Again no agreement on Iran

A senior US official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the meeting agreed that Iran must pay a price for not complying with UN resolutions but did not come to terms on what form that would take. “I think the prospects for an agreement this week are not substantially good,” he said.

After the political directors of the major powers met in New York on Tuesday, the ministers are likely to convene next week, but sponsors—aiming for unity—have backed off a timeline for UNSC action, the US official said.

The meeting came after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wrote to President George W. Bush proposing “new ways” to resolve their differences on Monday. IN the first detailed response to the letter from the US, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Tuesday that it did not resolve questions about Tehran’s suspect nuclear programme. “This letter is not the place that one would find an opening to engage on the nuclear issue or anything of the sort,” Rice said. “It isn’t addressing the issues that we’re dealing with in a concrete way.”

Ahmadinejad’s letter made only an oblique reference to Iran’s nuclear intentions, asking why “any technological and scientific achievement reached in the Middle East region is translated into and portrayed as a threat to the Zionist regime.” Otherwise, it lambasted Bush for his handling of the September 11 attacks, accused the media of spreading lies about the Iraq war and railed against the US for its support of Israel. It questioned whether the world would be a different place if the money spent on Iraq had been spent to fight poverty.

“Would not your administration’s political and economic standing have been stronger?” the letter said. “And I am most sorry to say, would there have been an ever–increasing global hatred of the American government?”

On Tuesday, Ahmadinejad , on his way to Indonesia, called his letter “words and opinions of the Iranian nation” aimed at finding a “way out of problems” facing humanity, according to the official Iranian news agency.