BRIEFING WITH TONY SNOW,
WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY
THE WHITE HOUSE
June 23, 2006
Excerpts
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Q: On Iran, Steve Hadley said yesterday that it would be useful if the Iranians would respond by the time of the G8 summit. Is it the President's position that the Iranians should respond by that time?
MR. SNOW: Yes, the President would like them -- look, the President would like them to respond tomorrow if the answer were "yes," and they were ready to renounce -- ready to suspend enrichment and reprocessing activities. He would like them to respond quickly and affirmatively to the series of incentives.
Q: Do you have a deadline in mind?
MR. SNOW: The President and the -- the President is not the guy who dictates this solely, as you know. The United States is joining the EU3 -- and for that matter, the P5 plus one -- in negotiating on this issue.
And so, let me put it this way, all the partners are agreed that Iran should respond -- to use the formulation now familiar -- in weeks, not months, and that the precondition should be that the Iranians suspend enrichment-related and reprocessing activities, and -- maybe this is the most important part -- that the answer come through the channel through which the offer was conveyed, because we've got a number of differing answers and responses from different actors in the Iranian government. We have suggested, and our partners agree, that Mr. Larijani, through Javier Solana, should provide the official response because that way, at least you know what you're getting, which is, that will serve as the official Iranian government response. So those are kind of the key aspects.
Q: -- accept August 22nd as the official Iranian --
MR. SNOW: I think the -- the position is that they should be able to assess it before then.
Q: Tony, a follow up, if I may, more or less on the same issue. The focus on Iran has been on nuclear weapons, and is. But yesterday at the Pentagon, General Casey said that one of the four critical points of security in Iraq is Iran, and the fact that it aids and abets the enemy, also the Hezbollah, which is financed by Iran. Is there any shift in focus on that, and --
MR. SNOW: Yesterday, in Budapest, National Security Advisor Hadley made the same point, which is, look, the Iranians can do a lot of things. There are a lot of issues on the table. There's human rights, there's terrorism. The series of issues that separate Iran from the international community are not limited to the possibility of developing a nuclear weapon. There are a whole series of other issues. And what Mr. Hadley said was that one of the ways the Iranians can start demonstrating that they wish to operate in good faith is to suspend those activities, to suspend terror activities, to suspend sending things across the border, to suspend support for Hezbollah, and so on.
So those are things the Iranians can do on their own without having to consult anybody to demonstrate good faith in these matters. So absolutely, these remain sources of concern and attention from the United States government.
Q: And a follow up, if I may. If you look at what's time sensitive, the enrichment problem and nukes for Iran are months, if not years, down the road. This is now -- it's undermining the existing new government in Iraq. And saying or recognizing by Hadley that it's a problem doesn't get it done. Is the United States putting any pressure anyway on Iran trying to solve these problems?
MR. SNOW: Ivan, you're leaping to intelligence conclusions that I'm neither going to agree or disagree with. But you seem to -- you seem to be drawing a series of conclusions about the relative nature of the threats, and so on.
The United States -- there are many ways of doing this, and the Iranians, at various junctures, have actually talked about trying to cooperate on these measures. Then, as you know, they stepped away and said they didn't want to cooperate with it. The important thing is, it's on their shoulders. The Iranians have to make a decision, two roads: one path, a whole lot of incentives, that will welcome them back into the international community, economically, socially, culturally; or on the other hand is a series of disincentives that are -- that the government is not going to like.
Q: It's not just nukes, then, it's all --
MR. SNOW: No, let's be clear. What we're talking about right now is the nuclear program. These are other issues, but we are not going to -- we're not going to muddle it. The issues before the --
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