US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton clarified Wednesday that Washington is committed to preventing Iran from having the capability to make ‘nuclear weapons, not only from their actual construction.’

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton clarified Wednesday that Washington is committed to preventing Iran from having the capability to make ‘nuclear weapons, not only from their actual construction.’

“It’s absolutely clear that the president’s policy is to prevent Iran from having nuclear weapons capability,” she told the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs, when asked whether the US would ‘allow Iran to become a nuclear threshold state, short of actually building nuclear weapons’.

When Clinton was asked Wednesday about America’s willingness to make such a public declaration, she responded, “It’s probably smarter for us to be pressing on the sanctions and the negotiations while we keep our objective of no nuclear capability absolutely clear, instead of setting other benchmarks at this time publicly.”

Concerning Syria, Clinton has admitted that her government lacks a clear understanding of the Syrian opposition. She spoke out against arming it, saying the weapons could potentially end up in al-Qaeda’s hands.

Speaking about the possibility of providing arms to the Syrian opposition, a measure supported by a number of US Congressmen, Clinton evoked Libya's recent past, and said Syria's situation now was quite different, Itar-Tass reports.

Clinton pointed to the fact that the Libyan opposition, led by the National Transitional Council, was a much more congruent and cohesive group that the US could work with. It is much less clear what or who exactly the ‘Syrian opposition’ is, Clinton said. And with open support coming from al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri, Washington would be forced to ask exactly who would be on the receiving end of possible arms shipments – and just how effective they would be in promoting American interests.