Alarm Spreads Over Defiance By Iranians

Eli Lake, The New York Sun:

Western governments and nongovernmental organizations, alarmed by Iran's defiance of international agreements to suspend its nuclear program, are working frantically on plans to isolate the Islamic Republic and reach out to its internal opposition.

A committee led by the French, which includes America and other European powers, is drawing up a list of sanction options likely to influence any resolution put before the U.N. Security Council next month. The list includes limiting the travel of Iranian diplomats; restricting their membership in international organizations; expelling known intelligence officers attached to Iranian embassies; limiting Iran's import of dual-use items that could be diverted to its nuclear program, and - at its most punitive - banning the export of refined petroleum to the country, which imports 40% of the refined petroleum it uses.

Today America's undersecretary of state for political affairs, Nicholas Burns, will meet in London with representatives from the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council to discuss the prospects of holding an emergency meeting of the U.N. nuclear agency to refer Iran to the Security Council. The meeting is scheduled one day after Iran's Foreign Ministry announced plans to hold an international conference to examine the Holocaust, an event Iran's president has said is a myth perpetrated by Zionists.

On January 12, Britain, France, and Germany signed a joint statement declaring an end to their negotiations with Iran over the nuclear program following its decision to restart in full the enrichment of uranium.

These diplomatic developments portend a confrontation next month between Iran and America's ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, who will hold the rotating presidency of the Security Council in February. Mr. Bolton has been one of the toughest critics of Iran inside the Bush administration since he oversaw the nonproliferation and arms control file for the State Department in President Bush's first term. Mr. Bolton's advocacy for action against Iran - he opposed the postponement of a council referral in 2003 - has prompted the regime in Tehran to attack him personally in the state-run press.

In an interview Saturday, Senator Brownback, a Republican of Kansas who is widely believed to be running for president in 2008, said: "We clearly need to go after the regime leaders, but at this point we need to throw everything we can at Iran. This is the greatest threat we are facing now. This is a country that has as a stated ideology to wipe Israel off the map."

Mr. Brownback's approach has some support among the Western diplomats discussing penalties for Iran's behavior. One such diplomat, who requested anonymity due to the sensitive and changing nature of the discussions on Iran, said: "We are looking at sanctions for now which attack Iran's political legitimacy. This sort of thing is restricting diplomatic travel and looking at punitive steps."

An administration official yesterday said that the approaches to sanctions included a range of options, from symbolic and political approaches such as travel bans to more serious economic sanctions that would target specific sectors of Iran's economy. The official also said America would consider multilateral sanctions outside the United Nations with European powers and Japan if action inside the United Nations were stymied.

"It will be awfully tough to get sanctions out of the United Nations," Mr. Brownback said. "It means that we are going to have to think about working with the Europeans on sanctions, and this is going to be a test if they are serious." He added, "They may be counting on the Chinese and Russians to block this." Over the weekend, China's ambassador to the United Nations, Wang Guangya, warned that a referral to the council could harden Iran's determination to defy the international community. "Our concern is that referring them might complicate the issue," he said.

As Europe and America discuss limiting the travel of Iranian diplomats, the Committee on the Present Danger is poised to release a new policy paper on Iran that recommends America send diplomats to its interest section in Tehran to reach out to the country's burgeoning democratic opposition.

"The paper argues just as the Iranian interest section in Washington has 36 diplomats, we ought to have Americans in the Swiss Embassy," the author of the paper and a former ambassador, Mark Palmer, said last week.

"All the people I talk to, like Akbar Atri, say it would be helpful to have Americans in Tehran with whom to work. We need to allow Freedom House and the Eurasia Foundation inside Iran. Right now, American NGOs are barred from doing things in Iran," Mr. Palmer said. The Committee on the Present Danger released a similar Iran policy paper in December 2004.

Mr. Brownback also said that one of the policy options America needs to consider in light of Iran's transgressions is bolstering support for the Iranian democratic opposition. "A key right now is to support for civil reform and civil disobedience movement in Iran," he said. The senator in 2002 began to request special earmarks for funding for such projects inside Iran. While the relatively small sums of money have been appropriated, the projects that have received the funding are based in America, such as a Yale University project to track human rights violations in Iran.

Mr. Palmer said last week that he was unimpressed with the options he had seen on possible Iran sanctions. "I've seen the ban on diplomats from traveling, economic sanctions. I find that stuff a waste of time. We ought to be focused on working with students to get rid of this guy. Sanctions should target the leaders, and we should try to expand our ties with the Iranian people," he said. Mr. Palmer was America's ambassador to Hungary when that country's democratic movement successfully ousted its Soviet client regime from power. READ MORE