ElBaradei said Monday that talk of war against Iran was "a lot of hype," after French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner warned that there could be a war if Iran persists with its uranium enrichment and other nuclear activities.

Asked during her flight to the Middle East about the talk of war against Iran, Rice directed a thinly veiled criticism at the UN nuclear watchdog agency's chief.

"Let me just start with the fact that IAEA is not in the business of diplomacy," the chief US diplomat said.

She recalled that the agency led by ElBaradei, who won the 2005 Nobel peace prize, worked under the authority of the United Nations.

"The IAEA is a technical agency that has a board of governors of which the US is a member," she said before a stopover in Shannon, Ireland.

"The IAEA role is to carry out the inspections, to report on activities, to make sure that various agreements that the states have agreed onto are indeed carried out," Rice said.

She repeated, however, that the United States favored diplomacy to end the standoff over Iran's nuclear program, which Washington believes is aimed at developing an atomic bomb. Tehran denies the charge.

"We believe that the diplomatic track can work but it has to work both with a set of incentives and a set of teeth," Rice said

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