September 18, 2007 (LPAC)--On behalf of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner is brutally blowing hot and cold on the Ahmadinejad government in Iran, in an effort to force Tehran to back down on its enrichment program by threatening new financial sanctions and the imminence of war. Following his Sept. 16 inflammatory statements, on a nationally televised interview with several media, including RLT, LCI, and {Le Figaro}, in which he said "one should prepare for the worst" and that "the worst is war," Bernard Kouchner toned down his statements, declaring after meeting yesterday with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Moscow, that "Everything must be done to avoid war. We must negotiate, negotiate, negotiate, relentlessly. there is no threat of war, at any rate from France. I even said that the worst would be war."

The Foreign Ministry (known as the Quai d'Orsay) claims that his statements are part of the strategy announced by Sarkozy at his recent meeting with French diplomats in which he called for doing everything to "avoid the catastrophic alternative between the Iranian bomb or the bombing of Iran." Even if the tone is harsher, the Quai d'Orsay claims that French policy has not mutated into a war policy. It is: "diplomatic action accompanied by strong pressures through programmed but reversible sanctions," if Iran agrees to shut down its enrichment program.

Russia however is not going along with such provocations, regardless of their ostensible intent. Sergei Lavrov made Russia's skepticism about the European coercive diplomacy. He declared he was "worried" about talk from Kouchner on the possibility of war. Concerning the new sanctions—against Iran's financial and economic sector, to be adopted by each country individually—Lavrov said that "besides the decisions taken at the [UN] Security Council, the U.S. and the EU have their own, more severe sanctions. If we decided to act collectively, why go for unilateral sanctions? Presented as a campaign to pressure Ahmadinejad to concede, this French and European policy is reminiscent exactly of the one the Europeans carried out in the week preceding the first Gulf War."