· Officials back nuclear inspector's warning
· Tehran denounces French extremism in growing row
Julian Borger, diplomatic editor and Angelique Chrisafis in Paris
Tuesday September 18, 2007
The Guardian
"The UN's chief nuclear weapons inspector yesterday warned against the use of force against Iran, in what UN officials said was an attempt to halt an "out of control" drift to war.
His outspoken remarks, which drew a parallel between Iran and Iraq, appeared to take aim at the US and Britain. They followed comments on Sunday night by the French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, who said: "We have to prepare for the worst," adding "the worst is war".
"I would not talk about any use of force," Mohamed ElBaradei told reporters at the International Atomic Energy Agency headquarters in Vienna. "There are rules on how to use force, and I would hope that everybody would have gotten the lesson after the Iraq situation, where 700,000 innocent civilians have lost their lives on the suspicion that a country has nuclear weapons."......
"There's a strategic reason for doing these things," one official said. "He really is alarmed. He sees this thing going out of control. The feeling around here is that this looks like the run-up to the Iraq war."
Last month, the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, sparked a heated political debate in Paris when he called the Iranian stand-off "the greatest crisis" of current times, saying the world had "a catastrophic alternative: an Iranian bomb or the bombing of Iran"......"
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