Agence France-Presse,
TEHRAN: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad warned on Tuesday that it was too late to stop Iran's nuclear programme despite new efforts by Western powers to impose more UN sanctions against the Islamic republic.
“It is too late to stop the progress of Iran,” Ahmadinejad told reporters. “We have broken through to a new stage and it is too late to push us back.”
At a typically defiant news conference, Ahmadinejad also warned the UN Security Council of the dangers of seeking to pressure Iran, telling the world body not to risk playing with a “lion's tail”.
“We advise them not to indulge in child's play… They say that Iran is a lion sat down in a corner. And we tell them: Do not play with the lion's tail.”
His comments were the latest warning from Tehran it has no intention of yielding to UN demands to suspend uranium enrichment activities, despite Western pressure for a third UN sanctions resolution against Tehran.
Ahmadinejad also launched a withering attack against Western powers, which he accused of seeking to dominate other peoples of the world and sow division by invading and arming states.
“If the countries of the region unite, very certainly, the great powers will not be able to dominate the world,” he said at the news conference marking the 18th anniversary of the death of Iran's revolutionary founder Ruhollah Khomeini.
Iran has infuriated the West by refusing to suspend uranium, a process Europe and the United States fear could be used to make nuclear weapons. Western countries are now openly calling for more UN sanctions against Tehran.
The Security Council has already imposed two sets of sanctions over the past half year targetting Iran's ballistics and nuclear industries to punish its defiance.
Iran has repeatedly said it has no intention of suspending enrichment and is instead working on expanding the programme by installing hundreds of centrifuges at an underground plant in the central city of Natanz.
Talks between EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana and Iranian chief nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani last week ended without any breakthrough with both sides seemingly sticking defiantly to their positions.
In another apparent attempt to find common ground, Larijani on Tuesday held talks with German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier in Berlin just ahead of the G8 summit.
Asked afterwards whether the meeting had been successful, Steinmeier told reporters: “I cannot tell you.”
He said the aim of the talks had been to create more “suppleness” on the part of Iran and to persuade the Islamic republic to rethink its stance.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has bluntly stated that the “only question” worth discussing is whether Iran was prepared to suspend.
In Jerusalem, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni urged the international community on Tuesday not to succumb to Iran's “psychological warfare”.
“Iran is trying to convince the world that it has crossed the point of no return in order to weaken the international community's efforts to stop Iran,” her office quoted her as saying at the inauguration of the newly created Israeli-European Chamber of Commerce.
“We are dealing with psychological warfare,” said Livni, whose country is considered the sole, undeclared nuclear power in the Middle East.
Meanwhile, Ahmadinejad predicted that Washington would never be able to hurt the Islamic republic even though the United States has never ruled out military action to bring Iran to heel over its nuclear drive.
“For the past 28 years (since the 1979 Islamic revolution) this is what they have wanted but Iran is stronger than ever. The secret is to believe in God. Those who are for God are victorious.”
In another sign of the rising tensions, Ahmadinejad was admonished by the United States and other Western powers for saying a “countdown” has begun that will end with Lebanese and Palestinian militants destroying Israel.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Ahmadinejad, who has repeatedly called for the destruction of the Jewish state, was “digging a deeper and deeper hole for his country.”
