U.S. to Continue to Engage Iran
Posted on 13. Jun, 2009 by Xander in Headlines
MARK LANDLER and DAVID E. SANGER
NY Times
June 13, 2009
WASHINGTON — Obama administration officials said Saturday that they were determined to plow ahead with efforts to engage the Iranian government, as they reacted to the apparent election victory of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
President Obama had spoken hopefully of change in Iran on Friday as Iranians thronged the polls. But as that hope gave way to news that Mr. Ahmadinejad was being declared the outright winner — and that police officers were cracking down on opposition supporters in Tehran — the administration was grappling with how to move forward with a diplomatic initiative that, in effect, would leave them reaching out to a familiar and implacable foe that now also has a legitimacy problem.
Trying to put a positive face on the development, one senior administration official held out the hope that the intensity of the political debate, and the huge turnout, might even 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. “That might also cause engagement to proceed more swiftly.”
But many analysts were not so sanguine, insisting that the election now posed a severe and immediate challenge to the administration.
“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. It clearly makes the notion of providing incentives quite unappetizing.”
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 and would embolden conservatives who argue that such efforts are futile.
Many analysts and Middle East officials asserted that the outcome reinforced the reality that ultimate power resides not in the president at all, but rather in Iran’s supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
“We should be clear about what we’re dealing with,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Just as we deal with Assad’s Syria and Mubarak’s Egypt, we now have to deal with Khamenei’s Iran,” he said, referring to two other authoritarian Middle Eastern leaders, Bashar al-Assad and Hosni Mubarak.
In Israel, which has reserved the option of a military strike on Iran to disable its nuclear capability, officials said Mr. Ahmadinejad’s victory dramatized the threat from Tehran and the need for a tough response.
Vice Prime Minister Silvan Shalom told an audience in Tel Aviv on Saturday that the Ahmadinejad victory “sends a clear message to the world” that Iran’s current policies have broad internal support and will be continued. The results also, he added, “blow up in the faces of those who thought Iran was built for a genuine dialogue with the free world on stopping its nuclear program.”