NEW YORK — The Bush administration moved Wednesday to cement international support for new U.N. sanctions on Iran over its nuclear programs and rebuked Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for declaring the issue "closed."
A day after a defiant Ahmadinejad told the United Nations General Assembly that his country would defy further U.N. Security Council efforts to impose additional penalties, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her top aides sought to marshal consensus on the move.
"I am sorry to tell President Ahmadinejad that the case is not closed," said Nicholas Burns, the State Department's No. 3 diplomat. He was to meet with senior diplomats from the five permanent Security Council members and Germany to craft elements of a new sanctions resolution.
"We're going to keep going," Burns told reporters. "If Mr. Ahmadinejad thinks somehow that he has been given a pass, he is mistaken about that."
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Burns' talks over dinner with diplomats from Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany will set the stage for a second meeting today and then one between Rice and the group's other foreign ministers on Friday when the resolution is expected to be further defined.
However, he said it is unlikely that the text of a new resolution will be agreed to this week.
As Burns spoke, Rice was assuring Iran's wary neighbors in the Persian Gulf of U.S. backing to improve their defenses against a "hegemonistic Iran" through proposed multibillion-dollar arms sales, a senior State Department official told reporters.
The United States accuses Iran of trying to develop nuclear weapons, something Tehran adamantly denies, and has been encouraged in recent months by stronger statements on the matter from Security Council members, notably France.
Iran is already subject to two U.N. sanctions resolutions as well as a growing number of financial penalties from individual nations, but China and Russia have been reluctant to agree to a new U.N. resolution.
The Bush administration is considering wide-ranging sanctions against the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps' Quds force, which is accused of supporting insurgents in Iraq, by naming it an international terrorist group.
The Senate on Wednesday voted 76-22 in favor of a resolution urging the State Department to designate the corps a terrorist organization.
The proposal attracted overwhelming bipartisan support.
