WASHINGTON, 22 July - A new round in the ongoing battle between realists and neo-conservative and other hawks over Iran policy began this week as a task force of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) published a report urging Washington to engage Tehran on a selected range of issues of mutual concern.

The task force, co-chaired by Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser under former president Jimmy Carter (1977-81), and including Robert Gates, the head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) under past president George H W Bush (1989-93), argues that neo-conservative and other analysts who are urging that Washington pursue "regime change" in Iran underestimate the staying power of the current government there.

"Despite considerable political flux and popular dissatisfaction," the 79-page report said, "Iran is not on the verge of another revolution. Those forces that are committed to preserving Iran's current system remain firmly in control."

The report, "Iran: Time for a New Approach", also argues that Washington's invasion of Iraq, as well as Iran's rapid progress in developing possible nuclear-weapons capability, makes it more urgent than ever to resume and broaden bilateral talks that broke off 14 months ago.

But it stresses that a "grand bargain" to settle all outstanding conflicts between Washington and Tehran is unrealistic and that talks should focus instead on making "incremental progress" on a variety of key issues, including regional stability and Iran's nuclear ambitions.

The 21 task-force members also stressed that Washington should offer fewer sticks and more carrots than in the past, suggesting, "The prospect of [Iran opening] commercial relations with the United States could be a powerful tool in Washington's arsenal."

The report's recommendations are considered anathema to the neo-conservative hawks closely associated with Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who led the drive to war in Iraq.

Indeed, its release was met with a furious attack by Michael Ledeen, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, who is particularly close to both former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle and Defense Under Secretary for Policy Douglas Feith, and who has long asserted that Iran is ripe for revolution by "democratic" forces that deserve US support.

Ledeen, who considers Tehran the global capital of Islamist "terror masters", wrote in National Review Online that the CFR recommendations were "humiliating" and constituted "appeasement".

They were made worse, he added, in light of leaks last weekend that the soon-to-be-released final report of the bipartisan commission investigating the September 11, 2001, attacks will assert that Iran provided members of al-Qaeda, including some of the hijackers, safe passage during the year before the attacks.

The issue comes at a particularly sensitive moment in the evolution of US-Iranian relations, which were formally broken off 25 years ago after militants captured the US Embassy in Tehran and held its diplomats hostage.

As noted in the report, the United States currently has about 160,000 troops - 20,000 in Afghanistan and 140,000 in Iraq - deployed just across the borders with Iran, named by President George W Bush in 2002 as a charter member of the "axis of evil" along with Iraq and North Korea.

Reports over the past month that Israel may be planning a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities have added to existing tensions, particularly due to uncertainties regarding Tehran's dialogues over its nuclear program with the United Kingdom, France, Germany and the International Atomic Energy Agency.

These new factors have intensified the three-and-a-half-year-old struggle within the Bush administration between the hawks, particularly the neo-conservatives for whom the security of Israel is a core commitment, and the realists, who are led by Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Powell, in turn, is backed by a number of top alumni of past Republican and Democratic administrations, including Bush Sr's former national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, Brzezinski, and Frank Carlucci, who served as national security adviser and defense secretary for the late president Ronald Reagan (1981-89) and also participated in the task force.

While the hawks dominated Middle East policy from September 11 through the Iraq invasion, their star faded as that adventure came increasingly to resemble a quagmire, so that the realists appear to have gained the upper hand at the moment, at least as concerns Iraq.

The realists have also been strengthened by the perception that US forces in the region, which seemed irresistible in the wake of the Afghan and Iraq campaigns, are now seen as much more vulnerable and thus less of a military threat to Iran than 14 months ago. "Military action [is now] highly unlikely to be attempted and, if attempted, to be successful," Gates said on Monday.

But if the internal balance of power on Iraq favors the realists, the situation regarding Iran is less clear. While few analysts believe Washington would launch a military strike on Tehran before the November elections, speculation that a second Bush term would make "regime change" in Iran a top priority has been persistent.

And forces in Congress that back Israel's governing Likud Party are already moving to endorse legislation that would officially endorse such a goal as official US policy.

It is in this context that the task force, whose membership was convened by CFR's new president and former top Powell aide, Richard Haass, is calling for selective engagement with Tehran. "The realistic alternative," according to Gates, "is US isolation and impotence."

The critical message is that neo-conservative claims that the Islamic Republic is on its last legs represent wishful thinking. Given Iran's ability to make trouble for Washington in both Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as advances made in its nuclear program, the current situation "mandates the United States to deal with the current regime rather than wait for it to fall", argues the report, which recommends five specific steps.

First, the administration should offer Tehran a "direct dialogue on specific issues of regional stabilization", much as it did for 18 months between the US campaign in Afghanistan and May 2003, when Washington accused Iran of harboring leaders of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda responsible for attacks in Saudi Arabia.

Second, Washington should press to clarify the status of al-Qaeda operatives detained by Tehran, in exchange for ensuring that the Iraq-based Iranian rebel group Mujahedin-e-Khalq is disbanded and its leaders brought to justice for terrorist acts. Any security dialogue, however, must be conditioned on assurances that Tehran is not providing support to groups violently opposed to the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Third, the US should work closely with Europe and Russia to ensure that Iran follows through on its commitment that it is not developing nuclear weapons by getting it to extend its freeze on all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities to a permanent ban and take other steps to guarantee compliance. In exchange, Washington should remove its objections to an Iranian civil nuclear program.

Fourth, Washington should resume an active role in negotiating peace between Israel and the Palestinians, which the report says is "central to eventually stemming the tide of extremism in the region".

Finally, the administration should promote people-to-people and commercial exchanges between Iran and the wider world, including authorizing US non-governmental organizations to operate in Iran, and agreeing to Iran's application to begin accession talks with the World Trade Organization.

Both Gates and Brzezinski said the administration should also use its influence to prevent a possible Israeli military strike against Iran's nuclear facilities, which, according to Brzezinski, would have "extremely adverse consequences" both for proponents of change in Iran and for the US position in Iraq and Afghanistan, where Tehran could be expected to retaliate.

It would be impossible for Israeli warplanes to reach their targets without flying in air space controlled by the US military, pointed out Brzezinski.

What to do over Iran
Meanwhile, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) reports that Bush says he hopes to get to the bottom of the report on Iran and September 11, with the help of John McLaughlin, the acting head of the CIA.

Bush said: "Of course we want to know all the facts. Acting director McLaughlin said there was no direct connection between Iran and the attacks of September 11. We will continue to look and see if the Iranians were involved. I have long expressed my concerns about Iran - after all, it's a totalitarian society."

Bush's statement was one of his toughest remarks on Iran in recent months. But State Department spokesman Richard Boucher has said the US is "willing to sit down" and talk with the Iranians "if the president determines it's in our interest to do so and we think there's the opportunity for progress".

McLaughlin, speaking to a television news program on Sunday, said the government "has no evidence" of an official connection between Tehran and September 11.

But no matter what US intelligence agencies learn, there may be little the US can do - or even might want to do - to punish Iran.

Marina Ottaway, a specialist in Middle Eastern and African issues at the Washington-based think-tank Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told RFE/RL that the commission's report, if accurate, is only the latest of several reasons that invading Iraq was a mistake. Now, Ottaway said, Bush's emphasis on military action in its foreign policy has left it little room to take meaningful action against Iran.

"There is not a lot that the US can do on Iran right now," Ottaway said, adding that the US "certainly does not have a military option the way things are, and it needs some cooperation from Iran on Iraq. Iran certainly has the capacity to make things in Iraq much more difficult for the United States. At the same time, the United States does not have the option of doing in Iran what it did in Iraq, and that is changing the regime."

Ottaway said a policy of regime change can succeed only if the US has enough military might. But given the resources that the Bush administration already has devoted to Iraq and Afghanistan, she said, it has left itself with few military options elsewhere. "By going to war in Iraq, the US narrowed its options toward Iran and toward North Korea," Ottaway said. "In other words, there are only so many wars the US can fight at one time."

Another analyst, Nathan Brown, said he finds it unlikely that Iran and al-Qaeda would have any significant contacts. Brown, a professor of international political science at George Washington University in Washington, cited the deeply conflicting religious principles held by the Iranian government on one side and al-Qaeda on the other.

"Any strong connection [between Iran and al-Qaeda] would be implausible," Brown said. "The environment which bin Laden comes out of is one which regards Shi'ite Muslims as not simply mistaken but as apostate. But it also strikes me as not impossible, but quite strange and maybe implausible, that the Iranians would even approach them, because there's bad blood that goes back a couple of hundred years - there's very deep bad blood."

Brown said there appears to be no evidence that Iran actually had a role in the September 11 attacks, and for that reason alone he does not expect a strong response from the US.

"The conclusions [of the independent 9-11 Commission] might be leaked, but the evidence we may never know," Brown said. "So, unless we've got hard evidence, it doesn't seem to me to be wise to make too much out of it. And also, it's my reading of the political situation: That's what's likely going to happen. Right now just does not seem to be the time for an American-Iranian confrontation."

(Inter Press Service/Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty)

VIENNA (Reuters - 25 July) - It has been two years since a group of Iranian exiles accused Iran of hiding a secret atomic weapons program from U.N. inspectors, and diplomats and analysts say Tehran is only getting closer to the bomb.

Officials and nuclear experts say that one of the two facilities Iran had not declared to the United Nations at the time was a uranium enrichment plant that, once completed, could enrich enough uranium for a dozen or so nuclear bombs each year.

Several diplomats said Iran began with a plan of developing its nuclear capabilities so that the atom bomb option would always be there -- the "break-out" scenario. Later, one said, Iran decided the only solution to the U.S. threat was the bomb.

"Iranian leaders got together after the Iraq war and decided that the reason North Korea was not attacked was because it has the bomb. Iraq was attacked because it did not," a Western diplomat told Reuters this week, citing intelligence reports.

Iran has vehemently denied pursuing nuclear weapons, arguing that its atomic ambitions are limited to generating electricity and that developing the bomb would violate Islamic law.

Wary of sparking another Iraq-like invasion of a Middle Eastern country, inspectors from the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) are cautious and say there is still no clear evidence that Tehran wants the bomb.

"We all think the American assessment is probably right because there is no other good explanation for the Iranian activities," a senior international diplomat involved in the investigation of Iran told the New York Times last week.

"But we still don't have the smoking gun," he said, adding that after Iraq "we need smoking guns more than ever."

Uzi Arad, director of Israel's Institute of Policy and Strategy and a former senior official in the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, disagreed, saying it was time the IAEA stated openly that Iran is pursuing nuclear arms -- which it could one day use to destroy the Jewish state.

"Anyone who suggests differently is under illusions," Arad said. "At which point will the IAEA state the obvious?"

A Western diplomat said such caution and conservatism was only giving Iran the time it needed to reach its goal.

"Is this evidence of a weapons program? Or do we need to wheel a nuclear bomb into the IAEA boardroom first?" he asked.

U.S. CHOOSES DIPLOMACY, NOT FORCE

Washington, which is still trying to pacify Iraq, has not threatened Iran with military action and has vowed to deal with the Iranian nuclear program at the United Nations.

For over a year, the United States has tried to pressure the IAEA's 35-nation governing board to report Iran to the U.N. Security Council for hiding its uranium enrichment program from the IAEA for nearly two decades.

Washington says this is a blatant violation of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which Iran signed in 1970. It has also said that Tehran is only trying to drag out the inspection process to buy time as it approaches the bomb.

"Every passing day could bring it closer to producing the enriched uranium needed for nuclear bombs," Kenneth Brill, U.S. ambassador to the IAEA, said last month.

Experts say that once a country has enough fissile uranium, it is only months away from a nuclear weapon.

But the Egyptian-born head of the IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei, along with the European Union's three biggest states -- France, Britain and Germany -- have blocked U.S. attempts to send the Iran file to the Security Council for fear of Iran's reaction.

"You are running the risk that the Security Council might not act and therefore the situation would exacerbate. And you run the risk that Iran might opt out of the NPT (Non-Proliferation Treaty) and you have another North Korea," ElBaradei said recently in Israel.

Last year, the IAEA board referred the case of North Korea to the Security Council after Pyongyang expelled all U.N. inspectors from the country on Dec. 31, 2002 and later announced it would leave the NPT. The council did nothing.

Officials from the EU trio agree privately that Tehran appears to be keeping the door open to the bomb and have encouraged Iran to suspend its uranium enrichment program in exchange for a promise of peaceful nuclear technology. So far this has not worked though the "EU three" refuse to give up.

NO "SMOKING GUN"

While it has yet to find any "smoking gun," there is no question that the IAEA has uncovered many things in Iran that would appear to support the U.S view.

For one, Iran already has the ability to produce fissile material for a weapon should it choose to.

Iran has experimented with multiple avenues of enriching uranium -- using lasers, as well as different types of centrifuges bought on a black market set up by the founder of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, Abdul Qadeer Khan.

Also, traces of bomb-grade uranium found inside the country last year have never been adequately explained.

Iranian scientists also experimented with a substance called polonium which can be used to spark a chain reaction in a bomb.

Iran says that its experiments with polonium were not military-related but civilian. But the IAEA cited an absence of information to support Iran's statements in this regard.

Despite their frustration with the IAEA process, officials from the United States and its allies doubt that military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities would do more than push Tehran's nuclear activities further underground.

This is why they have pushed to report Iran to the Security Council, which can impose unpleasant sanctions to prod Iran to decide that pursuing the nuclear option is not worth it.

There have been hints that Israel, which in 1981 bombed Iraq's Osiraq reactor where it believed Saddam planned to develop atomic weapons, might take similar action in Iran.

"Everything has to be done to stop it," said a senior Israeli official about Iran's possible nuclear arms program. "We are not discussing (a military) option right now. Israel hopes international efforts and pressure can still be brought to bear. This is an issue that concerns the entire world." (Additional reporting by Dan Williams in Jerusalem)

Axis of Evil, Part Two

By Charles Krauthammer

Well, of course Iran is a threat and a danger. But how exactly would the critics have "done" Iran? Iran is a serious country with a serious army. Compared with the Iraq war, an invasion of Iran would have been infinitely more costly. Can you imagine these critics, who were shouting "quagmire" and "defeat" when the low-level guerrilla war in Iraq intensified in April, actually supporting war with Iran?

If not war, then what? We know the central foreign policy principle of Bush critics: multilateralism. John Kerry and the Democrats have said it a hundred times: The source of our troubles is President Bush's insistence on "going it alone." They promise to "rejoin the community of nations" and "work with our allies."

Well, that happens to be exactly what we have been doing regarding Iran. And the policy is an abject failure. The Bush administration, having decided that invading one axis-of-evil country was about as much as either the military or the country can bear, has gone multilateral on Iran, precisely what the Democrats advocate. Washington delegated the issue to a committee of three -- the foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany -- that has been meeting with the Iranians to get them to shut down their nuclear program.

The result? They have been led by the nose. Iran is caught red-handed with illegally enriched uranium, and the Tehran Three prevail upon the Bush administration to do nothing while they persuade the mullahs to act nice. Therefore, we do not go to the U.N. Security Council to declare Iran in violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. We do not impose sanctions. We do not begin squeezing Iran to give up its nuclear program.

Instead, we give Iran more time to swoon before the persuasive powers of "Jack of Tehran" -- British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw -- until finally, humiliatingly, Iran announces that it will resume enriching uranium and that nothing will prevent it from becoming a member of the "nuclear club."

The result has not been harmless. Time is of the essence, and the runaround that the Tehran Three have gotten from the mullahs has meant that we have lost at least nine months in doing anything to stop the Iranian nuclear program.

The fact is that the war critics have nothing to offer on the single most urgent issue of our time -- rogue states in pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. Iran instead of Iraq? The Iraq critics would have done nothing about either country. There would today be two major Islamic countries sitting on an ocean of oil, supporting terrorism and seeking weapons of mass destruction -- instead of one.

Two years ago there were five countries supporting terrorism and pursuing these weapons -- two junior-leaguers, Libya and Syria, and the axis-of-evil varsity: Iraq, Iran and North Korea. The Bush administration has eliminated two: Iraq, by direct military means, and Libya, by example and intimidation.

Syria is weak and deterred by Israel. North Korea, having gone nuclear, is untouchable. That leaves Iran. What to do? There are only two things that will stop the Iranian nuclear program: revolution from below or an attack on its nuclear facilities.

The country should be ripe for revolution. The regime is detested. But the mullahs are very good at police-state tactics. The long-awaited revolution is not happening.

Which makes the question of preemptive attack all the more urgent. Iran will go nuclear during the next presidential term. Some Americans wishfully think that the Israelis will do the dirty work for us, as in 1981, when they destroyed Saddam Hussein's nuclear reactor. But for Israel, attacking Iran is a far more difficult proposition. It is farther away. Moreover, detection and antiaircraft technology are far more advanced than they were 20 years ago.

There may be no deus ex machina. If nothing is done, a fanatical terrorist regime openly dedicated to the destruction of the "Great Satan" will have both nuclear weapons and the terrorists and missiles to deliver them. All that stands between us and that is either revolution or preemptive strike.

Both of which, by the way, are far more likely to succeed with 146,000 American troops and highly sophisticated aircraft standing by just a few miles away -- in Iraq.

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