THE American and Iranian leaders dodged a face-to-face confrontation at the United Nations yesterday, but clashed from a distance in starkly different speeches.

Presidents Bush and Ahmadinejad were staying at adjacent New York hotels last night and spoke within hours of each other on the opening day of this year’s General Assembly session.

Despite President Ahmadinejad’s call for a televised debate between the two, he stayed out of the chamber when Mr Bush spoke, and skipped a diplomatic luncheon attended by the President because of the alcohol being served.

President Bush, pushing his “Freedom Agenda” for the Middle East, appealed directly to the Iranian people in his speech. “You deserve an opportunity to determine your own future, an economy that rewards your intelligence and your talents, and a society that allows you to fulfil your tremendous potential,” he said. “The greatest obstacle to this future is that your rulers have chosen to deny you liberty and to use your nation’s resources to fund terrorism and fuel extremism and pursue nuclear weapons.”

President Ahmadinejad, wearing his trademark tan suit and open-necked shirt, countered with an attack on American domination of the world and the UN. “Some seek to rule the world relying on weapons and threats, while others live in perpetual insecurity and danger,” he said.

Outlining the “grievances of the Iranian people”, he questioned the “raison d’etre” of Israel, criticised the international boycott of the elected Hamas Government in the Palestinian territories, and condemned the UN for sitting “idly by” during the recent conflict in Lebanon. However, he emphasised that Iran was committed to the Non- Proliferation Treaty.

The Bush Administration has met resistance to its push for limited UN sanctions on Iran over Tehran’s failure to meet a UN deadline of August 31 to halt uranium enrichment.

After a meeting with President Chirac of France yesterday, President Bush signalled some US flexibility on the way forward. He suggested that he would be happy to see the European Union’s “Big Three” powers — Britain, France and Germany — continue discussions with Iran to prepare the ground for a suspension of uranium enrichment work.

“The EU-3 will continue to dialogue with the Iranians to get them to the table, so they will verifiably suspend their enrichment activities, in which case the United States will come to the table,” he said.

The French President told reporters that he thought talks could resume if Iran agreed to suspend uranium enrichment and the US and its partners simultaneously dropped the threat of sanctions.

Further contacts are scheduled in New York this week between the EU’s foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, and Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani. President Bush emphasised, however, that Iran could not string the EU-3 along indefinitely.

“We believe time is of the essence. Should they continue to stall, we will then discuss the consequences of them stalling. One of the consequences of course will be some kind of sanctions programme,” he said. “But now is the time for the Iranians to come to the table.”

In Washington, Nicholas Burns, the State Department’s No 3, told a Senate committee that Iran had to make a decision “in New York this week”. He said that the EU-3, Russia and China were united on sanctions that targeted the Iranian leadership and curtailed dual-use exports that helped Iran’s nuclear research.

The Pentagon, meanwhile, is reportedly making contingency plans for military action. Time magazine said that the US Navy’s chief of operations, Admiral Michael Mullen, had ordered a review of plans to counter a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. It said that minesweepers, a submarine and an Aegis cruiser had been ordered to prepare to deploy in the Gulf.

General John Abizaid, the US commander in the Middle East, laid out Iran’s military capabilities. “Number one, they have naval capacity to temporarily block the Straits of Hormuz, and interfere with global commerce if they should choose to do so,” he said.

“Number two, they’ve got a substantial missile force that can do a lot of damage to our friends and partners in the region. Number three, they have a pretty robust terrorist surrogate arm that could, in the event of hostilities, cause problems, not only in the Middle East, but globally.

“And number four, they have a very substantial land army that is certainly capable of conducting asymmetric warfare.”

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