16 September 2007Yahoo! News
French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said on Sunday his country had to prepare for the possibility of war against Iran over its nuclear program, but he did not believe any such action was imminent.
Speaking in an interview on RTL radio and LCI television, Kouchner said the world's biggest powers should use further sanctions to show they were serious about stopping Tehran getting atom bombs before it came to war.
"We must prepare for the worst," Kouchner said, adding: "The worst, sir, is war."
Asked if France was involved in any planning towards war, he said: "The French army is not at the moment associated with anything at all, nor with any maneuver at all."
Tehran insists it only wants to master nuclear technology to produce electricity, but it has yet to comply with repeated U.N. demands that it halt uranium enrichment and other sensitive work that could potentially be used in producing weapons.
Kouchner's comments follow a similarly hawkish statement by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who said last month in his first major foreign policy speech since taking office that a diplomatic push by the world's powers was the only alternative to "an Iranian bomb or the bombing of Iran."
France has said repeatedly it wants the U.N. Security Council to pass tougher sanctions against Iran over its failure to dispel fears that it is secretly pursuing nuclear weapons.
"We do not want to signal anything other than 'peace is in your interest, and in ours too,"' Kouchner said.
Asked whether he believed U.S. President George W. Bush would launch air strikes against Iran before the end of his term of office, he said: "Honestly, I don't think we've reached that stage, not at all. At least I hope so."
