Rooyesh

If you read the liberal blogosphere, and even the stately New Yorker magazine, you get the impression that the Bush administration is itching to drop a bomb on Iran.

But talking with senior administration officials this week, I hear a different line: They worry about Iranian actions, and they are disappointed that diplomatic overtures to Iran so far have resulted in little progress. They believe that Washington and Tehran remain on a collision course over Iran’s nuclear program and its destabilizing activities in Iraq. But senior officials say they are seeking to avoid military conflict. The administration wants Iran to make a strategic shift — by changing its nuclear policy so that it doesn’t have the potential to make weapons, stopping its support for terrorism and working with the United States to stabilize Iraq. Officials continue to believe that the regime is capable of such a shift, despite its internal divisions.

But they have concluded that Iran won’t bargain unless it feels more pressure — from tougher economic sanctions and from credible threats of military power. The bottom line, officials say, is that the United States must avoid a future situation in which its only options are to accept a nuclear Iran or go to war. The biggest danger, some U.S. officials believe, is that the Iranians don’t take U.S. power seriously. Tehran sees the Bush administration as so bogged down in Iraq that, to quote a famous line of Ayatollah Khomeini’s, “America cannot do a damned thing.” The administration hopes this year’s surge of U.S. troops in Iraq will convince the Iranians that America is not quite so exhausted a superpower as they might have imagined. To increase leverage, administration officials are following several paths simultaneously. First, they want to maintain a broad coalition against the Iranian nuclear program at the United Nations, even if the price of consensus is weak U.N. sanctions.

The mere fact that Russia and China remain allied with the United States troubles Iran, officials believe. The real economic pressure will come from unilateral measures: U.S. financial sanctions already limit Iran’s ability to use the global banking system, and the European Union, pushed by France, appears ready to follow suit. Military force is harder to gauge. President Bush continues to insist that all options are on the table, and there is planning for a range of possibilities. Some options would focus on the al-Quds Force of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, the most militant faction in the jumble that is the Iranian regime. But one knowledgeable official argues that any “surgical strikes” against the al-Quds Force, as discussed by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker, would come only in response to a high-casualty attack — say, on U.S. forces in Iraq — that could be traced to Iran. A powerful, albeit silent, demonstration of military power was Israel’s Sept. 6 strike against a target in Syria, Iran’s key ally. An informed official told me it was an attack on nuclear materials supplied to Syria by North Korea, and that the United States and Israel had shared information before the raid. The silence from all parties has been deafening, but the message to Iran is clear: America and Israel can identify nuclear targets and penetrate air defenses to destroy them.

Officials say that despite rising U.S.-Iranian tensions, they want to maintain an open path to dialogue — “a way out, a way to go to a better world,” in one formulation. On the nuclear front, the vehicle for compromise might be Russia’s proposal for joint enrichment of uranium. On Iraq, it’s joint meetings in Baghdad to discuss security problems — a diplomatic door that the administration stresses is still open despite the lack of progress in the first two meetings this summer. What’s worrying is that this is still a game of chicken — two cars coming at each other on a narrow, poorly lit road. To avoid a collision, America and Iran will have to speak a language of compromise in which neither, so far, has shown much fluency. In my Sept. 30 column about the logjam on surveillance legislation, I wrote that Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell “seemed close to brokering a compromise in August, but the White House refused to allow him to sign off on the deal.”

McConnell’s spokesman and the White House both deny this account and insist that McConnell rejected a plan he had discussed with congressional Democrats because of advice from his intelligence and legal staff that it was unworkable. Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington, reviewed drafts of the bill, but a DNI spokesman says Addington did not play a significant role in the final decision.

The writer is co-host of PostGlobal, an online discussion of international issues. His e-mail address isdavidignatius@washpost.com.

The top US military commander in Iraq, Gen David Petraeus, has accused Iran’s ambassador of belonging to an elite unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.

Gen Petraeus said Hassan Kazemi-Qomi was a member of the Quds Force, which the US believes backs foreign Islamic revolutionary movements.

Gen Petraeus said he had no doubt Iran was behind attacks that had led to the deaths of US soldiers.

Iran has so far not commented, but regularly denies any such involvement.

Separately, the US military said it had captured three Iranian-linked Shia militiamen believed responsible for abducting five British security contractors in May.

Diplomatic immunity

Gen Petraeus made his comments during a briefing to journalists at a US military base near Iraq’s border with Iran.

Gen Petraeus said the Iranian ambassador to Iraq was a “Quds Force member”, but added: “Now he has diplomatic immunity and therefore he is obviously not subject [to scrutiny]. He is acting as a diplomat.”

Mr Kazemi-Qomi has twice met US counterpart Ryan Crocker this year to discuss Iraqi stability.

Iran admits the existence of the Quds Force but gives few details of its activities. Analysts believe it is behind funding of such groups as Hamas and Hezbollah.

Gen Petraeus said: “There should be no question about the malign, lethal involvement and activities of the Quds Force in this country.”

He said Iran was “responsible for providing the weapons, the training, the funding and in some cases the direction for operations that have indeed killed US soldiers”.

Gen Petraeus said Iran was implicated in the car-bomb assassinations of two provincial governors in southern Iraq in August.

The BBC’s Jon Brain in Baghdad says some analysts believe the US is deliberately ramping up the rhetoric against the Iranian authorities to prepare public opinion for possible military strikes against Revolutionary Guard facilities within Iran.

‘Safer streets’

Gen Petraeus also delivered a more upbeat message on security in Baghdad in the wake of this year’s “surge” by US and Iraqi forces.

He said in some parts of the capital it was secure enough for him to walk down the street unprotected.

“Certainly in places you could do that. You could walk right down Haifa street right now,” Gen Petraeus said.

But he added: “Nobody will let me do it.”

The security surge that started in February has added about 30,000 extra US troops.

The general said he was not “naive” and knew there was an ever-present threat of bomb attacks.

“If you say: ‘Will there be a time when you can walk around Baghdad?’, obviously I hope that will be realised in the future.”

Meanwhile, the US military said it had captured the three alleged Shia militia fighters in a raid on Saturday in Sadr City, Baghdad.

The fighters were believed to be involved in kidnapping four British security guards and a computer expert from Iraq’s finance ministry.

Sunday also saw Iraqi security officials report that bomb attacks in Baghdad had killed at least nine people.

Two of the blasts targeted security patrols, but, in both cases, the victims were civilians.

A third bomb exploded near the Baghdad provincial council building, killing three bystanders.

Source: BBC