The United States has "no intention whatsoever" of engaging in military conflict with Iran, the chairman of the US House of Representatives' foreign relations committee, Tom Lantos, said here on Wednesday.
"It is the policy of the United States to deal with the problems that the regime in Tehran poses for all of us in a peaceful and diplomatic fashion," said Lantos, a Democratic congressman who became the committee's chairman last month.

"The United States has no intention whatsoever to engage in a military confrontation with Iran. We have the highest regard for the Iranian people. We obviously have some reservations with respect to some of the utterly irresponsible and reckless statements by some of the leaders of Iran," he told a news conference in Moscow.

Lantos added that draft legislation he had introduced in Congress last week on creating an internationally supervised nuclear fuel bank would allow countries such as Iran to develop nuclear energy in a risk-free fashion.

"It is important that mature and dependable nuclear powers like Russia and the United States make available to all countries both nuclear fuel and reprocessing of used nuclear materials in a secure and internationally supervised manner, obviating the need for countries to develop their own nuclear cycle," said Lantos.

The comments came at the close of a visit to Moscow in which Lantos adopted a conciliatory approach to the Russian authorities, in sharp contrast to his previous criticism of Moscow on human rights and other issues.