US general threatens Iran with new pressure track

A senior US military commander threatens Iran with stepped up pressures by Washington following the latest IAEA report on Iran’s nuclear program.

“I think that no one at the end of this time can say that the United States and the rest of the world have not given Iran every opportunity to resolve the issues diplomatically,” the head of US Central Command David Petraeus claimed on Sunday.

“That puts us in a solid foundation now to go on (with) what is termed the pressure track. That’s the course on which we are embarked now,” he told the NBC TV broadcast news.

On Thursday, the new head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Yukiya Amano issued a two-pronged report about Iran’s nuclear program.

The report, while critical of some aspects of Iran’s enrichment activities, again confirmed the non-diversion of the country’s declared nuclear material.

The UN nuclear watchdog has carried out the highest number of inspections in Iran, compared to any other country throughout its history, and found no evidence indicating that the program has diverted toward weaponization, as claimed by Western powers.

Iran says its nuclear program — an issue which the country insists has been turned into a controversy by the West’s political games — is aimed at the civilian applications of the technology. However, the Untied States, backed by a number of its European allies, as well as Israel and its powerful lobby groups in Washington, allege that Iran is conducting covert operations in pursuit of building an atomic bomb.

Petraeus also claimed that the US intelligence community is ‘developing’ a new national intelligence estimate on Iran’s nuclear program.

“We’ll probably hear more on that from the International Atomic Energy Agency when it meets … Clearly, its new director expressed concern about the activities.”

Petraeus’ rhetoric, according to observers, sounds increasingly similar to Israeli threats of a looming military attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, something that Iranian officials have rejected as a psychological warfare that exposes Washington’s intolerance for sound reasoning and diplomacy.