White House Signals Willingness to Resolve Differences With Iran

Despite the escalating war of words between the United States and Iran, the Bush administration has sent a strong signal through diplomatic back channels that Washington is still interested in resolving differences through dialogue, senior administration officials said Monday.

The message was conveyed, the sources said, shortly after President Bush’s State of the Union address two weeks ago, in which he labeled Iran one of three nations in an “axis of evil.”

“If Iran wants to set a clear course toward the modern world, we’re happy to talk to them, work with them,” State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Monday.

The overture marks a new U.S. tactic. Increasingly concerned about Iran’s advanced weapons programs, the administration has decided to take a policy gamble and press Tehran’s reformers to stand up to religious conservatives who have thwarted democratic openings, closed down the independent press and imprisoned pro-democracy activists over the past five years.

“The president’s message to Iran is that it’s time to choose,” said a senior State Department official who asked to remain anonymous.

But the overture may not be enough to quell the hostile public reaction to the Bush administration’s recent string of criticisms. In one of the biggest demonstrations in years, hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to the streets of Tehran on Monday, carrying anti-American banners and burning effigies. The strident scene at Freedom Square was reminiscent of the early days of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. State-controlled television reported that millions turned out in other cities.

Big Crowds Seen as Reply to ‘U.S. Insults’

President Mohammad Khatami, the country’s leading reformer, heralded the turnout as a signal of Iran’s reply to “U.S. insults and trumped-up charges,” he said. Khatami had called on Iranians to join the rallies, which marked the 23rd anniversary of the revolution.

Just months after his election in 1997, Khatami called for cultural exchanges and a “dialogue of civilizations” to help bring down the “wall of mistrust” between Tehran and Washington. In contrast, on Monday he suggested that U.S. policies were the cause of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“The American people have every right to ask their leaders how long should they pay the price for their faulty policies. What policies and what reasons caused the Sept. 11 attacks?” he said to the crowds, which often interrupted him to shout, “Death of America!”

U.S. officials said Monday that they are not worried about the fallout from Khatami’s provocative remarks, interpreting them as a predictable political reaction.

“He has to cover his flank,” said the State Department official. “He doesn’t want to appear to be too soft. We don’t consider this to be a reversal of any kind.”

The Bush administration is instead focusing on a strategy aimed at resolving the power struggle between reformers and religious hard-liners in Iran. All of the Islamic Republic’s traditional elected government branches, including the presidency, have religious counterparts that have final veto power over everything from elections to candidates to legislation.

Bush’s State of the Union speech pointed to this rift, calling Iran a nation that “exports terror while an unelected few repress the Iranian people’s hope for freedom.” And in congressional testimony last week, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell openly talked about the problems created by Iran’s two rival power centers: a popularly elected government and the conservative unelected clerics.

Administration officials say they do not want to play the factions against each other or fragment power in the country. Their goal is to “support the aspiration of the Iranian people,” expressed in four elections since 1997 that were overwhelmingly won by reformers, according to a senior U.S. official.

The administration hopes to “help strengthen” the reformers by talking publicly about Tehran’s recent misadventures; among other things, it is accused of secretly shipping 50 tons of arms to the Palestinians and undermining the new Afghan government by aiding a regional warlord. Washington believes that top Iranian officials are not fully aware of all the actions taken by the Intelligence Ministry and the Revolutionary Guards, both of which are under the control of religious hard-liners.

“Khatami says all the right things on Afghanistan. We could get along perfectly fine with his state policies. But the reformers don’t control the others and often don’t know what they do,” the administration official said.

In his speech Monday, Khatami conceded that there were “many differences” among Iran’s leaders, a reference to the power struggle, but he said the country is united in supporting the cause of the 1979 revolution.

Reformers Have Been Put on Notice, U.S. Says

Administration officials also contend that leading Iranian reformers have conveyed their understanding of recent U.S. actions--and said they are not unhappy that the United States aired problems that reformers are reluctant to make public.

As an incentive, the United States is holding out the prospect of dialogue. “Obviously, the preferred method remains to be able to sit down . . . for a serious discussion and talk about Iran and the course it might go on,” Boucher said.

But the United States has also put Iran’s reformers on notice that their failure to prevail on the critical issues facing their nation will force the administration to begin looking for others to support, U.S. officials said.

“We intend to help in this way, but if it undermines or hurts the reformers, then it’s an indication that they’re too weak a reed and maybe we should look at the next generation, the youth, the women and the elements of civil society,” said the senior U.S. official.