Iran warns U.N. on sanctions

A defiant Iran, calling the Republican defeat in the U.S. elections a “landmark victory for the Iranian nation,” warned Friday that it would reassess its cooperation with international atomic regulators if the United Nations moved forward with comprehensive sanctions on Iran’s nuclear program.

The caution came from Iran’s top nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, as he concluded a day of meetings in Moscow aimed at winning Russia’s support for weakening or postponing the sanctions, which European and U.S. negotiators hope to bring to the U.N. Security Council as early as the end of the month.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said “the enemy cannot do a damn thing” to divert Tehran’s nuclear program -- one of many indications Iran might be prepared to endure an initial round of sanctions if diplomacy fails.

“By God’s grace, our powerful nation will continue its path,” the president said, according to the official Islamic Republic News Agency.

Shortly after Larijani’s meetings in Moscow, Russia proposed significantly scaled-down sanctions amendments that would focus strictly on halting Iran’s uranium enrichment and reprocessing activities and prevent the development of missiles to deliver nuclear weapons.

The proposal would leave intact Russia’s $1-billion civilian nuclear power plant under construction in the Iranian city of Bushehr, a key focus of Larijani’s agenda in Moscow, analysts said.

A draft resolution by Germany, Britain and France demands a ban on goods and technology that could contribute to Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs, and a cutoff of financial support to the programs.

It also calls for a travel ban for any officials or students related to the nuclear and ballistic missile programs and a freeze on foreign assets of people and agencies involved in those programs.

But Russian officials made it clear they believed negotiations were a better way to keep Iran engaged. “Sanctions are not going to force anyone to do anything they don’t want to do,” said Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s ambassador to the U.N.

Larijani said Iran remained ready for dialogue and warned against adopting the European group’s sanctions resolution.

“We will review our relations with the IAEA” -- the International Atomic Energy Agency -- “if the U.N. adopts the Euro-troika resolution without taking into account the amendments made by Russia,” he said in remarks carried by the Russian news agency RIA Novosti.

The warning carries an implicit threat to halt U.N. inspections at nuclear sites, though Iran could then lose IAEA technical cooperation on issues such as safety at nuclear facilities.

But Tehran appears to be realizing that some form of sanctions is probably inevitable, and the focus of Iran’s diplomacy is to delay or at least minimize any embargo and keep the Bushehr project and its future fuel deliveries intact, analysts said.

“Some people in Tehran are resigned to the prospect of some mild sanctions being instituted in the near future. And they’re preparing public opinion for that eventuality,” said Kaveh L. Afrasiabi, an Iranian-born analyst who has written extensively on Iran’s nuclear program.

The reaction to a “mild” level of initial sanctions would probably be largely “symbolic,” he said, such as a curtailment of IAEA inspections. But sanctions would quickly strengthen hard-liners in the government, Afrasiabi said, and successive moves to ratchet up the pressure would undoubtedly bring a correspondingly harsher reaction from Iran.

“At the end of the line is Iran’s exit from the [Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty] and complete suspension of any cooperation with the IAEA altogether. So there’s no bright light, even just talking about the initial sanctions,” Afrasiabi said.

The nuclear agency is set to complete a report next week on Iran’s compliance with inspectors who returned Friday from Tehran. Officials close to the agency said it would almost certainly confirm that Iran had started enriching uranium in a second cascade of 164 centrifuges. But with inspectors’ limited access, little else is likely to be revealed.

“The IAEA is losing knowledge about what Iran is doing,” said David Albright, a former weapons inspector who runs the Institute for Science and International Security. “They can see how much uranium is enriched, [but] they don’t know how many centrifuges are breaking ... they don’t know how many are being built, and Iran doesn’t have to answer questions.”

Meanwhile, Tuesday’s elections in the U.S. and the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld were greeted Friday by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as a victory for Iran and a show of “public opposition to the U.S.’s war-mongering policies.”

Though President Bush’s nominee to be the next secretary of Defense, Robert M. Gates, is expected to help set a new course on Iraq, he may also push the Bush administration in a new direction on Iran.

Gates has said that relations with Iran should never be normalized unless the regime gives up its nuclear program and its support for terrorism.

But in an influential 2004 report, Gates argued that Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons was largely driven by its “persistent sense of insecurity” vis-a-vis regional rivals and its “paramount adversary,” the U.S. Gates said that the United States’ lack of contact with Iran fueled this insecurity and that dialogue “need not await absolute harmony between the two governments.”

kim.murphy@latimes.com

Times staff writers Maggie Farley at the United Nations, Greg Miller and Paul Miller in Washington and Alissa J. Rubin in France contributed to this report.