Mottaki stated:  “It is natural that we welcome... countries that correct their views... which in the past had questions and ambiguities” about Iran’s nuclear programme, which Tehran says, has been undertaken only to generate electricity.

Caution advised
Hawks in the Bush administration and Israel responded to the report by claiming that Iran had not given up its ambition to obtain nuclear weapons. John Bolton, former US ambassador the UN, said accepting the intelligence report would be a “mistake” and argued that Iran had taken the “strategic decision” to pursue nuclear weapons 20 years ago and would not give up this objective.

Israel’s hardline Defence Minister Ehud Barak argued that Israeli intelligence believes Iran is still trying to build the bomb. He said that Iran may have frozen its programme but has since restarted it. “We cannot allow ourselves to rest just because of an intelligence report from the other side of the earth, even if it is from our greatest friend.”

Israeli official sources quoted by the liberal daily Haaretz said that the Bush administration seems “to have lost its sense of urgency regarding Iran’s nuclear programme, making a military strike in 2008 unlikely.” Many Arab analysts have argued that the US has taken such a strong line against Iran at the urging of Israel which sees Tehran as a threat to its continuing occupation of Palestinian and Syrian land because Tehran supports the Palestinian Hamas resistance movement and Lebanon’s Hizbollah.