August 8, 2004 WASHINGTON (AP) -- With Iran stepping up its
nuclear program, a top White House aide said Sunday the world
finally is ``worried and suspicious'' over the Iranians'
intentions and is determined not to let Tehran produce a nuclear
weapon.
National security adviser Condoleezza Rice also said the Bush
administration sees a new international willingness to act
against Iran's nuclear program. She credited the changed
attitude to the Americans' insistence that Iran's effort put the
world in peril.
She would not say whether the United States would act alone
to end the program if the administration could not win
international support.
Iran's foreign minister, Kamal Kharrazi, announced a week ago
that his country had resumed building nuclear centrifuges. He
said Iran was retaliating for the West's failure to force the
U.N. nuclear watchdog agency to close its file on possible
Iranian violations of nuclear nonproliferation rules.
Kharrazi said Iran was not resuming enrichment of uranium,
which requires a centrifuge. But, he said, Iran had restarted
manufacturing the device because Britain, Germany and France had
not stopped the investigation by the International Atomic Energy
Agency.
``The United States was the first to say that Iran was a
threat in this way, to try and convince the international
community that Iran was trying, under the cover of a civilian
nuclear program, to actually bring about a nuclear weapons
program,'' Rice said on CNN's ``Late Edition.''
``I think we've finally now got the world community to a
place, and the International Atomic Energy Agency to a place,
that it is worried and suspicious of the Iranian activities,''
she said. ``Iran is facing for the first time real resistance to
trying to take these steps.''
Bush, in his 2002 State of the Union address, included Iran
with North Korea and Iraq in an ``axis of evil'' dedicated to
developing nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction.
Since then, North Korea has publicly resumed its nuclear
development program. In Iraq, invading U.S.-led forces have
found no such programs after President Saddam Hussein was
deposed.
Iran announced in June that it would resume its centrifuge
program. Afterward, the U.S. official whose job is to slow the
global atomic arms race, Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton,
told Congress that Iran was jabbing ``a thumb in the eye of the
international community.''
On NBC's ``Meet the Press,'' Rice reasserted that the world
has fallen in line on Iran and said she expects next month to
get a very strong statement from the IAEA ``that Iran will
either be isolated, or it will submit to the will of the
international community.''
She also said, ``We cannot allow the Iranians to develop a
nuclear weapon. The international community has got to find a
way to come together and to make certain that that does not
happen.''
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