Downing Street Says

» Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Iran

Asked if the Prime Minister was satisfied that the joint statement referring Iran to the UN Security Council had been worded strongly enough, the PMOS said that we should be clear what our goal here was. Our goal was to send as clear and united a signal as possible to Tehran, that the international community believed as a whole that Iran had broken its international obligations and that it should stop its activities. Therefore the aim was to move at the pace and in a method which brought the international community as whole to a position where it was putting pressure on Iran to deliver that result.

The important thing about last night was that following this recommendation, if the IAEA board agreed this Thursday, it appeared that this issue would go to the UN. In terms of achieving that goal, it would not be helpful for him to speculate about what might happen once it got to the UN. We had to take this step-by-step. The important thing was that today we were appreciably closer to getting that clear, united signal to Tehran.

Asked if it was likely that Iran, and Syria for that matter, would take the UN more seriously after what had happened in Iraq, the PMOS said that the Prime Minister clearly believed that if you could bring united international pressure to bear on particular issues, then countries would listen. He would simply point out that earlier this week, people had been predicting that we would not get the agreement of Russia and China to bring this issue to the UN Security Council. Therefore it sent a very clear signal to Iran that Russia and China had in fact now agreed to a process which we hoped would mean the issue came to the UN. These weren’t easy, simple steps, but they did point to a dynamic which countries, such as Iran and Syria, had to take account of.

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Iran

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