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Israeli urges sanctions on Iraq

Brendan Nicholson
August 16, 2007

AUSTRALIA has been urged to help impose sanctions against Tehran to help increase pressure for Iranians to overthrow the Government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from within.

A former Israeli army general and deputy defence minister, Dr Ephraim Sneh, is in Canberra for meetings with Defence Minister Brendan Nelson and senior Defence officials.

Speaking yesterday, Dr Sneh urged Australia, "as a country with courage", to support a push for tough international sanctions against Iran.

Dr Sneh said sanctions offered the best way to stop Iran from pushing ahead with its development of a nuclear bomb.

He urged countries such as the US, Australia, Britain and Canada to impose a narrow program of sanctions targeting key imports such as processed fuels Iran relied on heavily.

Under the sanctions regime, companies that dealt with Iran would not be able to do business in the US, Britain, Canada or Australia.

"Sanctions may, in the minimum, change the behaviour of the regime and may bring them to abandon the nuclear project. But beyond that, I hope it will increase the resentment inside Iran so that the regime will be weakened," Dr Sneh said.

"The solution to the problem which the theocracy in Iran poses is not through external intervention but it is through the fact that the Iranian people will take their fate in their own hands.

"I do not encourage any government, let alone the Australian one, to be involved in inciting uprising in Iran."

Dr Sneh said Iran sponsored Iraqi militias in southern Iraq, provided insurgents there with bombs to use against coalition armoured vehicles, and financed extremists in Lebanon and Palestine.

"Iran is the spoiler of the process. They try to disrupt Israeli-Palestinian rapprochement, all kinds of dialogue, by unleashing the terror organisations to change the atmosphere and foster the hatred.

"It would be much easier to reach peace with the Palestinians if this regime did not exist."

Iran considered its campaign to control Iraq as even more important than its push to develop a nuclear bomb, he said.

Iran could have a bomb by 2010 and Israel would only take military action to prevent that as a last resort, he said.

"We are fully aware of the repercussions. We don't want it and that's why we would strongly prefer other options."

Meanwhile, the secretary of the US Navy, Donald Winter, said that far from waving the flag in Iraq he believed Australian forces there were doing an invaluable job. He said he was most familiar with the role of the Australian navy in protecting Iraq's two offshore oil platforms.

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