UNITED NATIONS – Amid lobbying efforts to escape condemnation of its nuclear weapons program, Iran predicted yesterday that an international watchdog will soon give it a clean bill of health.

An International Atomic Energy Agency report, due in a matter of days, will exonerate the Islamic Republic and refute allegations that it is developing nuclear weapons, according to Iranian officials.

Western diplomats said that while the report is not expected to do that, it will include scant new incriminating evidence, strengthening the case of opponents of sanctions.

“The new report is a clear sign of our progress in solving technical ambiguities,” with the Vienna-based agency, Supreme National Security Council member Hossein Mousavian said yesterday, according to Iranian news agencies.

Several recent press accounts say the IAEA report will agree with Tehran’s contention that traces of enriched uranium found in imported centrifuges were pre-contaminated. A Western official in Vienna told The New York Sun, however, that the agency did not have enough information to make that determination.

Claiming Iran is developing a weapons program, Washington still hopes to use the upcoming report to refer the Iranian transgressions to the Se curity Council, where sanctions could be imposed.

“There are a large number of outstanding issues,” an official in the American mission to the IAEA, Michael Garuckis, told the Sun yesterday. “At this juncture it would be impossible for all the questions to be resolved.”

The decision is not going to be based on the upcoming report only, he added. “One must look at the entirety of the reports,” the IAEA has made in the last year, he said.

Other diplomats in Vienna, however, told the Sun they doubted Washington could convince enough of the 35 members of the IAEA’s board of governors to move to sanctions.

Iran’s foreign minister Kamal Kharrazi has been on a worldwide tour, lobbying in key board members’ capitals. This week he visited Wellington, New Zealand, a strong non-proliferation advocate.

Yesterday Mr. Kharrrazi suggested in the Philippines that instead of Iran, the world should look at Israel’s nuclear capabilities. “Every country in the Middle East is feeling insecure because of the capabilities of Israel,” he told reporters in Manila, calling for pressure on Israel to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Mr. Garuckis said Washington does not think the issue is political, but technical. Regardless of “what any particular nation is doing in capitals in terms of lobbying,” he said, “the technical case presented by the [IAEA against Iran] is very strong and very damning.”