Biden Says White House Will Still Engage Iran
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is determined to press on with efforts to engage the Iranian government, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and other officials said over the weekend, despite misgivings about irregularities in the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
"The decision has been made to talk" regardless of the election outcome, Mr. Biden said Sunday. He added that "talks for Iran are not a reward for good behavior," but depend on President Obama's sense of whether such contacts would advance security interests for the United States. Mr. Biden, speaking on NBC's "Meet the Press," questioned but did not explicitly challenge Mr. Ahmadinejad's victory.
That cautious reaction reflected the combustible scene in Tehran, where riot
police officers were cracking down on angry opposition supporters, and the likelihood that the administration would be forced to pursue its diplomatic initiative with a familiar and implacable foe, one who now also has a legitimacy problem.
There was palpable disappointment within the administration, where there were hopes, as Mr.. Obama said Friday, that the throngs of people at the polls augured a change in Iran.
"It sure looks like the way they're suppressing speech, the way they're suppressing crowds, the way in which people are being treated, that there's some real doubt" about the result, Mr. Biden said; he also questioned a surprisingly strong showing by Mr. Ahmadinejad in Tehran.
But while saying that "there's an awful lot of questions about how this election was run," Mr. Biden said that American officials "just don't know enough" to formally reject the official outcome.
One senior administration official held out the hope that the intensity of the political debate during the campaign, and the huge turnout, might make Mr. Ahmadinejad more receptive to the United States, if only to defuse a potential backlash from the disputed election.
"Ahmadinejad could feel that because of public pressure, he wants to reduce Iran's isolation," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the delicacy of the matter.
Mr. Ahmadinejad was asked during a news conference Sunday about talks with the United States, but sidestepped the question.
Outside analysts said that the suspicions surrounding Mr. Ahmadinejad's re-election would create new problems.
"This is the worst result," said Thomas R. Pickering, a former under secretary of state. "The U.S. will have to worry about being perceived as pandering to a president whose legitimacy is in question." Mr. Pickering, who has had informal contacts with Iranians, said the White House would have little choice but to accept the results. But he said the outcome would hinder efforts to court Tehran.
Many analysts and officials asserted that the outcome reinforced the reality that ultimate power resides in Iran's supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
"I doubt whether there's anything that can be done of consequence without the supreme leader sanctioning it," Mr. Biden said.
In Israel, which has hinted that it might launch a military strike on Iran to disable its nuclear capability, officials said Mr. Ahmadinejad's victory underscored the threat from Tehran and the need for a tough response.
Vice Prime Minister Silvan Shalom said in Tel Aviv that the election results "blow up in the faces of those" who thought Iran was ready for "a genuine dialogue with the free world on stopping its nuclear program."
In the Arab world, reaction was largely split between those aligned with Iran and American allies who have felt threatened and bullied since Mr. Ahmadinejad took office.
Arab diplomats and political analysts said that they did not believe that Iran would change its nuclear policy regardless of who the president was.
In Washington, administration officials said they had received back-channel messages from Iran's leadership, urging the United States to wait until the election was over for a response to Mr. Obama's overtures.
A victory by Mr. Ahmadinejad's rival, Mir Hussein Moussavi, would have posed its own challenges, officials said, including further delays in talks until he took control of the government. And it is not clear that Mr. Moussavi would have shown greater flexibility about Iran's nuclear ambitions.
"There clearly would be differences in tone between Ahmadinejad and Moussavi," a senior administration official said, "but not necessarily in policy." Mr. Obama, officials said, has long said he was willing to negotiate with whoever would respond, including Ayatollah Khamenei. For the United States, the larger problem is that while the election has frozen the dialogue, Iran's nuclear program has speeded ahead.
Now, the administration faces a vexing choice. It can continue to demand that Iran give up all of its enrichment capability — still the official position of the United States, but considered an all but impossible goal. Or it can tacitly accept that Iran is not going to stop enriching.
David E. Sanger and Brian Knowlton contributed reporting from Washington, Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem, and Michael Slackman from Cairo.
Comment> The U.S. government is always on weal moral ground
when it comes to advocating stripping any other government power
of any kind of nuclear capacity when historically it has been the only government in world history to use the Atomic Bomb on people as it
did in Hiroshima and Nagasaki!
Education for Liberation!
Peter S. Lopez ~aka: Peta
Sacramento, California, Aztlan
Yahoo Email: peter.lopez51@yahoo.com
http://anhglobal.ning.com/group/humanerightsagenda
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Humane-Rights-Agenda/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NetworkAztlan_News/
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