'No serious response from Iran without sanctions'

The US does not expect any "serious response" from Iran to halt its controversial nuclear programme unless the UN Security Council slaps Tehran with additional sanctions, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Friday. Flanked by new British Foreign Secretary William Hague, Clinton said she is not expecting much from the this weekend's visit of the Turkish Prime Minister and Brazilian President to Tehran; as both the United States and Britain believe Iran is determined to pursue its nuclear weapons programme.

"I have told my counterparts in many capitals around the world that I believe that we will not get any serious response out of the Iranians until after the Security Council acts," Clinton asserted. "I have long advocated that the European Union should adopt financial sanctions of the kind the United States has implemented on this issue. But, of course, we'll have to get into the specifics of that once the Security Council resolution is passed," Hague said. Observing there is no magic to this approach, he said it requires persistence and determination and united strength in the international community to tackle this problem.

"And so we will buttress that as, indeed, our predecessors have tried to do. We have never ruled out supporting, in the future, military action, but we're not calling for it," Hague said in response to a question."It is precisely because we want to see this matter settled peacefully and rapidly that we call for the sanctions, that we support the idea of a Security Council resolution. That is our perspective on it," he said supporting the US stand on Iran.

Clinton

said she has spoken to her counterparts in Turkey and Brazil as their leaders visit Iran over the weekend. "We are making progress every day. This is the highest priority, not only of the United States but of many of our partners and allies like the UK. We believe that the case is being made perhaps most effectively by the Iranians themselves," she said. Clinton said when the US and its allies like the Britain began pointing out, starting last fall, that the Iranians were not responding to their offers of engagement. "That the offer that was made through the IAEA, for the Tehran research reactor approach, was not accepted; that there had been no meeting since the meeting in Geneva in October; that the Iranians unilaterally said they would start enriching at 20 per cent; when the undisclosed facility of Qom was revealed, ".... and the IAEA under Director General Amano issued its report -- every step along the way has demonstrated clearly to the world that Iran is not participating in the international arena, in the way that we had asked them to do, and that they continue to pursue their nuclear program,"Clinton argued.

The Secretary of State said Brazilians are still hopeful to "climb the hill" to convince Iran to join the P5 Plus 1 negotiation process. "So the world leadership, as evidenced by the Security Council, has moved in the same direction -- some perhaps more quickly than others -- but in the direction of reaffirming the authority of the Security Council, of putting some real teeth into the sanctions, of uniting the world in a way that will send an unequivocal message to the Iranian leadership," she said.