US should call for direct talks with Iran

It's time to soften the Bush administration's hard position against direct talks with Iran. A good time for both Washington and Tehran to begin overtures toward such talks would be following the UN Security Council's April 28 deadline for Iran to suspend uranium enrichment, which Iran rejects.

During her brief visit in Athens this week, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice reiterated that while "all options are still on the table" with Iran, Washington prefers that Iran and European Union states return to earlier multilateral nuclear talks to cajole Iran into suspending its uranium enrichment plans. Those talks have so far been singularly unsuccessful.

In remarks to the London Financial Times, US State Department counselor Philip Zelikov linked rejection of direct US-Iran talks to the nature of Iran's "dictatorial ... and revolutionary" regime. This is a flawed argument. If, since World War II, the United States had avoided negotiating with such regimes, including the former Soviet Union and China, what would America's world status be now?

It's time for ideologues in both the Bush administration and Iran's clerical regime to reconsider the historical grievances complicating the Iranian nuclear issue, and then to work to defuse them in direct talks.

Otherwise, the world could face the military confrontation forecast recently by New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh and other serious commentators. As it happened with Iraq in 2003, such an outcome could follow action in the UN Security Council, where the sanction demands by the US is demanding sanctions backed by possible force, but is blocked by Russia and China.

Cooler and better-informed heads in both Washington and Tehran, with concerted help from like-minded leaders around the world, could help move both sides back from the brink of a possible military confrontation and retaliation.

Jahangir Amouzegar is a distinguished Iranian economist and former member of the International Monetary Fund's executive board. He has closely followed and sometimes influenced Iran's course since the epoch of the former US Middle East ally, Shah Muhammed Reza Pahlavi.

In the authoritative newsletter Middle East Economic Digest (MEED) for April 10, Mr. Amouzegar points to the loud US and Israeli alarm signals about Iran's overt (and legal) program of uranium enrichment for power generation and about its presumed covert weapons research. He argues that they mask a wish to overthrow and change Tehran's clerical-fascist regime to one amenable to US and Israeli strategic wishes.

Since the Shah's 1979 fall and the ensuing US hostage crisis, Washington and Tehran have squared off and mostly treated each other as bitter foes. The mullahs' regime feels that the US has never accepted, and will never accept, their theocratic rule.

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