No evidence Iran building nukes: UN watchdog chief
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No evidence of nuclear weapons: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (Reuters: Caren Firouz)
UN atomic watchdog chief Mohamed El Baradei said he had no evidence that Iran is building nuclear weapons and accused US leaders of adding "fuel to the fire" with recent bellicose rhetoric.
"We haven't received any information there is a parallel, ongoing, active nuclear weapon program," the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) told CNN.
"Second, even if Iran were to be working on nuclear weapons... they are at least a few years away from having such weapon," he said, citing Washington's own intelligence assessments.
"My fear is that if we continue to escalate from both sides that we will end up into a precipice, we will end up into an abyss. The Middle East is in a total mess, to say the least. And we cannot add fuel to the fire."
The White House had earlier rejected any parallels between its Iran rhetoric and the run-up to the Iraq war, after fresh sanctions on Iran and escalating US warnings fuelled comparisons to the months before the 2003 invasion.
"We are absolutely committed to a diplomatic process," spokesman Tony Fratto told reporters.
"We would never take options off the table, but the diplomatic process is what we want to move forward with," he said, calling it "unwise" to rule out the use of force.
His comments came as US President George W Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have been sharply ramping up their rhetoric about Iran, leading some critics to draw parallels with the late 2002 verbal escalation against Iraq.
In recent months, Mr Bush has predicted "nuclear holocaust" and "World War III" if Iran gets atomic weapons, while Mr Cheney has warned of "serious consequences" for Iran if it defies global demands to freeze uranium enrichment - echoing the UN resolution that the US says authorised war in Iraq.
Iran insists that it is enriching uranium only for nuclear energy and denies US charges that it is seeking the bomb.
Mr El Baradei also accused Israeli of taking "the law into their own hands" with a mysterious raid on Syria last month, and demanded more information about what was hit.
Neither Israel nor the United States has furnished "any evidence at all" to prove that the Syrian site bombed in early September was a secret nuclear facility, he said.
"That to me is very distressful because we have a system: if countries have information that the country is working on a nuclear-related program, they should come to us. We have the authority to go out and investigate," he said.
"But to bomb first and then ask questions later, I think it undermines the system and it doesn't lead to any solution to any suspicion, because we are the eyes and ears of the international community."
-AFP
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