Making a hardsell of the Indo-US nuclear deal on Wednesday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the Bush administration cannot guarantee that even if the deal gets Congressional approval, the Iran-India gas pipeline would not be built.
Rice stressed before lawmakers of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that if the amendments to the 1954 Atomic Energy Act go through, the administration cannot give any guarantees that India's reliance on Iranian energy will go away or that the pipeline will not be built.
"What confidence do we have that if this amendment of the 1954 Atomic Energy Act occurs, that the reliance on Iranian energy won't go forward, anyway, that a pipeline won't be built anyway," Senator Lincoln Chaffee asked.
"Well, I can't be assured that it will not. But let me just note that India is of course not the only country with an oil and gas relationship with Iran. Some of our closest allies -- Japan, for instance -- have an oil and gas relationship with Iran. Also the Europeans -- Italy is Iran's largest trading partner. So, most countries have a different relationship with Iran than we do," Rice replied.
"But what we are saying to everyone, and I think it is now gaining resonance, is that Iran is not really a reliable supplier in the long run. Because of the behavior of Iran concerning the entire international community about what its intentions are toward a nuclear program, the unreliability of that Iranian oil and gas supply has got to be taken into account. The nature of Iranian policies has got to be taken into account," Rice said.
"And the one point that I would make is that I think you will see everybody taking a harder and harder look at their relationships and reliances on some of the states that, from time to time, talk about using oil and gas as a weapon when they are confronted with policies that they do not like", Rice said.
"And so while I can't tell you that, if India has access to civil nuclear energy, they are going to forego other relationships. It does give them, in many ways, a better option for a more reliable energy supply than being dependent on states that, from time to time, brandish the oil and gas weapon," she said.
Breaking the energy association between India and Iran, she said, was not the rationale for the Bush administration seeking changes to the 1954 Atomic Energy Act.
"The driving force is the strategic partnership with India and having a full-scale partnership with India that can fully deal with technological cooperation, energy cooperation, economic cooperation--all of which, we believe, are hindered by the absence of our ability to do civil nuclear cooperation," she told members of Senate Foreign Relations Committee Wednesday morning.
"I only make the Iran point as one among many, that reliable energy supply is a problem for countries like India that are growing at 8 percent, that need energy supply and they're looking for it anywhere that they can," Rice said in response to a question.
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