Senator Urges White House to Join Talks on Iran

A top Democratic senator urged the Bush administration Sunday to join three European allies in negotiating with Iran to get it to abandon its nuclear programs, saying that failure to do so could result in the need to invade the country.

“This is a case where we’re ... on the sidelines,” Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said on “Fox News Sunday.” “The three European countries that are negotiating with the Iranians are saying, ‘Look, we’ve got to get in the deal with them. We can’t just sit on the sidelines.’ ”

In Tehran, a government spokesman warned the Bush administration Sunday against attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities and said talks with the European countries could resolve the dispute.

Iran acknowledges that it has a nuclear program but says that it is pursuing peaceful energy production, not weapons. Britain, France and Germany have offered Iran economic incentives to drop any activities that could be used to develop nuclear weapons.

The Bush administration has suggested that Iran is using its nuclear power program as a shield to produce weapons, and says the White House will not rule out any option to stop the country from developing nuclear arms.

Biden criticized Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for her recent comments suggesting that the U.S. would not sign on to a deal between the Europeans and Iran even if Tehran agreed to accept a verification program to ensure that its nuclear program was only for peaceful purposes.

“Nothing [the Europeans are] going to be able to do is going to be involved with us unless we’re willing to get into some kind of an agreement that results in a verifiable arms control agreement,” Biden said on Fox.

He said that if diplomatic efforts failed, efforts to block Iran’s nuclear program could be sent to the United Nations.

If both of those options failed, he warned, the U.S. would be left with only two unattractive choices.

“You accept them as a nuclear power, which I’m disinclined to do, or you invade, which we are not really particularly capable of doing right now,” he said.

Speaking on CNN’s “Late Edition,” Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W. Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said that he had always viewed Iran as being “much more of a problem” than Iraq and that not taking the country seriously would be “an enormous mistake.”

“Unlike Iraq, which didn’t have nuclear weapons, they certainly are working on it,” he said. “I think it’s their ambition to have one, and my guess is they will get one.”

In Tehran, government spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said Iran would never give up its nuclear power program. “Iran strongly insists on its views, and we will not give up our people’s legitimate right,” he declared at a news briefing.

He criticized the Bush administration for refusing to rule out the use of force against Iran, saying, “They know our capabilities. We have clearly told the Europeans to tell the Americans not to play with fire.”

Asefi was upbeat about talks between his country and the European nations, describing them as “deeper and more professional.”

German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer also called for the U.S. to back European diplomatic efforts.

“I think if the United States were to engage positively -- and I’m aware of the difficulties of doing that -- that it would substantially strengthen the EU drive,” he said at a news conference in Munich on Sunday.

However, Fischer also said that the European Union would support tougher moves against Iran if Tehran was found to be carrying out weapons-related programs.

“If Iran were to behave unreasonably, against its own interests, if it for example restarted [uranium] enrichment ... then that would lead to the Security Council,” he said.

In related news, the Washington Post reported Sunday that the United States had been using unmanned surveillance planes to fly over Iran and look for evidence that the country had ongoing nuclear weapons programs.

Although neither Rockefeller nor Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), the intelligence committee chairman who also appeared on CNN, would confirm that such flights were going on, Rockefeller noted that “Iran, like North Korea, is very, very dangerous.”

“Everything we can do to gather intelligence and information -- no matter who is doing it among our intelligence or military agencies -- is for the betterment, because we’re stretched so thin,” Rockefeller added. “We need all the eyes on the ground that we can possibly get.”

Reuters news service was used in compiling this report.