News Analysis: Iran puzzle: U.S. and Europe on separate tracks
By Elaine Sciolino The New York Times
Saturday, January 29, 2005
PARIS Iran is shaping up as the most serious diplomatic challenge for President George W. Bush's second term, and conflicting pronouncements by Bush and his national security team have left Iran's leadership frustrated and angry about the direction of American policy and the Europeans more determined than ever to push Washington to embrace their engagement strategy.
To the outside world, the administration seems divided over whether to promote the overthrow of the Islamic Republic of Iran, perhaps by force, or to tacitly support the negotiating approach embraced by the Europeans.
That approach implicitly recognizes Iran's legitimacy because it would give concrete benefits to Iran if the country permanently stopped key nuclear activities.
"You need to get everybody to read from the same page, the Europeans and the Americans," said Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in an interview in Davos, Switzerland, on Friday.
"This is not a process that is going to be solved by the Europeans alone," ElBaradei said. "The United States needs to be engaged. If you continue to say they are going to fail, before you give them a chance, it will be a self-fulfilling policy."
Michel Barnier, the foreign minister of France, echoed those remarks during an interview in Paris on Friday.
"I cannot explain American policy to you," he said. "That would be French arrogance and I am not someone who is arrogant. But I think that the Americans must get used to the fact that Europe is going to act. And in this case, without the United States, we run the risk of failure."
France, Germany and Britain - with European Union support - opened negotiations last month that could give Iran generous rewards in the areas of nuclear energy, trade and economic concessions and political and security cooperation if Iran guarantees that it is not developing a nuclear weapon.
The negotiations flow from Iran's voluntary decision last November to temporarily freeze its programs to make enriched uranium, which is useful for producing energy or for making bombs.
But instead of embracing the initiative, Bush began his second term with a sweeping pledge to defend the United States and protect its friends "by force of arms, if necessary" and a statement that he did not rule out military action against Iran.
In the Senate hearings on her nomination as secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice did not say no when asked whether the United States' goal was to replace the Islamic Republic.
Vice President Dick Cheney has put Iran at the "top of the list" of the world's trouble spots and suggested that Israel might attack Iran militarily because of its nuclear program. Those words, combined with a report in The New Yorker magazine that secret Pentagon operations were under way in Iran to prepare lists of targets for possible military action, have left the impression - particularly in Tehran - that Iran might be the next Iraq.
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"Madness" is how President Mohammad Khatami of Iran described that approach, while his foreign minister, Kamal Kharrazi, dismissed the talk of a military strike as "psychological warfare."
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Unlike the American-led Iraq war, which Britain joined and France and Germany opposed, the Iran crisis has drawn the three countries together against possible military plans by the United States or by Israel against Iran.
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"This is a hotbed region, the last thing we need is a military conflict in that region," Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany said in Davos on Friday. "I'm very explicit and outspoken about this because I want everybody to know where Germany stands."
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw of Britain also has strongly criticized a possible military attack on Iran as "inconceivable." But, in a sign that the Bush administration may be trying to moderate its warlike rhetoric, "the issue of a military option wasn't raised" during his talks with Rice and other officials this week, Straw told the BBC.
Still, there are other confusing signals emanating from Washington. At one point in her confirmation hearings, Rice suggested that the United States implicitly supported the European negotiating approach, saying that the Bush administration is "trying to see" if it will produce concrete results.
But Rice also repeated a threat to haul Iran before the Security Council for censure or possible sanctions, and specified that even a complete stop to Iran's nuclear and missile programs would not translate into American support for a policy of engagement and incentives.
There were "other problems" that precluded such an approach: "Terrorism, our past, their human rights record," she said.
Further complicating the picture is that in a news conference in late December, Bush uncharacteristically admitted the limits of American power. "We're relying upon others, because we've sanctioned ourselves out of influence with Iran," he said.
The Europeans have made the determination that any negotiation - however flawed - that slows and perhaps eventually even halts Iran's nuclear program is better than the alternatives put forward by the United States.
"Is this approach free of risks? No," Javier Solana, the European Union's foreign policy chief, said in a telephone interview. "Does it have a guarantee of success? No. But at this point in time it is the only game in town, no doubt about that. The other options are worse."
Some senior Iranian officials make the same point. "The West has suspicions about our nuclear program; we have suspicions of the Europeans," said Mohammad Javad Zarid, the Iranian ambassador to the United Nations and a key negotiator with the Europeans.
Speaking in a telephone interview, Zarid said, "We are eager to use any possible avenue to resolve those suspicions. That's why we have had the pragmatism to understand that the European game is a very serious game. Washington has yet to understand that the European game is the only game in town."
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