Obama shuns talk of going to war with Iran
U.S., Europe set for new talks with Tehran
WASHINGTON— Alarmed by rising talk of war, the United States, Europe and other world powers announced Tuesday that bargaining will begin again with Iran over its fiercely disputed nuclear efforts. Tehran, for its part, invited inspectors to see a site suspected of secret atomic weapons work.
In Washington, U.S. President Barack Obama declared he had been working to avert war with Iran during intensive meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week. Israel, fearing the prospect of a nuclear Iran, has been stressing a need for possible military action, but Obama said sanctions and diplomacy already were working.
The president rebuffed Republican critics, who say his reluctance to attack Iran is a sign of weakness, holding up the spectre of more dead Americans in the Middle East.
“When I see the casualness with which some of these folks talk about war, I’m reminded of the costs involved in war,” Obama said. “This is not a game. And there’s nothing casual about it.”
Although Obama’s remarks were suffused with American electionyear politics — they came the same day as the biggest batch of Republican primary elections to choose his opponent in November — he spoke for capitals around the world in warning that “bluster” and posturing to appear tough on Iran could edge the world closer to an avoidable war.
EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany had agreed to a new round of nuclear talks with Iran more than a year after suspending them in frustration.
The rush to diplomacy was partly an answer to increasingly hawkish rhetoric from Israel, which is publicly considering a military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities within months. Obama and western allies say such a strike would be risky and premature, and there remains time to convince Iran that it is better off without nuclear weapons.
Iran insists that its program is only for energy production and other peaceful purposes.
The time and venue of the new talks have not been set.
In Washington, speaking at his first news conference this year, Obama said he saw a “window of opportunity” to use diplomacy instead of military force to resolve the dispute. He declared anew that his policy on Iran is not one of containment but of stopping Tehran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.
“It is deeply in everybody’s interests — the United States, Israel and the world’s — to see if this can be resolved in a peaceful fashion,” Obama said. “This notion that somehow we have a choice to make in the next week or two weeks or month or two months is not borne out by the facts.”
The impact of the Iran debate on domestic American politics was underscored as Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich took time while competing for votes in the high-stakes Super Tuesday elections to join the speakers’ lineup at the same pro-israel gathering that influenced the timing of Netanyahu’s visit.
Romney, in a video appearance, assailed the administration’s approach on Iran, saying, “Hope is not a foreign policy.”