Iran's hardline president warned the West will suffer more than his country if it tries to stop Tehran's nuclear ambitions, vowing to press ahead with the program as the confrontation moved into the UN Security Council.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's comments on Thursday came as Tehran struck an increasingly threatening tone, with the top Iranian delegate to the UN atomic watchdog agency warning a day earlier that the US will face "harm and pain" if the Security Council becomes involved.
"They know that they are not capable of causing the least harm to Iranian people," Ahmadinejad said during a visit to Iran's western province of Lorestan, according to the ISNA news agency. "They will suffer more."
Ahmadinejad did not elaborate. Some diplomats saw the comments as a veiled threat to use oil as a weapon, though Iran's oil minister ruled out any decrease in production. Iran also has leverage with extremist groups in the Middle East that could harm US interests.
The move to the UN Security Council takes the standoff to a new level, but how much it escalates depends heavily on the council's first steps.
The EU's foreign ministers were to take stock yesterday of international efforts to get Iran to resolve concerns over its nuclear program -- an issue that is raising the prospect of UN sanctions against Tehran.
The International Atomic Energy Agency has referred Iran to the UN Security Council. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan insisted this week that "negotiations must continue" with Iran, but as the EU foreign ministers opened two days of informal talks, a senior EU official cautioned sanctions may lie ahead.
"At a later stage, sanctions of some kind can't be excluded. Let's wait and see what the Security Council does," the EU's foreign policy chief Javier Solana was quoted as saying by the Austrian daily Der Standard in an interview published yesterday.
"We are only at the beginning. I don't exclude sanctions but it depends on the type of sanctions. We certainly don't want to target the Iranian people," Solana was quoted as saying.
There was always time for diplomacy, Solana was quoted as saying, noting that the Security Council had a tough task ahead.
French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy yesterday urged Iran to return rapidly to "reason" as the standoff over its nuclear program moved to the UN Security Council.
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