Leaving The Options Open With Iran

Team Infidel

Forum Spin Doctor
New York Times
February 24, 2007
Pg. 7
News Analysis

By David E. Sanger
WASHINGTON, Feb. 23 — As the Bush administration tries to rally allies to tighten sanctions on Iran yet again, it is sending mixed messages to Tehran about its commitment to a diplomatic solution, trying to create new openings for negotiations even while holding open, ever so vaguely, the possibility that the United States might some day resort to force.
In Australia on Friday, Vice President Dick Cheney, one of the strongest advocates of pressing for a “regime change” in Iran, reiterated his belief that a diplomatic solution was possible. But Mr. Cheney noted that “the president has also made it clear that we haven’t taken any options off the table,” a phrase that President Bush frequently uses but has conspicuously avoided in recent weeks while discussing the issue.
At the same time, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice restated her willingness to meet the Iranians anyplace to talk about anything as long as they first agree to stop producing nuclear fuel, even temporarily.
White House officials insist that there is no contradiction.
“The idea that we are ginning up another war — there is no evidence for that,” one senior administration official said Friday. The official added that Iran needed to know that it could not let negotiations drag on forever, and that any talk of military options was a signal that Washington would not negotiate endlessly while Tehran used the time to continue its work on uranium enrichment.
But, so far, the White House has declined to say at what point the Iranians will have pushed the United States too far — in other words, how many working centrifuges in Iran would be too many, or at what point it would be impossible to guarantee that Iran could not achieve a “nuclear option,” the ability to turn ostensibly civilian nuclear facilities into bomb-making ones.
For now, administration officials say, Mr. Bush is happy to leave the Iranians guessing. He ordered an additional aircraft carrier into waters within striking distance of Iran and its nuclear facilities last month, a step that senior officials say they believe took the Iranian leadership by surprise. He has issued warnings to the Iranians not to meddle in Iraq and has focused on intelligence findings that the most deadly bombs used against Americans in Iraq bear marks of Iranian origins.
But Mr. Bush has denied that he is trying to provoke Iran into a response that would provide a pretext for direct confrontation. “To say it is provoking Iran is just a wrong way to characterize the commander in chief’s decision to do what is necessary to protect our soldiers in harm’s way,” Mr. Bush said at a news conference on Feb. 15, shortly after accusing Iranian forces, but not necessarily the country’s leadership, of worsening the violence in Iraq.
In interviews in recent days, three administration officials, all of whom insisted on anonymity because they were speaking about a strategy still being developed, said the carrier movements, the accusations about weapons in Iraq and the use of sanctions against the government were all intended to provide Mr. Bush with some leverage in dealing with Iran.
The officials have made little secret of their desire to fuel dissatisfaction inside Iran with the country’s fiery president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who on Friday vowed anew to continue enriching uranium, saying, “If we show weakness in front of the enemies, they will increase their expectations.”
R. Nicholas Burns, the under secretary of state for policy and the lead negotiator on Iran, said Thursday that the multipronged approach was showing an effect. “We’ve roiled their government, and I think we’ve shocked them a bit,” he said.
Mr. Burns is headed to London for a meeting on Monday with France, Germany, Britain, Russia and China about devising a new, tighter set of sanctions against the Iranian government — one that might include a further crackdown on export credits or conventional arms sales.
Mr. Burns will undoubtedly run into more resistance from the Russians and the Chinese, who told American officials flatly in December that they would not put additional economic pressure on the Iranians. But Mr. Burns said he was not looking for a major escalation of sanctions, and other administration officials say that modest steps would be fine for now.
“The most important thing about the last resolution was that we achieved a consensus, we kept the Russians and Chinese on board,” one senior administration official said. “And in the end, that’s what has serious impact in Iran.”
Administration officials say that the need to hold that consensus together is overriding the differences on Iran that roiled the administration in its first term. Back in 2002 and 2003, when the prospect of a nuclear-capable Iran was more distant, the administration decided not to explore several offers through intermediaries to open discussions. Mr. Cheney and others argued that the success they anticipated in Iraq would chasten the Iranians, bringing them to the table on more favorable terms.
Mr. Cheney, however, appears increasingly isolated now that many of his protégés have departed the Defense Department, the State Department and other corners of the administration. He was described by several top officials as only a minor player in the president’s decision in May to offer incentives to Iran if it agreed to suspend its fuel production.
But the Iranians did not accept last year’s offer, and if the administration and the Europeans are unable to find a formula that works for all sides, the talk of military options is bound to persist.
“No one has defined where the red line is that we can’t let the Iranians step over,” one senior official said. But Mr. Bush, the official said, is determined “not to let them get one lugnut turn away from having a bomb.”
Some diplomats who are trying to bridge the differences between Washington and Tehran insist that Mr. Bush is going to have to give some ground. “To focus only on suspension in my view is not the right approach,” Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said early this week to The Financial Times.
In Vienna on Friday, Dr. ElBaradei repeated his idea of a “time out” to allow talks, with Tehran halting uranium enrichment and the United Nations suspending sanctions. And he has consistently preferred to allow a modest amount of face-saving “research and development” in Iran, and focus instead on preventing the country from having an industrial capacity to produce nuclear fuel.
So far, though, Mr. Bush has said that even that much nuclear knowledge cannot be allowed in a country he does not trust.
Nazila Fathi contributed reporting from Tehran.
 
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