Reuters

Iran's nuclear program is peaceful and has no military purpose, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Thursday, adding he was ready to engage in dialogue with anybody.

"It has nothing to do with nuclear weapons, or military purposes," he said during a visit to Indonesia. He was speaking in an interview broadcast live on local Metro television.

He also said it was "ridiculous" for countries with nuclear arsenals of their own to be pressing Iran to curb its effort to develop nuclear energy.

"We also possess the technical and other capabilities to defend our interests," Ahmadinejad added.

Antiwar.com

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice couldn't possibly have been more accurate when she accused Iran of "playing games" with the international community.

Rice was specifically referring to an announcement made April 30, by deputy head of the Iranian Atomic Energy Agency Muhammad Saeedi, that his country is willing to allow "snap inspections" by the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, on the condition that the UN Security Council is excluded from any involvement in inspecting Iran's nuclear-enrichment facilities.

Iran is playing games in the sense that it is repeatedly testing U.S. resolve to see how far the Bush administration is willing to go to escalate the conflict. Naturally, the outcomes of Iran's political experimentation help adjust - escalate or downgrade - the government's political attitude toward the issue.

How can the crisis over Iran be resolved without resort to violence? Scilla Elworthy looks at the possibilities for creative action at citizen level.

Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian lawyer and Nobel peace laureate, writes in her new autobiography Iran Awakening : "Bellicosity and brinkmanship are what have brought us to where we stand now, but they remain ingrained habits for both sides….The threat of regime change by military force, while reserved as an option by some in the western world, endangers nearly all the efforts democracy-minded Iranians have made in these recent years."

Even the threat of force gives the Iranian government a pretext to crack down on the opposition and undermine the civil-society groupings that are slowly forming. It also, in Ebadi's words, "makes Iranians overlook their resentment of the regime and move behind their unpopular leaders out of defensive nationalism."

The Japan Times

One cold morning in December 1941, I was running through the frozen streets of Tokyo during the predawn hours, delivering newspapers. I saw this as my way to contribute to the family finances. I was 13 at the time, my father was bedridden with rheumatism, and my four elder brothers had been sent off to war.

Four years had passed since the start of Japan's invasion of China. Many people with family members on the front anxiously awaited the arrival of the morning newspaper and information it might bring about the war.

Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor was that day's top story, reported in banner headlines designed to convey the "glory" of the event. I will never forget the mood of eerie agitation that enveloped the city as I distributed the newspapers that morning.

The Guardian

The only route to regime change and disarmament is engagement, so the US must respond to this week's letter from Tehran

For a British foreign secretary Iraq is easy. It has been Tony Blair's personal, colossal, hubristic, career-wrecking mistake, and the Foreign Office need only sit by and brush his tears with tissues. Iran is different. Iran is hard, as the new foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, clearly found in New York on Monday.

Conventional wisdom can be summed up in a simple declaration that a nuclear Iran one day may be undesirable but not half as undesirable as a war on any scale likely to prevent it. Other things being equal, only arms salesmen welcome nuclear proliferation. But for America and Britain to extend military operations from Iraq and Afghanistan into Iran and start bombing would be, as Jack Straw said, inconceivable and "nuts".

But other things are never equal. The undesirability of a nuclear Iran is supposedly enforced by an international treaty to which that country still claims to subscribe. Though the treaty is all but defunct, its goals remain laudable. Besides, elements within Iran's ever-shifting coalition are known to be alarmed by the fundamentalist outbursts of President Ahmadinejad and his nuclear-enrichment boasts. How can those elements be helped? Might a few threats not do the trick?

Mr. George Bush, President of the United States of America,

For sometime now I have been thinking, how one can justify the undeniable contradictions that exist in the international arena -- which are being constantly debated, especially in political forums and amongst university students. Many questions remain unanswered. These have prompted me to discuss some of the contradictions and questions, in the hopes that it might bring about an opportunity to redress them.

Can one be a follower of Jesus Christ (PBUH), the great Messenger of God, feel obliged to respect human rights, present liberalism as a civilization model, announce one's opposition to the proliferation of nuclear weapons and WMDs, make War and Terror his slogan, and finally, work towards the establishment of a unified international Can one be a follower of Jesus Christ (PBUH), the great Messenger of God, feel obliged to respect human rights, present liberalism as a civilization model, announce one's opposition to the proliferation of nuclear weapons and WMDs, make War and Terror his slogan, and finally, work towards the establishment of a unified international community – a community which Christ and the virtuous of the Earth will one day govern, but at the same time, have countries attacked; the lives, reputations and possessions of people destroyed and on the slight chance of the … of a … criminals in a village city, or convoy for example the entire village, city or convey set ablaze. Or because of the possibility of the existence of WMDs in one country, it is occupied, around one hundred thousand people killed, its water sources, agriculture and industry destroyed, close to 180,000 foreign troops put on the ground, sanctity of private homes of citizens broken, and the country pushed back perhaps fifty years. At what price? Hundreds of billions of dollars spent from the treasury of one country and certainly other countries and tens of thousands of young men and women – as occupation troops – put in harm's way, taken away from family and loved ones, their hands stained with the blood of others, subjected to so much psychological pressure that every day some commit suicide and those returning home suffer depression, become sickly, and grapple with all sorts of aliments; while some are killed and their bodies handed off to their families.

Asia Times

By drawing attention to Iraq and the obvious role oil plays in US policy today, the George W Bush-Dick Cheney administration has done just that: it has drawn the world's energy-deficit powers' attention firmly to the strategic battle over energy, and especially oil.

This is already having consequences for the global economy in terms of US$75-a-barrel crude-oil price levels. Now it is taking on the dimension of what one former US defense secretary rightly calls a "geopolitical nightmare" for the United States.

The creation by Bush and Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and company of a geopolitical nightmare is also the backdrop to comprehend the dramatic political shift within the US establishment in the past six months, away from the Bush presidency. Simply put: Bush and Cheney and their band of neo-conservative war hawks, with their special relationship to the capacities of Israel in Iraq and across the Mideast, were given a chance.

United Press International

A dialogue between the United States and Iran could solve most of their disputes, says Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr. Shirin Ebadi.

"This kind of dialogue should be direct and should be public," she said, adding it would work best at three levels -- with cooperation between governments, legislative bodies and non-governmental organizations.

Ebadi spoke with United Press International on a range of issues facing the two countries while in Washington, D.C. to promote her new book "Iran Awakening; A Memoir of Revolution and Hope."

The book details Ebadi`s life in Iran, where she served as a distinguished judge for many years before the 1979 Islamic Revolution rendered female judges illegal and put her out of a job. After writing several books and legal articles and raising her two daughters, Ebadi applied for a license to practice law and began taking on human rights cases.

Reuters

Military action is not a "magic wand" that can be used to resolve the international community's standoff with Iran over its nuclear programme, French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said on Thursday.

He said the international community must look at what tools can be used to put pressure on Iran but said military action in Iraq and the Middle East showed that it was not a solution.

"My conviction is that military action is certainly no solution," Villepin told a monthly news conference.

"You know as I do the situation in the Middle East, in Iraq and the Near East, the idea that by waving the magic wand for a military shortcut we are going to solve the Iranian problem doesn't seem to me today to be something to talk about."