U.S. and Iran Can Improve Ties Without Arms Sales, Shultz Says

Secretary of State George P. Shultz, declaring that Iran’s Islamic revolution is “a fact of life,” said Tuesday that Washington and Tehran have enough common interests to make warmer relations possible even without additional U.S. arms sales.

In his most conciliatory comments about the regime of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini since the Iran arms scandal first surfaced last November, Shultz said the United States has a variety of ways of conducting business with Iran despite the absence of diplomatic relations.

“We would like to see Iran as a different kind of player in the world,” Shultz said. “We recognize the Iranian revolution as a fact of life, but Iran’s behavior with respect to the Iran-Iraq War, with respect to terrorism, with respect to hostage-taking, with respect to its threat to the region generally, represent problems.”

U.S. May Offer Help

Nevertheless, he said, Iran has “its own needs and problems” resulting, in part, from its geographic location in a strategic part of the Middle East on the border of the Soviet Union. He implied that Washington is prepared to be of help in some of those matters.

“They have a long border with the Soviet Union. They see the Afghanistan problem on their doorstep,” said Shultz, referring to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. “So there are things that perhaps we can work with them on.”

The secretary talked to reporters aboard his Air Force jet on the way from Washington to an overnight stop in Bermuda. He will fly to Senegal late today at the start of a six-nation African tour.

Shultz, who has said he knew very little about U.S. arms deals with Iran and nothing at all about diversion of some arms profits to the contras fighting the Nicaraguan government, said he will virtually ignore congressional investigations of the Iran-contras controversy.

“Outside of the time it takes to go to appear (before congressional committees) and so on, I’m organized so that I’m going to spend my time concentrating on the foreign policy concerns that we have,” Shultz said.

His trip to Africa and his comments on ways to ease relations with Iran seemed intended to emphasize that business-as-usual approach.

Shultz gave no indication of whether new U.S. diplomacy toward Iran has produced any results. But he said an emphasis on possible common concerns is a much more useful approach than the earlier effort to soften Iran’s hatred for the United States by selling arms to the Muslim fundamentalist regime in Tehran.

Shultz said his purpose in visiting Senegal, Cameroon, Kenya, Nigeria, Ivory Coast and Liberia is to show U.S. support for “a very healthy set of trends” toward private enterprise in all six nations.

A senior State Department official said that Shultz selected the six countries because the United States already enjoys warm relations with them. The secretary of state clearly hopes to avoid the sort of confrontations that would result if he visited South Africa in the wake of congressionally imposed U.S. sanctions or some of the continent’s radical black-ruled states.