Brazil: Regional peace impossible without Iran

A foreign policy adviser to the Brazilian president warns against pushing Iran into a corner over its nuclear program.

“Iran is a key element in the region, we will not get peace by excluding it,” said Marco Aurelio Garcia in an interview published in Wednesday’s edition of the French daily Le Figaro.

“We want to encourage Iran to abandon its nuclear armament ambitions, [but] it is not through isolating [Iran] that we can achieve this goal,” he said.

Garcia further pointed out that the Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva will travel to Tehran May 15 on a state visit.

Speaking on March 9, the Brazilian president warned that imposing new sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program would be a very dangerous step.

“We don’t want to repeat in Iran what happened in Iraq,” Lula said.

The US and a number of its allies demand that Iran must not be permitted possess an independent civilian nuclear fuel cycle, since it could possibly give the country the “capability” of producing nuclear weapons in the future.

This is while Iran has rejected any desire for nuclear weapons and, under its Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty obligations, has opened its facilities to intrusive inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

The IAEA has repeatedly stated in its reports that it has found no evidence of diverting any nuclear materials from civilian to military purposes in Iran.