US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton expressed the hope that “responsible” leaders would take control in Iran in an interview to be aired yesterday.
“And I can only hope that there will be some effort inside Iran, by responsible civil and religious leaders, to take hold of the apparatus of the state,” Clinton told ABC News, according to a transcript made public in Washington.
Clinton said the military, the Revolutionary Guard and other militia and military entities were increasingly wielding power.
“And I know that that’s a concern of people inside Iran,” she said. “We read reports coming out of Iran, and it is something that would be even more distressing for the Iranian people.”
Clinton said the most recent elections in Iran were “very flawed” and as a result elected officials were now turning to the military to enforce their power.
“And there should be a way out of this takeover of their political system and a threat to their dual system of elected and clerical leadership, because when you empower a military as much as they have to rely on them to put down legitimate protests and demonstrations, you create a momentum and unleash forces that you do not know where they will end up,” the secretary of state said.
According to Clinton, many Iranians, even those who were originally sympathetic to the Islamic government, were starting to disagree with the system.
“So we are very much in favor of and speaking out on behalf of individual cases and more generally the human political civil rights of Iranians,” she said.
Clinton said the administration of US President Barack Obama was trying to be effective in trying to help those inside Iran, adding that she had meetings with Iranian experts. The secretary of state also praised the international economic sanctions imposed on Iran by the UN Security Council in June, saying they were “biting.”
“And we hear that from many in the region and beyond,” she said. “And in fact the information we’re getting is that the Iranian regime is quite worried about the impact on their banking system, on their economic growth, because they’ve already encountered some tough economic times. And this is, you know, making it more costly.”
Clinton said the US wanted Iran to return to the “P5 Plus One” forum to talk about their nuclear program and permit full International Atomic Energy Agency inspections of its nuclear facilities.
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