WASHINGTON - The administration of US
President George W Bush is under increasing
pressure - both in the US and abroad - to engage
Iran in direct talks, despite the continued
opposition of pro-Israel neo-conservatives and
Vice President Dick Cheney.
In recent
weeks, a growing number of prominent Republicans,
as well as Democrats, have been urging Bush to
pursue face-to-face negotiations on a range of
issues.
At the same time, Washington's
European allies, who have acted as the
administration's surrogates in talks with Iran on
its nuclear program for the past three years, are
rapidly losing patience with what they
increasingly see as US intransigence.
"The
Europeans are jumping up and down telling the US
it's time
to
engage," said Charles Kupchan, director of
European Studies at the Council on Foreign
Relations (CFR) in Washington. "If the United
States doesn't engage in some sort of negotiation,
the likelihood of a major bust-up across the
Atlantic is very high," he added.
Some
signs that the pressure is being felt in the White
House emerged this week when Bush's new spokesman,
Tony Snow, told reporters that Washington might be
willing to talk directly with Iran about its
nuclear program if Tehran suspended its uranium
enrichment activities.
"When that happens
... then there may be some opportunities [for
discussions]," he said, suggesting that any such
contact would likely take place within a larger
multilateral context, presumably involving at
least the EU-3 (Britain, France and Germany), and
possibly Russia and China.
Diplomats from
those five powers met with their US counterparts
in London this week in an effort to fashion a new
package of carrots and sticks that they hope will
persuade Iran to halt its enrichment activities as
a first step toward an agreement that would ensure
that Tehran could not build a nuclear weapon.
The package is likely to include providing
Iran with light-water nuclear reactors, trade and
other economic incentives, and discussion of a
"framework" to address Iran's security concerns.
According to published reports, however,
US diplomats opposed inclusion of the last item on
the agenda, apparently due to a continuing impasse
within the administration between Cheney and his
allies, who favor "regime change", and other
officials, notably in the State Department, who
believe that goal to be both unrealistic and
possibly counter-productive.
"Security
guarantees are not on the table," one anonymous
"senior State Department official" told the media,
which also noted that the Europeans had advised
Washington that, in the absence of such guarantees
by the US, Tehran was unlikely to make concessions
on its nuclear program.
The
administration, which in 2002 labeled Iran a
charter member of the "axis of evil", has pushed
for the UN Security Council to approve sanctions
against Iran for alleged violations of the nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
While the
European members of the council have generally
backed the effort, Russia and China, concerned
about both the impact of such a resolution on
their own strategic and commercial interests and
the possibility that Washington could use Iran's
refusal to comply with its terms to justify an
eventual military attack - much as it did in
Iraq's case three years ago - have dragged their
heels.
Even the Europeans, however, are
skittish about the kinds of sweeping sanctions,
such as a ban on imports of gasoline or exports or
Iranian oil and gas, that Washington wants to see
imposed, according to Kupchan. He predicted that
trans-Atlantic unity would remain strong through
the imposition of "light sanctions", such as bans
on arms sales and visas for Iranian leaders, but
is likely to "disappear" beyond that, particularly
if the US resorted to military force.
"At
the end of the day, the US wants regime change,
and the EU doesn't," he said, adding that an
eventual resort by Washington to military action
against Iran had virtually no support in Europe.
"I have yet to find a European policymaker who
thinks war is preferable to a nuclear Iran."
But it is not only Washington's European
allies, Russia and China that are urging Bush to
change course by engaging directly with Tehran.
Other key regional allies, including Saudi Arabia
and Turkey, have made similar appeals.
In
the US, Bush, already battered by record-low
approval ratings, is also under pressure from some
fellow Republicans.
In the past two
months, two former political appointees who served
as top State Department officials in Bush's first
term, Middle East specialist Richard Haass and
former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage,
called for talks on the full range of issues -
including Iran's nuclear program, its alleged
support for terrorism, and its regional policies
that Washington finds objectionable - that have
separated the two countries since 1979.
They have been joined by the chairman of
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Dick
Lugar, and Senator Chuck Hagel, a possible
Republican presidential candidate in 2008, as well
as a number of prominent Democrats, including Bill
Clinton's national security adviser, Sandy Berger,
and secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, and
influential lawmakers, such as senators Joseph
Biden and Dianne Feinstein, both considered
pro-Israel moderates in the party.
Perhaps
most impressive, former secretary of state Henry
Kissinger, who supported Bush's invasion of Iraq,
also called earlier this month for direct
negotiations with Iran, at least over the nuclear
issue, which he argued in a lengthy Washington
Post column was too important to US security to be
"negotiate[d] through proxies, however closely
allied".
These appeals have also been
bolstered by signals, including President Mahmud
Ahmadinejad's unprecedented letter to Bush -
which, according to Kissinger, may have been
designed "to get the radical part of the Iranian
public used to dialogue with the United States" -
that Iran itself favored direct talks.
That interpretation of Iran's intent has
since gained credence by the publication in Time
magazine of a two-page memorandum by Hassan
Rohani, the chief national security representative
of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini, on a
proposed solution to the nuclear issue. Messages
have also reportedly been sent to US officials
through intermediaries by the chairman of the
Supreme National Security Council, Ali Larijani,
regarding Tehran's willingness to engage in
comprehensive talks.
Against this tide,
neo-conservatives, whose influence in the
administration runs chiefly through Cheney's
office, have been fighting back, warning that
direct talks with Tehran would be a trap from
which Washington would find it difficult to
extricate itself and declaring that recent ethnic
unrest inside Iran showed that its population was
ready to rise up against the regime.
"The
question before the world now is: can Iran be
coerced by any means short of force [to halt its
nuclear program]," wrote David Frum of the
American Enterprise Institute. "There's only one
way to find out - and it is not by talking."
