New U.N. Iran Resolution Considered

Still, the draft does not go as far as the Bush administration wants. One compromise has already rolled back a U.S. proposal for a ban on the sale of all arms and military equipment to Iran, calling instead for "restraint and vigilance," which is not legally binding, on arms sales and transfers. Russia and China, which have Security Council vetoes, sell military goods to Iran.

The draft also limits punitive steps to only one of the three banks sanctioned by the United States. The current draft calls for sanctions against Bank Melli, one of Iran's largest banks, sources say.

Moscow and Beijing are likely to have the last word on the final draft, since they have long opposed squeezing Iran too hard. The United States is still hoping for a vote this month, although a senior U.S. official acknowledged that it could slip until after the new year.

Although European officials and Middle East experts agree that the new NIE effectively takes military options off the table, tensions remain high between Washington and Tehran. Iran lashed out at the Bush administration Sunday after Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said in Bahrain that Iran is trying "everywhere you turn . . . to foment instability and chaos," charging that its "destabilizing" policies are a threat to every Middle East country.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini charged at a news conference that the United States is trying to undermine regional cooperation. As a result of the new U.S. national intelligence estimate, "the U.S. government is disgraced and its decisions will definitely be questioned by world opinion," Hosseini said.

On Saturday, Oil Minister Gholamhossein Nozari said Iran, the fourth-largest producer of crude oil, has stopped selling its oil in U.S. dollars. "The dollar is no longer a reliable currency," he said.

An International Atomic Energy Agency team is now in Iran for three days of talks that are expected to focus on questions about particles of weapons-grade enriched uranium found by the U.N. watchdog agency at Tehran's Technical University, the Reuters news agency reported.

Rice told a women's foreign policy forum yesterday that the talks, by conference call, would attempt to finalize the draft to put before the Security Council in the next few weeks.

"I have found that most states have found that we have the right strategy, and the key is still to get Iran to stop its enrichment and reprocessing so that we can begin negotiations to meet the legitimate need for civilian nuclear power," Rice said.