WASHINGTON — The White House on Tuesday rejected as a "cover story" Iran's contention that its nuclear program is civilian in nature, claiming that the Persian Gulf oil and gas giant has little need for atomic energy and is instead pursuing nuclear weapons.
The White House also called "insufficient" Iranian efforts to combat al-Qaida operatives and other terrorist groups, and called for a democratic future for the country.
"The future of Iran is to be determined by the Iranian people," said White House spokesman Ari Fleischer.
"It's a diplomatic course that the president is pursuing," said Fleischer. "It's a course that trusts the Iranian people at its core."
The statements follow weekend press reports that the Bush administration is seeking to undermine Iran's conservative theocratic rule, perhaps through covert activity and by aiding pro-democracy reformers.
On Friday, the administration announced an aggressive new set of U.S. sanctions against Chinese companies it says are linked to Iran's missile program.
Underscoring the heightened attention to Iran, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice huddled to discuss U.S. policy toward the country, long a thorn in the side of American interests in the region.
The State Department lists Iran as a state supporter of terrorism, owing largely to its support for militant Palestinian and other Islamic groups that have long worked to derail U.S.-led efforts to broker Middle East peace.
While officials at the White House and State Department insisted there was no change in U.S. policy toward Tehran, the raft of comments and developments in recent days suggests that President Bush — who has engaged Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts in the wake of the Iraq war — is stepping up pressure on Iran.
"We do not approve of their support of terrorist activities. We have made it clear over the years that we disapprove of their efforts to develop a nuclear capability," Powell told reporters at the State Department. "Our policies are well known and I am not aware of any changes in policy."
But the developments raised the question of whether the United States and Iran — a member of Bush's "axis of evil" — are drifting toward a collision.
"I don't think we should be biting off more than we can chew right now," Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., told the NBC television network.
"We know they are developing a nuclear weapons program," said Biden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "They've been doing that for the last 10 years."
The issue could come to a head in mid-June when the International Atomic Energy Agency, a United Nations weapons monitoring body, is due to issue a report on Iran's nuclear program.
Tehran claims that its program is confined to domestic energy production.
"The United States rejects that argument as a cover story," Fleischer said. "Our strong position is that Iran is preparing, instead, to produce fissile materials for nuclear weapons."
As one of the world's largest producers of natural gas and crude oil, "they don't need nuclear energy to produce energy in their country," said Fleischer. "They have sufficient energy from fossil fuel sources, from gas and from oil." At a Washington press conference, an exiled Iranian opposition group, the National Council Resistance of Iran, charged that it has discovered two more sites west of Tehran that are being used to develop nuclear weapons. Attacks by al-Qaida operatives earlier this month in Saudi Arabia and Morocco have also led to fresh U.S. assertions that Iran may be harboring terrorists belonging to that group.
If so, that would violate pledges Iran and other United Nations members made in an anti-terror resolution passed by the Security Council after the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States.
Hoping to counter such criticism, the Iranian government announced that it had taken steps to round up some of the al-Qaida operatives that might have slipped into the country from neighboring Afghanistan.
Fleischer dismissed those measures, saying more needs to be done.
The steps that the Iranians claim to have taken in terms of capturing al-Qaida are insufficient," said Fleischer. "We continue to press Iran to cease its harboring of terrorists."