Bush Expects Referral of Iran to U.N.
President Bush predicted Friday that Iran would be called to account before the United Nations Security Council over its nuclear program.
After a meeting with Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, an ally of both the United States and Iran, Bush said, “When that referral will happen is a matter of diplomacy. And that’s what we talked about; we talked about how to deal with this situation diplomatically.”
The U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, is expected to delay action on Iran when its board meets next week in Vienna.
The Bush administration had been lobbying hard for the IAEA to refer Iran to the Security Council but ran into opposition from several nations, including Russia.
Bush and Putin called each other by their first names and seemed friendly as they spoke to reporters after an Oval Office meeting.
Each left his strongest criticism of the other unsaid: Bush omitted mention of U.S. concern that Putin was overseeing a creep toward authoritarian rule in post-Soviet Russia, while Putin was silent about what Moscow views as U.S. slights and double standards over democratic political expansion on old Soviet turf.
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