in Herzliya, Israel, yesterday. A former undersecretary of state for disarmament and the American ambassador to the U.N. under President Bush, Mr. Bolton told the prominent annual conference of the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center that Israel should not look to Washington for action on Iran.

"It's close to zero percent chance that the Bush Administration will authorize military action against Iran before leaving office," he said, according to Haaretz. If — unlike America's National Intelligence Estimate, which downplayed Iran's nuclear weapons pursuit — Israel "feels Iran is on the verge of acquiring that capability, it brings the decision point home to use force," he told the news agency AFP.

"Iran has made a mockery of the world and has bought precious time," a former Israeli defense minister and current transportation minister, Shaul Mofaz, said, adding, "There are two years left to stop Iran before it's too late." Last week, Prime Minster Olmert said Israel would use "all options" to stop Iran from reaching nuclear capabilities. Earlier this week, India launched a new spy satellite for Israeli use, which was reportedly designed to increase Israel's ability to gather information on Iran's nuclear activities.