French official: No military strike against Iran

By · November 19, 2007

The French foreign minister said reports that France would consider military options against Iran are false.

Reports in a leading Israeli paper suggesting that France would consider using military force against Iran are wrong, said French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner during a news conference with his Israeli counterpart, Tzipi Livni, on Sunday.

He said the report, which appeared in Haaretz, was misleading, and that its headline, which suggested France would not rule out a strike on Iran, was “horrible.”

At the Nov. 18 press conference in Israel, Kouchner said France’s position had never changed toward Iran: “They have the right to set up civilian nuclear power ... but we are not ready to accept an atomic bomb,” he told reporters.

Haaretz had cited Kouchner as saying he planned to continue pressuring Iran toward “an agreed solution, the only one that will prevent us from having, one day, to be faced with a dilemma of ‘an Iranian bomb or bombing Iran.’”

In September, Kouchner said on a French TV broadcast, “We have to prepare for the worst, and the worst is war.”