U.S. works to hold together anti-Iran alliance

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia -- The Bush administration scrambled Wednesday to hold together a global alliance of suspicion against Iran, saying the clerical regime still has much to answer for despite a U.S. reversal of its claim that Tehran is seeking nuclear weapons now.

President Bush's top diplomat, who must explain and sell the shifted U.S. position among European allies later this week, pushed anew Wednesday for international solidarity on Iran.

No allies have told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice they want to back out of a U.S.-led drive for new sanctions on Iran, but the administration is worried that the new assessment weakens its leverage over Iran and drains the urgency from international efforts to roll back Iran's nuclear program.

The re-evaluation of the Iranian threat has overshadowed diplomatic meetings Rice attended in Africa.

"It is the very strong view of the administration that the Iranian regime remains a problematic and dangerous regime and that the international community must continue to unite around the Security Council resolutions that it has passed," Rice said in Ethiopia.

The idea of talking truthfully about a past illicit program is something the United States is pushing hard as it tries to make sure that a useful diplomatic coalition against Iran does not fracture. That alliance was built partly on the strength of U.S. assertions that Iran had an ongoing ambition to build a bomb and could not be trusted with sensitive technology that could speed that process.

Rice reminded reporters that the U.N. Security Council has already demanded that Iran halt its uranium enrichment and reprocessing activities, "because those enriching and reprocessing activities permit, if they are perfected, a state to acquire fissile material for a nuclear weapon."

-- The Associated Press