official Mehr news agency quoted Brigadier General Gholamreza Jalali as saying. AL ARABIYA – AGENCIES
Iran will move its uranium enrichment plants to safer sites if conditions make this necessary, a senior Revolutionary Guards commander said on Wednesday amid warnings of ‘disastrous’ consequences if Washington headed on a collision course with Tehran that could lead to a war. Controversy over Iran’s uranium enrichment program has resulted in Western powers imposing increasingly tight economic sanctions on the Islamic Republic, and Israel and the United States say they have not ruled out military action if diplomacy fails to persuade Tehran to suspend its sensitive nuclear work. “If conditions require, we will move our uranium enrichment centers to safer places,” the semi-official Mehr news agency quoted Brigadier General Gholamreza Jalali as saying. Western powers suspect Iran is trying to acquire the ability to produce nuclear weapons. Iran denies this, saying it is enriching uranium only for peaceful purposes such as power generation and medical use, according to Reuters. Israel, widely believed to have the only nuclear arsenal in the Middle East, says a nuclear-armed Iran would threaten its existence. Meanwhile, a former advisor to ex-president Jimmy Carter warned that the United States appears headed on a collision course with Iran that could lead to a war with ‘disastrous’ consequences. “We think we are going to avoid war by moving towards compulsion,” Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was national security advisor to Carter in the late 1970s, told an audience at an Atlantic Council think tank event in Washington late Tuesday. “But the more you lean towards compulsion, the more the choice becomes war if it doesn’t work. That narrows our options in a very dramatic way,” said the former official, who remains an influential voice on U.S. foreign policy, according to AFP. Brzezinski said he was concerned about an escalation in “rhetoric,” as the U.S. approach to Iran’s nuclear program appeared solely focused on forcing Tehran to comply with international demands, leaving Washington little flexibility. “A lot of small decisions are being made which in the meantime narrow your freedom of choice in the future,” he said. Tuesday’s gathering featured four former national security advisors, including president Richard Nixon’s powerful deputy Henry Kissinger. Brzezinski warned repeatedly of his concerns that the United States could stumble into a war with Iran. “If we slide into a conflict with Iran, in this or that fashion, the consequences for us will be disastrous, disastrous on a massive scale and also globally at the same time,” he said. Brzezinski was in office in 1979 when America’s ally, the Shah of Iran, fell from power in a revolution that resulted in an Islamic theocracy in Tehran. After the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Iran and the taking of American hostages that same year, Brzezinski presided over a plan to rescue the captives but the military operation failed before it got off the ground. Tensions have steadily grown between Iran and the United States in recent months as Washington has pushed for stricter sanctions to punish Tehran over its nuclear activities and amid speculation Israel may be weighing possible pre-emptive military action.
