Bush Says War's Outcome 'Will Merit the Sacrifice'

President and Petraeus Discuss Strategy as the U.S. Death Toll in Iraq Rises to 4,000

By Karen DeYoung and Michael Abramowitz
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, March 25, 2008; A01

As the American military death toll in Iraq reached 4,000, President Bush conferred yesterday with top U.S. officials in Washington and in Baghdad and vowed in a public statement that the outcome of the war "will merit the sacrifice."

Bush held a two-hour videoconference with Gen. David H. Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker. Petraeus reiterated his plan to halt U.S. troop withdrawals, begun late last fall, at the end of July. At that point, he has said, he will "evaluate" whether Iraqi forces and a reduced number of U.S. troops can maintain the lower levels of violence.

"We have every desire to continue with the withdrawal of forces" at some time after July, one military official said. "The issue will be once we remove over 25 percent of combat power plus other associated units . . . we let the dust settle . . . and look to see where we're at," he said, adding that the evaluation period would probably be at least six weeks. Petraeus has offered no guarantee that conditions will allow further withdrawals before Bush leaves office.

In congressional testimony next month, Petraeus and Crocker are expected to describe continued but slow improvement in military and political conditions, even as recent weeks have seen an increase in suicide bombings, along with Sunday's renewal of rocket attacks on Baghdad's Green Zone, where the U.S. Embassy and much of the Iraqi government are located.

Among the wounded in four separate attacks were an American military contractor and an embassy employee from Jordan, both of whom remain in serious condition, a U.S. official in Baghdad said. Military officials said the munitions were Iranian-made, fired from northeastern Baghdad by renegade Shiite militia groups.

Late Sunday night, the U.S. command in Baghdad announced that four soldiers had been killed by a makeshift bomb in southern Baghdad, bringing the total number of U.S. troops killed to 4,000 since the war began in March 2003. Dozens of Iraqis were also killed in violence around the country Sunday.

Overall attacks in Iraq have sharply declined in Iraq, but the trend has begun to plateau over the past three months -- car bombings have decreased, but suicide bombings have increased. Military officials said that Petraeus will tell Congress that the withdrawal, which has now reached about 9,000 troops, will continue with three additional brigades to be withdrawn without replacement by July 31.

Although administration officials have said that U.S. troop strength at that point should be about where it was before a "surge" in deployments began last spring -- approximately 130,000 -- the military official said the net number remaining may be larger. "They're in the process now of trying to scrub the numbers," he said of Petraeus's command in Baghdad. "Figuring out boots on the ground is difficult because . . . units come in at different sizes, people have left, people have been wounded."

There are similar difficulties, he said, in determining the "battlefield geometry" that will enable the withdrawal of entire combat brigades. Brigades are seldom deployed intact, and their battalions are often scattered. While one battalion could be withdrawn without replacement, others may have to be replaced by U.S. or Iraqi forces from elsewhere.

During his testimony on April 8 and 9, Petraeus expects to present Congress with firm numbers on how many U.S. troops will leave Iraq and how many will remain by the end of July.

Crocker, who in previous testimony has cautioned against hopes of rapid progress, is expected to describe some political and economic achievements but to say that much work remains. In a mid-March interview with The Washington Post, he described Iraqi political and economic institutions as "like everything else here, still very much under development."

Another senior U.S. diplomat offered positive indicators yesterday, saying that Iraqis are "spending increasingly more money than we are" on reconstruction and some military programs. "We're not starting any new projects and [the Iraqis] are getting incrementally better," he said. Iraq's "Arab neighbors are gradually engaging, although not enough. They're not embracing Maliki the way they ought to," he added, referring to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

After speaking with Petraeus and Crocker yesterday morning from the White House, Bush attended a briefing by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at the State Department on cooperation between military and civilian officials in Iraq and elsewhere. In a statement to reporters, he spoke of the U.S. civilians who have died in Iraq and said: "I will vow so long as I am president to make sure that those lives were not lost in vain."

Bush will attend a similar briefing by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and military leaders today at the Pentagon, but administration officials said they do not expect any new decisions or departures from current policy.

One official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that after months of friction among civilian and military leaders -- including over concerns about overall stress on the military -- there is little debate over the basic Iraq strategy for the next six months. The only real question, he said, is how long the "pause" in withdrawals after July will last.

In Turkey yesterday, Vice President Cheney told ABC News that "there's no reason now to decide what the force level is going to be in December of '08." The criterion, he said, "is how do we make certain we succeed in Iraq? It may be that we can make judgments about reductions down the road. . . . But I don't think [Bush] is likely to want to try to say now what the force level ought to be at the end of the year."

New Pakistani Leaders Tell Americans There’s ‘a New Sheriff in Town’

By SALMAN MASOOD

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The top State Department officials responsible for the alliance with Pakistan met leaders of the new government on Tuesday, and received what amounted to a public dressing-down from one of them, as well as the first direct indication that the United States relationship with Pakistan would have to change.

On the day that the new prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gillani, was sworn in, Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte and the assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs, Richard A. Boucher, also met with the Pakistani president, Pervez Musharraf, whom they had embraced as their partner in the campaign against terrorism over the past seven years but whose power is quickly ebbing.

The leader of the second biggest party in the new Parliament, Nawaz Sharif, said after meeting the two American diplomats that it was unacceptable that Pakistan had become a “killing field.”

“If America wants to see itself clean of terrorists, we also want that our villages and towns should not be bombed,” he said at a news conference here. Mr. Sharif, a former prime minister, added he was unable to give Mr. Negroponte “a commitment” on fighting terrorism.

The statements by Mr. Sharif, and the cool body language in the televised portions of his encounter with Mr. Negroponte, were just part of the sea change in Pakistan’s domestic politics that is likely to impose new limits on how Washington fights militants within Pakistan’s borders.

That fight, which has recently included American airstrikes in the lawless tribal areas where the Taliban and Al Qaeda have made sanctuaries, has become widely unpopular, particularly in the last few months as a surge in suicide bombings here has been viewed as retaliation for the American attacks.

Asif Ali Zardari, the leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party, also met with the Americans but did not speak to reporters afterward. Husain Haqqani, an adviser who attended the meeting with him, said, though, that the American officials had been given notice that the old ways were over.

“If I can use an American expression, there is a new sheriff in town,” Mr. Haqqani said. “Americans have realized that they have perhaps talked with one man for too long.”

Neither Mr. Negroponte nor Mr. Boucher spoke publicly about the meetings, but the Pakistanis said the Americans expressed willingness to work with the new government.

Mr. Sharif and Mr. Zardari boycotted the swearing-in of Mr. Gillani as prime minister by Mr. Musharraf at the presidential palace, another sign of their determination to sideline Mr. Musharraf.

Distancing himself from Mr. Musharraf, Mr. Gillani, moments after taking the oath of office, said, “We have to give supremacy to the Parliament so that we can jointly take the country out of these crises.”

He later received a call from President Bush offering congratulations. According to Mr. Gillani’s office, Mr. Gillani told Mr. Bush that “Pakistan would continue to fight terrorism in all its forms” but that a “comprehensive approach” was required, “combining a political approach with development programs.”

The new chief of staff of the Pakistan Army, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, also seemed to eager to show he was his own man, relieving two generals on Monday who had been close to Mr. Musharraf.

The timing of the American visit was harshly criticized in the Pakistan media for creating the appearance that the United States was trying to dictate policy to a government not even hours old. The two American diplomats met Mr. Sharif as Mr. Musharraf administered the oath of office to Mr. Gillani.

“I don’t think it is a good idea for them to be here on this particular day,” said Zaffar Abbas, the editor of the English-language newspaper Dawn. “Here are the Americans, right here in Islamabad, meeting with senior politicians in the new government, trying to dictate terms.”

An editorial on Tuesday in The News, one of Pakistan’s most-read English dailies, was headlined “Hands Off Please, Uncle Sam.” The Americans should understand, the editorial said, that the newly elected Parliament was now their proper partner, not Mr. Musharraf.

An aide to Mr. Sharif, Ahsan Iqbal, said Mr. Sharif told Mr. Negroponte that the strategy of the partnership against terrorism needed to be reassessed. “Nobody supports terrorism, but there are different ways to counter it,” Mr. Iqbal said.

“Mr. Sharif asked Mr. Negroponte if he thought that using the military was the only solution,” Mr. Iqbal said. “Mr. Negroponte agreed that there are other dimensions that can be adopted.”

Some of those questioning the American visit noted that Pakistan had been an ally of the United States since its independence 60 years ago. Still, they added, many Pakistanis now resented that the campaign against terrorism dominated the relationship.

Washington should learn from the outcomes of the election last month in which Mr. Musharraf’s party was trounced and an alliance of religious parties in the North-West Frontier Province, adjacent to the tribal areas, was also defeated, said Javangir Tareen, the leader of a faction of the Pakistan Muslim League, who was a member of Mr. Musharraf’s early cabinet.

“The people have spoken and rejected the religious parties, and at the same time they have rejected the people who will automatically nod to the United States,” Mr. Tareen said.

An independent analyst on the Pakistani military, Shuja Nawaz, who lives in Washington, said Pakistani officials had told him they discouraged the American diplomats from coming this week.

But the Pakistanis were told that Mr. Negroponte was on a trip that included other already arranged stops and that Tuesday was the only possible day for him. Mr. Nawaz called the visit “ham-handed,” and said it could be seen as Washington wanting to keep acting as the “political godfather behind Musharraf.”

The American Embassy in Islamabad said that the two diplomats would stay in Pakistan until Thursday, and that they would meet other officials on Wednesday, though the embassy declined to identify them.

The changes in the military hierarchy by General Kayani seemed intended to display his independence from Mr. Musharraf, who appointed him chief of the military in December. General Kayani reassigned two of the most important corps commanders, the 11 powerful generals in charge of regional posts: Lt. Gen. Shafaat Ullah Shah, the corps commander of Lahore, Pakistan’s second biggest city; and Lt. Gen. Sajjad Akram, the corps commander at Mangla on the Indian border.

Tibet unrest tests India

New Delhi's delicate balance between relations with China and ties with the Dalai Lama is unsettled.
By Henry Chu
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

March 20, 2008

NEW DELHI — One party feels caught in the middle amid the heated clashes and the battle for public opinion between the Chinese government and pro-Tibet activists: India.

The crisis in Tibet has forced New Delhi into a difficult diplomatic balancing act that pits its improving ties with Beijing against its longstanding relationship with the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader who has made India his base of operations for more than half a century.

The Dalai Lama's presence, and that of the Tibetan government in exile, in the Himalayan city of Dharamsala has long been a source of friction between the two Asian giants. New Delhi's cautious solution has been to provide sanctuary to what the Beijing government insists on calling the "Dalai clique," but to demand that the Tibetans refrain from anti-China activities on Indian soil.

That fragile formula has come under increasing strain from the violent protests that have erupted in Tibet against Chinese rule and the bloody crackdown unleashed in response. India is now under competing pressure to speak out against the clampdown, on the one hand, and, on the other, to restrain some of the rhetoric and activities of Tibetan exiles here.

So far, critics say, India's official statements have been tepid.

The Foreign Ministry says it is "distressed" by the violence in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, and has called for the crisis to be resolved "through dialogue and nonviolent means." At the same time, it has reminded activists here that they, "while they are in India, are expected to refrain from political activities and those activities that affect our relations with other friendly countries."

On Wednesday, the Tibetan parliament in exile, fresh from a meeting in Dharamsala, converged here in the Indian capital and held a one-day fast to focus attention on the plight of those back in their homeland.

One parliament member, Youdon Aukatsang, urged India, as the world's most populous democracy, to take a stronger stand.

"They should strongly condemn what's happening inside Tibet. They haven't done that. This is a gross human rights violation," she said. "I don't expect them to take any covert action or anything like that, but at least [make] forceful statements. It's their moral duty."

At least 100,000 Tibetan refugees live in India, more than anywhere else in the world, with thousands more arriving every year. Beyond sheer numbers, the Indian government also is struggling with the fact that many Tibetans here, especially youths, have grown increasingly militant in favor of independence for their homeland. The Dalai Lama, however, endorses greater autonomy for Tibet under Chinese suzerainty.

In recent days, protesters have mounted raucous anti-China protests in Dharamsala, at times burning the Chinese flag and cursing the Beijing government on national television.

Aukatsang acknowledged the increasing polarization of opinion within the Tibetan diaspora, which the Dalai Lama has struggled to hold together with his message of nonviolent dissent. The government in exile announced Wednesday that it was creating an umbrella "Tibet Crisis Committee" to oversee pro-Tibet movements worldwide.

"We are concerned about the growing frustrations among younger Tibetans especially, but the government [in exile] will never endorse violence," Aukatsang said. "Nonviolence is our philosophy."

The Indian government is eager not to upset the small gains it has made in recent years in improving ties with China. Hostility stemming from a border war in 1962 and ongoing territorial disputes has gradually eased as trade grows between the two booming economies.

In 2003, the Indian government recognized Tibet as part of China in exchange for Chinese recognition of the contested state of Sikkim, adjacent to Tibet, as part of India. Two years ago, the historic road linking the two sides, high on a mountain pass, was reopened as a trading route.

"Relations with China are improving. We're making some cautious moves in settling our issues," said Mohan Guruswamy, director of the Center for Policy Alternatives here.

The Indian government has "a carefully calibrated policy" on Tibet, he said. "We don't want something small to snowball into something big."

Last week, Indian authorities arrested a group of Tibetan activists who had vowed to march all the way to Tibet to protest the Olympic Games due to be held in Beijing in August. Aukatsang said that Indian police had also detained demonstrators who protested outside the Chinese Embassy here.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, while acknowledging Tibet as a sensitive bilateral issue, publicly thanked New Delhi for the "steps taken by the Indian government in handling Tibetan independence activities masterminded by the Dalai clique."

Not just Tibetan activists but some Indian leaders as well have accused Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of being soft on China.

Thupstan Chhewang, a member of parliament from the Himalayan region of Ladakh, bordering China, called on the government to press the United Nations to mount an international inquiry on the situation in Tibet.

"India should come out very strongly in support of the Tibetan people," Chhewang said. "Most of the people in India support the cause of freedom."

henry.chu@latimes.com

Turkey Set to Invest in Better Relations With Kurds

By SABRINA TAVERNISE

ANKARA, Turkey — Turkey’s government is planning a broad series of investments worth as much as $12 billion in the country’s largely Kurdish southeast, in a new economic effort intended to create jobs and draw young men away from militancy, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said.

The program is intended to drain support for the militant Kurdish group, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, by improving the lives of Turkey’s impoverished Kurdish minority, Mr. Erdogan said in an interview with The New York Times on Tuesday.

As part of the push, the government will dedicate a state television channel to Kurdish language broadcasting, a measure that Kurds in Turkey have sought for years. The Turkish state has imposed severe restrictions on the use of Kurdish, arguing that allowing that freedom would strengthen the Kurds’ desire to form a separate state.

Turkey, a vibrant Muslim democracy and a strong American ally, has for years fought the militant group, known as the P.K.K., which hides in Turkey and Iraq and seeks greater autonomy for Kurds in Turkey.

That fight has put it at odds with the United States, whose strongest allies in the war in Iraq are Kurds. But after an ambush of Turkish troops last fall, and subsequent lobbying by Mr. Erdogan and the Turkish military, the Bush administration agreed to let Turkey strike at the group inside Iraq, opening up airspace there and even offering intelligence.

“Turkey is not a guest,” said Mr. Erdogan, 54, sitting in a cream-colored high-backed chair in his official residence in Ankara, Turkey’s capital. “Everyone who has entered Iraq until now will stay for a while and go away, but we will stay.”

“We are the most important door for northern Iraq to open up to the world,” he added. “We are the healthiest door.”

Last month, Turkey conducted an eight-day ground offensive into Iraq, and Mr. Erdogan said that the United States had been fully behind it.

“I can openly and freely say that this short process has been done with the total understanding of Turkey, the United States and the central government of Iraq,” he said.

“But the fight against terrorism is not only this,” he added. “It also has a socioeconomic part, a psychological part, a cultural part.”

Mr. Erdogan was the first public figure to speak openly about Turkey’s troubles with its Kurdish population in a speech several years ago that won him a measure of respect among Turkey’s approximately 12 million Kurds, about a sixth of its population. Kurds voted in large numbers for his political party in a national election last July. Since then, many say his efforts have stalled, replaced by frequent military operations just over the border.

Mr. Erdogan sought to allay Kurds’ fears Tuesday, emphasizing Turkey’s efforts to engage them on both sides of the border. Turkey has chosen not to negotiate directly with the Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq, led by Massoud Barzani, despite the fact that many of the militants it is chasing hide in that territory. Mr. Erdogan added, however, that informal contacts had been made with the area’s representatives.

“We have relatives in northern Iraq,” he said. “And people living there have relatives in our southeastern region. With whom will we have good relations other than with ourselves?”

Efforts to improve relations with Iraq include plans to open a consulate in the southern city of Basra, Mr. Erdogan said. Turkey has an embassy in Baghdad and a consulate in Mosul, a major city in the north.

Mr. Erdogan is still identifying funds for the economic effort, which was started years ago by a previous administration but languished. The state will invest between $11 billion and $12 billion over five years to build two large dams and a system of water canals, complete paved roads and remove land mines from the fields along the Syrian border, he said.

Plans for the project will be completed within two months, he said, at which point construction on the two dams will begin. He said he had dedicated one of his deputy prime ministers to visit cities across the largely Kurdish southeast to work on it.

“Everything we can see in the western part of the country we can see in the east,” he said.

The television channel will also include Persian and Arabic, Mr. Erdogan said, and should be running in several months. “This will be the most important step providing cultural rights to the region,” he said.

Turkey, a member of NATO, has ambitions to join the European Union, though Mr. Erdogan has recently come under criticism for allowing the required democratic and economic retooling needed for membership to drop from the agenda.

“There is no stalling or slowing down,” he said. “We are determined.”

A social security law required to meet European standards will be submitted to Parliament in the next two to three weeks, he said, and a long-awaited revision of a law that limits freedom of speech is nearly ready. At every weekly cabinet meeting, one of the topics is Turkey’s European bid, and each ministry is working on it.

“There is no alternative for us other than full membership,” Mr. Erdogan said.

Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting.

North Korea keeps up appearances

DISPATCH FROM PYONGYANG
A delegation traveling with the New York Philharmonic saw an impressive Pyongyang. But the lights went out afterward.
By Barbara Demick
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

March 10, 2008

PYONGYANG, NORTH KOREA — With our noses pressed to the windows of the bus, we could see festive garlands of lights twinkling along the main road as though it were Christmas. The soaring monuments to the late North Korean founder Kim Il Sung were illuminated by floodlights, giving this city's skyline a warm glow.

We arrived at our hotel, where cellphones were available for rent from a counter in the lobby. Journalists were directed to a filing center with broadband Internet access.

Over the course of 48 hours touring with the New York Philharmonic, a delegation of 300 musicians, journalists and orchestra benefactors was whisked between our overheated hotel and theaters and banquet halls.

We were feted with multi-course dinners of salmon, crab gratin, lamb and pheasant. Our breakfast buffet was decorated with ice sculptures and included foods meant to cater to American palates.

OK, some of it was a little weird, like the banana and tomato sandwich. But the overall impression was that the North Koreans were trying hard to please and had the means to do so. Even if you were a cynical journalist, it was hard not to be impressed.

Wrong.

Within hours after our plane left, the lights went out. The cellphone kiosk closed down and the broadband was disconnected.

Pyongyang looked again like what it really is: the capital of the one of the world's most desperately poor and dysfunctional countries. As is often the case, the best show was the city itself, which had been displayed to create an illusion of prosperity.

"As soon as you guys left, it was pitch dark again," said Jean-Pierre de Margerie, country director of the United Nations World Food Program here and a resident of Pyongyang for the last 18 months.

The North Koreans "are very good at putting on a show," he said in a telephone interview from Pyongyang.

In fact, people working in North Korea say the situation is as grim as ever.

The Buddhist charity Good Friends reported last month that food is as scarce this year as in the mid-1990s, when famine killed an estimated 2 million people. The World Food Program says that last summer's flooding had destroyed more cropland than previously estimated and that only 10% to 20% of the population had enough to eat.

An agronomist working in North Korea said Pyongyang was eager to conceal the extent of its economic woes because it was hoping to attract foreign investment.

The philharmonic's trip Feb. 25 and 26 brought by far the largest delegation of Americans to visit Pyongyang since the Korean War more than 50 years ago. The capital of the aptly named Hermit Kingdom gets few visitors.

We stayed in a hotel called the Yanggakdo, a 47-story pile of 1970s modernism. Among frequent visitors to Pyongyang, the hotel is nicknamed Alcatraz; its location on an island on the Taedong River discourages visitors from wandering off.

To the extent that reporters saw Pyongyang, it was mostly through the windows of the bus. Facades of apartments had been recently painted in bright hues of lilac, apricot and wintergreen that imparted a hint of Austro-Hungarian romanticism on an architectural style more often described as Stalinist.

Along the main street, the storefronts displayed clothing and appliances, but it was unclear whether the merchandise was for sale. Reporters who asked to visit a regular store where North Koreans shopped were taken to a foreign-currency store charging about $140 for a pair of gloves and $290 for a bottle of champagne. A South Korean expert last week estimated North Koreans' average income at $1 per day. Needless to say, there were few shoppers.

It is almost impossible to distinguish the reality from the illusion in Pyongyang, which is as much a theatrical set as it is a city. It was rebuilt in the 1960s out of the wreckage of the Korean War as a showpiece to rival Seoul, the South Korean capital.

"Kim Il Sung needed an exemplary communist city for pure propaganda reasons to show that North Korea is a rich, prosperous nation, a perfect society under a wise leader," said Andrei Lankov, a Russian scholar of North Korea.

With so much money poured into the capital, it was indeed a marvel of modernism by the standards of the 1970s and 1980s, with its towering monuments, wide boulevards and plazas. But almost nothing has been built since.

Even today, residency in Pyongyang is reserved for citizens with top rating under a complicated system in which grades are assigned based on loyalty. Regular North Koreans aren't allowed to visit without a permit. And the disabled are banned from the city lest their appearance mar the perfection.

North Korean efforts to disguise their poverty are in fact counterproductive, Lankov said, because they undermine attempts to get sorely needed humanitarian aid.

"It is a question of national pride and acquired habit," he said. "They cannot really admit to themselves that they are a destitute Third World nation."

barbara.demick@latimes.com

Is There a Cure for Cuba?

By George F. Will
Sunday, March 9, 2008; B07

On Dec. 29, 1962, 11 months before he was murdered by an advocate for Fidel Castro's regime (Lee Harvey Oswald had distributed propaganda on a New Orleans street for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee), President John Kennedy, speaking in Miami's Orange Bowl to veterans of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, received from them a Cuban flag and vowed, "I can assure you that this flag will be returned to this brigade in a free Havana." In Cuba, too, regime change has turned out to be more problematic than American policymakers imagined.

Even after the Bay of Pigs -- arguably the most feckless use of U.S. power ever-- Cuba unhinged some American officials. In his biography of Robert Kennedy, Newsweek's Evan Thomas reports that one high-ranking CIA operative had a plan "to surface an American submarine just over the Havana horizon to fire star shells into the night sky, in the hopes of convincing the Cubans that the Second Coming was imminent, thus spurring them to get rid of the anti-Christ -- Castro." Skeptics called this "elimination by illumination."

The question of what should be done now begins with the matter of the U.S. trade embargo. Cuban Americans demanded its imposition in 1961, applauded its strengthening in 1996 and largely favor its continuation. Changing it would be politically problematic. The Cuban American vote can be decisive in Florida, whose 27 electoral votes are 10 percent of the 270 needed to win the presidency. Add the 15 electoral votes of New Jersey, another state with a large Cuban American community, and 16 percent of the 270 can turn on policy toward Cuba.

The embargo was imposed when Cuba was a salient of Soviet values and interests in this hemisphere. Today, Cuba is a sad, threadbare geopolitical irrelevancy. Far from threatening Castro's regime, the embargo has enabled Castro to exploit Cubans' debilitating mentality of taking comfort from victimhood -- the habit, more than a century old, of blaming problems on others, first on Spain and then on the United States.

Those facts do not, however, by themselves make the case for ending the embargo without some reciprocal liberalization by (the other) Castro's regime. Granted, it is arguable that the embargo should be abandoned, or significantly eased, regardless of how the Cuban regime behaves, because the regime has much to fear from any increased permeation of Cuba by foreign commercial and intellectual presences.

U.S. policy toward Cuba should, however, be conditioned, and perhaps haunted, by U.S. policy toward China. That policy was supposed to result in steady, slow-motion regime change through candid subversion in broad daylight. The premise has been that the cure for communism is commerce with the capitalist world. The assumption is that capitalism brings, because it requires, an ethic of trust and the rule of law in the form of promise-keeping (contracts). Also, the protection of private property gives individuals a sphere of sovereignty and whets their appetites for a politics of popular sovereignty.

This has been called "the Starbucks fallacy" (see James Mann's book "The China Fantasy"): When people become accustomed to many choices of coffee, they will demand many political choices. This doctrine may be being refuted by the emergence of a China that has become wealthier without becoming less authoritarian.

Cuba has negligible democratic traditions and no living experience with a culture of pluralism and persuasion. In Iraq, Russia and elsewhere, we have seen how decades of tyranny degrade a public's capacity for a democratic culture. We also have tested, and found questionable, the proposition that democratic institutions can precede and create such a culture.

The embargo is being partially vitiated by dollars -- about a billion of them, equivalent to about 2 percent of Cuba's gross domestic product -- sent to Cuba by the Cuban diaspora, 1.5 million strong. That diaspora supports the embargo, but dollar remittances from abroad can be spent only in government stores, so they accrue to the benefit of the regime.

Castro, whose personal worth is estimated at nearly $1 billion, has sternly -- and proudly -- told Cubans, whose average annual income is less than $200, "We're not a consumer society." That is not news where shampoo is scarce.

Six years ago, Castro's regime gathered 8 million signatures from among the 11 million captive Cubans for a petition -- was that necessary? -- to amend Cuba's constitution (is it necessary?) to declare communism "irrevocable." Let us now praise the much-misunderstood Viking King Canute, who commanded the tide to recede in order to demonstrate that it would not obey.

georgewill@washpost.com

Settling of Crisis Makes Winners of Andes Nations, While Rebels Lose Ground

By SIMON ROMERO

After leaders in the Andes tiptoed from the edge of war to bear hugs and oaths of brotherhood, Latin America was trying to sort out the winners and losers in the region’s worst diplomatic dispute in years.

A day after the crisis was resolved at a summit meeting in the Dominican Republic on Friday, it was already clear that nearly all of the players lost something. The leaders of Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela traded charges that muddied each of them. Colombia and its ally, the United States, found themselves isolated in the region.

And Latin America’s largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, lost two senior commanders in a week, the latest in a string of tactical and strategic defeats.

But the biggest winner appears to have been the region itself, which resolved its own dispute without outside help and without violence.

The crisis began when Colombian security forces hunted down and killed Raúl Reyes, the FARC’s second-in-command, and 23 others in a raid last weekend on the guerrillas’ camp in Ecuador. Venezuela and Ecuador assailed Colombia as having violated Ecuador’s sovereignty, cut diplomatic ties and sent troops to the Colombian border in a show of force, effectively defending the FARC’s nebulous operations in their countries.

Colombia insists it has the right to attack its enemies, but the military response by its neighbors — President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela vowed war if Colombia pursued its fight with the FARC into Venezuela — could allow the FARC to operate with more freedom outside Colombia.

Still, that victory may be small consolation for the FARC, whose very presence in neighboring countries is a reflection of its loss of strength within Colombia, as a brutally successful counterinsurgency has driven it out of territory it once controlled.

Reports emerged on Friday of yet another senior commander of the FARC who had been killed. No cross-border raid was involved. A deserter simply brought the guerrilla’s severed right hand as proof that he had killed his own commander.

The killing of the guerrilla, Manuel Jesus Muñoz, who went by the nom de guerre Ivan Ríos, was extraordinarily macabre even in the annals of Colombia’s four-decade war. Mr. Muñoz, a member of the FARC’s guiding secretariat, was the fifth senior member of group killed in the past year.

Colombia’s government contends that the FARC, which finances itself through cocaine trafficking and abductions for ransom, has seen its ranks fall from 16,000 members at the start of the decade, when the guerrillas had advanced close to the capital, Bogotá, to between 6,000 and 8,000 now.

For Colombia, too, the results were mixed. It found itself diplomatically isolated in the region, its tactics rebuked and President Álvaro Uribe under siege as a too-willing ally of the United States.

The raid was one of the most controversial chapters of Plan Colombia, the American program that has disbursed more than $5 billion in aid to Colombia since the late 1990s. And in carrying out the operation without getting Ecuador’s permission beforehand, Mr. Uribe took a page from the Bush administration’s playbook.

The predawn operation bears remarkable similarities to one carried out in late January by the United States in Pakistan. In that case, the Central Intelligence Agency used a Predator drone aircraft to drop missiles, killing Abu Laith al-Libi, a senior commander of Al Qaeda who had hidden from American officials for years.

Both operations used local informants to track the men down. Both operations were carried out in foreign countries without getting permission beforehand. Both were tactical victories, killing enemies classified as terrorists.

But in killing Mr. Reyes in Ecuador, Mr. Uribe may have misjudged the reaction that would follow. A firestorm of criticism was directed at Colombia, a nation increasingly viewed as a redoubt of loyalty to the United States in a region chafing at Washington’s waning influence.

“The Bush doctrine openly rejects nonintervention in other nations’ affairs, something that runs counter to the ideal of sovereignty that is so precious in Latin America,” said Greg Grandin, a professor of Latin American history at New York University.

The methods employed by Mr. Uribe, whose father was believed to have been killed by guerrillas in the early 1980s, may be hard to swallow in a region that has largely seen its other cold war-era insurgencies vanquished. On Thursday, Nicaragua joined the fray on the side of Venezuela and Ecuador. But the wrath of Colombia’s neighbors is a price Mr. Uribe seems content to pay.

Despite Colombia’s insistence that it acted alone, speculation persists as to whether the technological prowess of the United States was involved in the hunt for Mr. Reyes.

Mr. Chávez emphatically denied reports last week that he had placed a call to Mr. Reyes’s satellite phone; such a call might have allowed intelligence agencies to track the guerrilla down in Sucumbíos, an Amazonian province in Ecuador’s northern frontier.

In their war of words, Mr. Uribe accused his counterparts in Ecuador and Venezuela of having financial ties to the FARC, a group resembling a criminal syndicate that dresses up its actions in leftist rhetoric.

And the presidents of Ecuador and Venezuela reminded Latin America of the ties between many of Mr. Uribe’s top supporters in Colombia and the paramilitary death squads that have evolved into nothing less than criminal syndicates trafficking in cocaine.

Cocaine, guns, private armies and guerrillas remain the ingredients of Colombia’s war even as the last element is being visibly pushed into the porous border regions of the country’s neighbors.

In the end, Latin America eased its own crisis. But the celebratory behavior of its leaders in the Dominican Republic belies the tension that persists around a war without closure. Just because the FARC is weakened does not mean it will wither away.

Latin American Crisis Resolved

Colombia Apologizes At Regional Summit

By Juan Forero
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, March 8, 2008; A09

BOGOTA, Colombia, March 7 -- The presidents of Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela on Friday agreed to end a bitter standoff that had resulted in troop deployments, a downturn in trade and a rupture in diplomatic relations.

The crisis began after Colombia bombed a rebel camp last Saturday just inside Ecuador, killing 24 guerrillas, including Luis Edgar Devia, a top commander. The strike marked the first time the army had killed a member of the directorate of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, a guerrilla group that has been fighting here for 44 years.

Colombian President Álvaro Uribe had come under criticism from various Latin American governments for the incursion, but at a regional summit in the Dominican Republic on Friday he heartily shook hands with Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega. All three of those nations had broken relations with Colombia over the incident.

The resolution of the crisis, at a meeting of the 20-nation Rio Group, came in the form of a declaration that noted Uribe had apologized for the raid and that he promised never to violate another nation's border. "With the apology and the promise of never again violating a brother country, we have overcome this very grave crisis," said Correa, in comments that were broadcast live across much of Latin America.

Although the meeting ended on a positive note, the most serious issue raised in the debate -- that Colombian rebels operate with the help of foreign governments -- has not been resolved and is sure to fester.

The news came soon after the Defense Ministry in Bogota reported the death of a second member of the FARC's top command. Manuel Jesús Muñoz, better known by his nom de guerre, Iván Ríos, did not die in battle, but rather was killed by his own men this week in a mountainous, coffee-growing region of north-central Colombia, Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos told reporters.

The slaying appeared to reflect serious internal divisions in an organization that has in recent months seen several seasoned, mid-level commanders killed in combat and hundreds more desert.

Colombian officials said that Muñoz's men, tired of running from troops, decided to kill him. Santos said they then severed his hand and presented it, along with Muñoz's identification card and computer, to an army column that had been pursuing the guerrillas. The United States had placed a $5 million bounty on Muñoz's head, accusing him of coordinating drug-trafficking operations.

The issue of Colombian guerrillas and whether they are harbored by Venezuela and Ecuador marked the often heated exchanges at Friday's summit, which had been scheduled previously. Ecuador, Venezuela and Nicaragua focused on Colombia's violation of Ecuador's sovereignty, while Colombia said that its people are under threat from rebels hiding outside its borders.

Uribe came out firing, accusing Correa of ties to the FARC. He cited as evidence a letter culled from a computer that commandos recovered in the camp that belonged to Devia. Uribe said the letter showed that the FARC supported Correa during his 2006 presidential campaign.

Correa, a leftist, U.S.-trained economist, angrily rejected the allegations, accused Uribe of lying and explained that his government has battled against FARC units in Ecuador's northern jungles.

"How hard it is to believe something from someone who has lied so many times," Correa said. "My hands are clean, and free of blood."

Other presidents at the summit applauded the Ecuadoran leader, who along with Chávez had vowed to marshal international condemnation for Colombia's incursion.

Chávez, who had been accused this week of assisting the FARC, also denied any ties. "I have never done it and will never do it," he said. "I could have sent a lot of rifles to the FARC. I will never do it because I want peace."

Uribe, though, said his country had been attacked 40 times since 2004 by Colombian rebels who used Ecuador as a launching pad. He also explained why he didn't inform Correa of the strike against Devia, who had been located with the help of a rebel who deserted, military officials said.

"I didn't inform him of the operation because we have not received cooperation from his government in the fight against terrorism," Uribe said.

Tensions eased after Dominican President Leonel Fernández, the host of the summit, appealed for calm and said, "What all of us would like is for this meeting to end with a hug, a handshake, between the presidents of Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador."

With the hearty handshakes, the countries resumed normal diplomatic and commercial relations. Uribe also said that he would not file a complaint with the International Criminal Court accusing Chávez of aiding the FARC, as he had vowed earlier.

Belarus expels U.S. ambassador

The Associated Press
Friday, March 7, 2008

MINSK, Belarus: The Belarusian Foreign Ministry on Friday demanded the U.S. ambassador leave the country and recalled its own ambassador to the U.S over economic sanctions Washington imposed on Belarus last year.

The action reflects rising tensions between the government of Belarus' authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko and the United States. Washington has slapped travel restrictions on Lukashenko and members of his inner circle as well as financial sanctions against Belarusian authorities over their crackdown on opposition and free media.

It was not immediately clear whether U.S. Ambassador Karen Stewart had left the country. The U.S. Embassy refused to comment.

The Belarusian Foreign Ministry said its demand that Stewart leave had been prompted by U.S. sanctions against Belarus' state-controlled oil-processing and chemicals company, Belneftekhim. The U.S. last year froze the company's assets and barred American companies from doing business with it.

The United States and the European Union, which also introduced economic and travel sanctions against Belarus, have made clear that Lukashenko must free political prisoners and allow more democratic freedoms before sanctions can be lifted and relations normalized.

Lukashenko began signaling a desire for better relations with the West after Russia's decision to sharply raise prices for oil exports to Belarus — exports on which the country's Soviet-style, centrally controlled economy had long depended. He cast the release of several opposition activists this year as a goodwill gesture to the West.

The U.S. State Department welcomed the releases of opposition activists as positive steps, but urged Lukashenko to free another opposition leader, Alexander Kozulin, as a condition to start a dialogue on normalizing ties. Belarusian authorities allowed Kozulin to attend his wife's funeral, but then put him back behind bars.

Kozulin, who challenged Lukashenko in the 2006 presidential election, was arrested during a postelection protest.

Heated Words in Wake of Colombian Raid

Ecuador's Correa Warns of Danger to Region; Uribe to Seek Genocide Charges Against Chávez

By Monte Reel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, March 5, 2008; A15

RECIFE, Brazil, March 4 -- While troops in Ecuador and Venezuela moved toward their borders with Colombia, the leaders of those three countries moved further from a negotiated solution Tuesday. One ratcheted up his rhetoric, another cut trade ties, and the third warned of a broader regional conflict if the worsening diplomatic dispute becomes a military confrontation.

Ecuador's Rafael Correa visited Peru to begin a tour soliciting Latin American backing for sanctions against Colombia after its military crossed into Ecuador on Saturday to attack guerrillas from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, who use the frontier region as a sanctuary. Venezuela, which jumped into the dispute in support of Ecuador, announced that it would halt cross-border trade with Colombia.

"If this act goes unpunished, the whole region will be in danger, because the next victim could be Peru, it could be Brazil, it could be Venezuela, Bolivia or any of our countries," Correa said in televised comments in Lima. "Colombia's attitude is creating a danger for the entire region and setting intolerable precedents."

But Colombia's Álvaro Uribe announced that he will ask the International Criminal Court to bring genocide charges against Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, whom he has accused of sympathizing with the rebel group. Colombian officials contend that computer documents recovered in Saturday's cross-border raid revealed that Chávez had given more than $300 million to the FARC, the Marxist insurgency that has battled the Colombian government for more than 40 years.

Correa and Chávez are vocal critics of the regional influence of the United States, which has provided military assistance and billions of dollars in funding for Colombia's fight against drug-trafficking and guerrilla groups that profit from the narcotics trade. President Bush said Tuesday that he spoke with Uribe to express his support.

"I told the president that America fully supports Colombia's democracy and that we firmly oppose any acts of aggression that could destabilize the region," Bush said at the White House. "I told him that America will continue to stand with Colombia as it confronts violence and terror and fights drug traffickers."

Though the initial dispute did not involve Venezuela, Chávez's involvement surprised no one in the region. A former army lieutenant colonel who tried unsuccessfully to topple the Venezuelan government in 1992, Chávez has infuriated Uribe by publicly praising the FARC and its members as "revolutionaries."

"Certainly one of the points of greatest discord between Venezuela and Colombia has been the overt support of Chávez for the FARC, which resulted in a worsening of diplomatic relations even before March 1," said Peter DeShazo, a former U.S. diplomat in Latin America and currently director of the Americas program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "Generally, Chávez's view on the FARC has been largely benign in the face of a Colombian government that has dedicated itself to encountering the FARC and the other illegal armed groups."

In recent months, Chávez has tried to mediate swaps of prisoners between the FARC and the government of Colombia. The FARC has released six hostages to Venezuelan authorities, and Chávez has asked other governments to remove the group from their lists of terrorist organizations.

Among the hostages held by the FARC are three U.S. military contractors and former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, who also has French citizenship. Both France and Ecuador had been communicating with Raúl Reyes, a senior FARC commander killed in Saturday's raid, according to Colombian officials.

The FARC released a statement Tuesday saying that Reyes was killed while trying to arrange -- through Chávez -- a meeting with French President Nicolas Sarkozy to discuss the possible release of Betancourt, who is said to be ill. Correa contended during his televised address that Colombia's attack disrupted late-stage discussions to release 12 hostages.

During an emergency meeting of the Organization of American States in Washington aimed at negotiating a peaceful solution to the crisis, Colombian officials described the FARC as a "mafia" group. But they also reiterated the country's apologies to Ecuador for the incursion into its territory.

"The government of Colombia has offered public apologies to the government of Ecuador, and we do so again today," Camilo Ospina, the Colombian ambassador to the OAS, said during the televised meeting.

European powers drop bid to push resolution against Iran

The Associated Press
Tuesday, March 4, 2008

VIENNA: Facing objections by Russia, China and developing nations, European powers abandoned on Tuesday an attempt to introduce a resolution on Iran's nuclear defiance at a meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Western diplomats said.

Opponents felt a resolution against Iran would be superfluous a day after the UN Security Council toughened sanctions on Iran and could provoke a Tehran to reduce, not increase, cooperation with UN inspectors, they said.

"The board doesn't need to compete with the Security Council," said an Asian diplomat on the 35-nation governing board of the IAEA. Almost half the governors are from developing nations.

Britain, France and Germany scrapped the resolution after concluding that their goals had been achieved by the Security Council and there was no point risking a schism among UN nuclear policy makers that Iran might exploit, Western diplomats added.

"Iran thought it could manipulate the IAEA to avoid a Security Council resolution while moving forward to develop its uranium enrichment capability," Gregory Schulte, U.S. ambassador to the IAEA, told reporters.

"As the resolution adopted yesterday in New York shows, Iran clearly failed. In fact what the resolution does from a Vienna perspective is to underscore that Iran's file remains open and to fully support the IAEA in its continuing investigation of outstanding issues, particularly with respect to weaponization."

In Tehran, the government rejected the resolution imposing new sanctions as "worthless" and vowed to move ahead with its uranium enrichment program.

"This resolution is contrary to the spirit and articles of the International Atomic Energy Agency," said a Foreign Ministry spokesman, Muhammad Ali Hosseini, according to the official press agency IRNA.

"It has been issued based on political motivations and a biased approach. It is worthless and unacceptable."

He said the sanctions would "have no impact on the resolve and determination of the Iranian nation and government to fulfill its legitimate rights in continuing its peaceful nuclear activities within the framework of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty."

Iran has pursued a uranium-enrichment program it says is meant only to generate electricity. But its history of nuclear secrecy and continued curbs on IAEA inspections stoke fears it could turn enrichment technology to yielding nuclear arms.

In imposing more far-reaching sanctions by a 14-to-0 vote, the Security Council cited Iran's defiance of demands to suspend enrichment, failure to fully explain past nuclear activity and continued restrictions on IAEA inspections.

The third round of sanctions approved Monday orders a freeze on assets of more Iranian officials and companies with links to the country's nuclear and missile program, and for the first time bans trade with Iran in some goods with both civilian and military uses.

Last week the IAEA's chief of nonproliferation safeguards presented to board diplomats detailed intelligence suggesting Iran had tried to "weaponize" nuclear materials.

He revealed diagrams, slides and video, much of them from a laptop removed from Iran by a defector, indicating administrative links between projects to process uranium, test high explosives and modify a missile cone for a nuclear payload.

The IAEA director, Mohamed ElBaradei, opening the weeklong governors session Monday, pressed Iran to cooperate with the agency inquiry into the allegations, signaling the IAEA would not take Tehran's flat denials for a final answer.

Iran's ambassador to the IAEA repeated on Tuesday that Tehran would have nothing more to do with the inquiry and would never suspend its nuclear program, but would keep its declared enrichment sites under IAEA monitoring despite the new sanctions.

Ali Asghar Soltanieh noted that ElBaradei had certified Iran had resolved six outstanding questions about its past nuclear activity and said arms studies did not count because they were "fabrications" of Iran's chief foe, the United States.

"The alleged studies were thoroughly reviewed in two rounds of talks, and we gave our final assessment," he told reporters invited to a slide presentation held to counter the IAEA one last week.

"The issue is over."

He offered no substance in the presentation, entitled "A Short Glance at Iran's Peaceful Nuclear Activities," to refute the intelligence material.

Serbia reclaims stretch of rail line in Kosovo

The Associated Press
Monday, March 3, 2008

MITROVICA, Kosovo: Serbia reclaimed control of a 50-kilometer stretch of rail line in northern Kosovo on Monday, a senior official said, in defiance of the government in Pristina.

The official, Branislav Ristivojevic, chairman of Serbia's state-owned railroad company and a senior adviser to Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica, said that Serbia was restoring control over the 30-mile line "after a period of nine years."

Earlier, a few dozen Serbian railroad workers blocked passage of a freight train on the line, saying they would not work for Kosovo's rail company and demanding to be transferred to Serbia's state-owned railroad.

The surprise move is likely to increase tensions between the Serbs and Kosovo's authorities and NATO peacekeepers. It is in line with the Belgrade government's instructions to the Serbian minority to shun any contact with Kosovo's government after it declared independence two weeks ago, and to work directly with Serbia instead.

Hundreds of Serbian policemen have handed over their badges and weapons rather than submit to the authorities in Kosovo. Serbian protesters have set fire to border crossing points with Serbia and have blocked ethnic Albanians from working in courts in the northern area.

Serbia's Orthodox Church joined in the boycott Monday. Archbishop Artemije, who heads the church in Kosovo, ordered his clergy to cease all contacts with the Kosovo authorities and with the coming EU mission.

In another sign of underlying tension, a sniper attack Monday targeted an office gathering of different ethnic groups in the northern, Serb-controlled part of the ethnically divided town of Mitrovica.

Two bullets were fired at the offices, which operate on a grant from the Belgian government. No one was hurt. Wim Peeters, Belgium's top diplomat in Kosovo, condemned the attack as "a cowardly and shameful act."

It was not clear how the takeover of the rail line by Serbia's railroads would be carried out in defiance of the government in Pristina. Serbia's government has long claimed ownership of much of Kosovo's infrastructure, including power plants and rail lines.

United Nations officials, who are in charge of Kosovo's railroads, said they would discuss whether to continue running train services.

Deputy Prime Minister Hajredin Kuqi of Kosovo dismissed Serbia's move as a ploy aimed against Kosovo's independence and pledged that the authorities would protect the country's borders.

Serbia has rejected Kosovo's declaration of independence last month. Belgrade has ruled out military action to reclaim Kosovo, but has said it has a secret "action plan" to deal with the breakaway province. Officials have said Serbia will seek to retain control of Serb-dominated areas in northern Kosovo.

Serbia and its ally Russia maintain that the UN Security Council has not authorized the EU mission, which is meant to replace the UN administration that has ruled Kosovo since 1999.

The Russian Foreign Ministry protested on Monday the creation of an international group to help guide Kosovo, saying it violated UN decisions and could lead to "unpredictable consequences."

"We think the creation of the group goes against UN Security Council Resolution 1244 and internationally agreed principles" for handling Kosovo's future, a ministry spokesman said in a statement.

Serbia lodged a complaint with the United Nations against the establishment last week of the 15-nation International Steering Group for Kosovo, whose mission is to help guide Kosovo's democratic development.

The group includes the United States, Turkey and 13 other European countries - all of which have recognized Kosovo's Feb. 17 declaration of independence from Serbia.

The group appointed Pieter Feith to be its international civilian representative for Kosovo. He is also the European Union's representative in Kosovo who will oversee the authorities' compliance with a UN-sponsored deal providing broad rights for minorities.

The EU will also deploy an 1,800-strong police and justice mission to be led by a retired French general, Yves de Kermabon.

While ethnic Albanians account for nearly 90 percent of Kosovo's two million people, Serbs dominate a number of enclaves and a large part of northern Kosovo.

Serbian leaders have vowed to ignore both the EU mission and Kosovo's new government, and work only with the UN administration.

Feith has accused Belgrade of striving for a de facto division of Kosovo, leaving the northern region under Belgrade's control. Serbian officials, calling Feith's presence in Kosovo illegal, have refused to deal with him.

Security Council Adds Sanctions Against Iran

By WARREN HOGE and ELAINE SCIOLINO

UNITED NATIONS — The Security Council on Monday adopted its third resolution imposing sanctions on Iran for its refusal to cease enriching uranium, an activity that Western nations say is designed to build nuclear weapons.

The previous two measures gained unanimous support of the 15-member panel, but in Monday’s balloting, Indonesia abstained, saying it “remained to be convinced of the efficacy of adopting additional sanctions at this juncture.” Fourteen countries voted in favor.

The resolution authorizes inspections of cargo to and from Iran that is suspected of carrying prohibited equipment, tightens the monitoring of Iranian financial institutions and extends travel bans and asset freezes against persons and companies involved in the nuclear program.

It adds 13 names to the existing list of 5 individuals and 12 companies subject to travel and asset restrictions. The new names include people with direct responsibility for building fast-spinning centrifuges that enrich uranium ore and a brigadier general engaged in “efforts to get round the sanctions” in the two earlier resolutions.

The new measure also bans all trade and supply of so-called dual-use items, materials and technologies that can be adapted for military as well as civilian ends.

Earlier Monday in Vienna, Mohamed ElBaradei, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations nuclear monitor, said that newly disclosed intelligence reports that Iran had secretly researched how to make nuclear weapons were of “serious concern” and would be pursued by his office.

“Iran continues to maintain that these alleged weaponization studies related to conventional weapons only are fabricated,” Dr. ElBaradei said in a speech to the agency’s 35-country policy-making body. “However a full-fledged examination of this issue has yet to take place.”

The studies were described last Monday, in a briefing for the agency’s 35-country governing body by Olli Heinonen, the agency’s senior inspector.

They included sketches and a video that appeared to have come from Iran’s own military laboratories, and Mr. Heinonen said they showed work “not consistent with any application other than the development of a nuclear weapon.”

In a thinly veiled criticism of Iran, Dr. ElBaradei said, “I urge Iran to be as active and cooperative as possible in working with the agency to clarify this matter of serious concern.”

Iran says that the agency’s findings support its claim that its nuclear program is solely for peaceful purposes, and it has rejected all suggestions that it was studying how to make nuclear weapons.

Iran’s ambassador to the agency, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, called the intelligence data “forged and fabricated” and denounced the new Council resolution Monday as “irresponsible” and “an arrow aiming at the heart of” the atomic energy agency.

Iran argues that its program is devoted solely to producing fuel for nuclear reactors that generate electricity. The United States and its European allies on the council contend the real purpose is to make Iran an atomic power, and they say they are determined to prevent that from happening.

The resolution voted Monday was originally scheduled for a decision on Friday, but its two sponsors, Britain and France, delayed consideration in the hope of getting as close to unanimity as possible. In addition to Indonesia, three other Council countries - Libya, South Africa and Vietnam - had expressed reservations.

To address them, the final version included last minute language changes making it clear that cargo inspections must conform to local and international laws and stressing the central role of the International Atomic Energy Agency and evidence in the latest report from Dr. ElBaradei Feb. 22 that Iran was cooperating with the agency.

The resolution extends the reach of punishments in the two earlier measures, adopted in December, 2006 and March, 2007, but it does not make them any tougher.

The text was drawn up after months of talks among the Council’s five permanent members - Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — and Germany, which is not a Council member.

It repeats a pledge from the six countries to establish full relations and economic cooperation with Iran should it agree to suspend enrichment-related and reprocessing activities.

In Vienna, Britain, France and Germany said they were preparing a draft resolution critical of Iran that could be adopted by the agency’s policy-making body later this week. The United States, Canada, Australia and Japan already have indicated privately they would support such a move.

It would be the first time the board had passed such a resolution on Iran since it sent the Iran to the Security Council for review two years ago.

The United States, which in the past has criticized Dr. ElBaradei for not being tough enough on Iran, expressed support for this approach. “Despite some progress in addressing past issues, troubling questions remain about Iranian activities that strongly suggest a clandestine weapons-related program,” Gregory L. Schulte, the American envoy to the agency, told reporters in Vienna.

He added, “Between the indications of weapons work, which would constitute a violation of Iran’s treaty obligations and Iran’s blatant violations of Security Council resolutions, there is strong reason for Iran’s file to remain open both in New York and in Vienna.”

Warren Hoge reported from the United Nations, and Elaine Sciolino from Paris.

In Search for Peace, a Shrinking White House Role

By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 2, 2008; A16

When Palestinians broke through the barrier dividing the Gaza Strip and Egypt in January and streamed across the border by the tens of thousands, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak faced a moment of crisis. His phone soon rang, but the world leader offering help on the other end was not President Bush -- it was Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Mubarak took the call, resulting in the first such contact between leaders of the two nations since relations were severed nearly three decades ago.

The conversation signaled a growing rapprochement between Egypt, which receives nearly $2 billion in annual aid from Washington, and Iran, a country that the Bush administration has tried to isolate as a possible threat to U.S. interests in the region.

As Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice heads back to the Middle East this week, three months after Bush hosted a peace conference bringing together Israelis and Arabs in Annapolis, prospects for peace have shifted dramatically. There has been little clear movement in peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians, while the Iranian-backed militant group Hamas has shown increasingly that it can set the region's agenda.

Hamas rockets have continued to rain down on Israeli towns, prompting deadly counterattacks by Israel amid increasing speculation that Israel will invade the narrow coastal strip housing 1.5 million Palestinians that it abandoned just two years ago.

Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator, said that key players in the region are moving beyond the Bush administration. "The feeling is that if you keep the flash points on a lower or somewhat higher flame, it will give you more cards when a new administration comes in," he said, speaking in a phone interview from Israel. "Everyone is sucking up to the Iranians," he added.

The signs of American irrelevance are apparent throughout the region. Even Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, hailed as a potential peacemaker by the Bush administration, mused last week to the Jordanian newspaper al-Dustour that in the future it might be necessary to return to armed struggle against Israel. And Syria, which received an unexpected invitation to Annapolis, believes that the peace summit was "an exercise in public relations" and that Bush has no interest in peace, as Syria's ambassador to Washington, Imad Moustapha put it last week.

Rice's first stop, on Tuesday, will be Cairo, where she will consult with Mubarak and other Egyptian officials on Gaza. She then will shuttle between Israeli and Palestinian officials on Tuesday and Wednesday, seeking to head off a deadly confrontation between Israel and Hamas while pushing for progress in the nascent peace talks.

The architecture of Annapolis established by Rice includes four key tracks, all of which are supposed to operate simultaneously: high-level talks on "final status" issues such as the division of Jerusalem; incremental changes in security, Jewish settlements on the West Bank and roadblocks hindering Palestinian movement; jump-starting the Palestinian economy; and greater Arab involvement. The final-status talks have been shrouded in secrecy, while little has happened on the other tracks, participants said. The number of roadblocks has increased, according to U.N. estimates.

"Politically, I have not heard anything that is good," a senior Arab diplomat said.

Organizers of a Palestinian investment conference scheduled for late May, designed to bring Arab businessmen to Bethlehem, have expressed concern that senior Arab executives will be forced to wait for hours in humiliating checks at roadblocks, potentially spoiling the mood for investment.

The lack of movement has added to the skepticism, even in Israel. A poll published in the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth last week showed that 69 percent of Israelis surveyed believed the talks would not bring peace, while 78 percent believed the talks were being held only for political reasons.

During a recent visit to Washington, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad charged that Israel has "not done a thing materially on the ground to help my government." Israeli officials counter that Israel has taken steps to bolster the Abbas government, but that some efforts -- such as new restrictions on settlement growth -- cannot be publicized because of the tenuous political situation in Israel.

Ghaith al-Omari, a former adviser to Abbas and now advocacy director for the American Task Force on Palestine, faulted the Bush administration for not nurturing a process that it started. He noted that the administration has appointed three generals to assess various aspects of the issue, but that few people in the region understand their roles. Rice's two-day visit this week is her first substantive trip since the conference in November.

"There is no push from the Americans," he said. "We are still waiting to see what they will do. It is surprising how little has happened. If you guys are going to run out of steam, why create all these expectations?"

"It is a big question mark," said Martin Indyk, director of the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy. "The impression one gets is that this administration is out of juice."

Most observers give the administration six months, until the Democratic and Republican conventions, to show that progress on the peace talks is possible. But the Annapolis conference has been increasingly overshadowed by the conflict over Gaza.

The Annapolis talks were designed to bolster Abbas so he could overcome the challenge from Hamas. In 2006, the militant group unexpectedly won Palestinian elections that the Bush administration had supported, beating Abbas's Fatah party, and a unity government between the two sides went sour when Hamas seized control of Gaza last June. The administration had hoped that if Abbas could seal a peace deal, it would give him the popular support to oust Hamas, which has called for Israel's destruction.

Neither Hamas nor Iran was invited to Annapolis but, as Ahmadinejad's courting of Mubarak suggests, the administration's effort to divide the region into "moderate" and "extremist" camps has not succeeded. After the phone call between the two men, Iran's foreign minister declared that diplomatic ties with Cairo would soon be restored.

Meanwhile, Hamas has gained popularity as Israel has attempted an economic blockade of Gaza. Hamas bulldozers burst through the Gaza-Egyptian border in January, while Hamas rockets last week reached Ashkelon, an Israeli city of 120,000 that generally had been safe from Hamas attacks.

Egypt would like to arrange a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas while giving the Palestinian Authority control over border crossings, Arab diplomats said. But those would be difficult negotiations as public pressure increases in Israel for a ground invasion of Gaza. In the best-case scenario for Israel, that would wipe out Hamas's leadership, but it could also prove as vexing as Israel's war against Hezbollah in 2006.

Some argue that Hamas's strength can no longer be ignored. Before the Annapolis conference, a group of U.S. foreign policy specialists -- including former national security advisers Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft and former congressman Lee H. Hamilton -- wrote Bush to argue that "a genuine dialogue with the organization is far preferable to its isolation." But State Department spokesman Tom Casey said Friday, "It's pretty hard to say that Hamas has a legitimate role to play in this process if their main policy is to promote terror."

Iranian Leader Arrives in Iraq

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 10:45 a.m. ET

BAGHDAD (AP) -- Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Sunday his landmark visit to Iraq opened a new chapter in ''brotherly'' relations between the two countries, which were once bitter enemies.

The Iranian president’s trip is a historic one, the first since Iran and Iraq fought an eight-year war in the 1980s. The trip not only highlights his country's growing influence on its Arab neighbor in the post-Saddam Hussein era, but it also serves as an act of defiance toward the U.S., which accuses Iran of training and giving weapons to Shiite extremists in Iraq.

The Iranian leader went from Baghdad's airport to a meeting with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, who gave him a red-carpet welcome. The two kissed four times on the cheek in the traditional fashion and a band played the two countries' national anthems.

''We had very good talks that were friendly and brotherly. ... We have mutual understandings and views in all fields, and both sides plan to improve relations as much as possible,'' Ahmadinejad said in a news conference with Talabani at the Iraqi president's residence, located across the Tigris River from the new U.S. Embassy in the fortified Green Zone.

Talabani said the two discussed economic, political, security and oil issues and planned to sign several agreements later. But he said the issue of borders, including the disputed Shatt al-Arab waterway between the two countries, was not discussed.

Ahmadinejad stressed that his country wanted a stable Iraq that would benefit the region.

''A united Iraq, a sovereign Iraq and an advanced Iraq is to the benefit of all regional nations and the people of Iran,'' he said.

Though much of the public talk focused on the warming relations between the two countries, Ahmadinejad denounced U.S. accusations that Iran was training and supplying Shiite militia fighters in Iraq with weapons designed to kill American troops.

''Such accusations increase the problems of the Americans in the region and they are not going to solve their problems,'' Ahmadinejad said in a separate press conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki after discussions with Talabani.

Al-Maliki emphasized that the Iranian leader's visit was ''an expression of the strong desire to enhance the relations and develop mutual interests after the past tensions during the dictatorship era.''

The news conference appeared to end abruptly after a reporter asked Ahmadinejad about the People's Mujahedeen Organization of Iran, which was allied with Saddam during the bitter 1980s war between the two countries. The group has opposed Iran's Islamic republic and has operated out of Iraq. The U.S. and European Union list it as a terrorist organization.

Talabani interjected, saying: ''This issue has been discussed earlier and the presence of those as a terrorist organization is constitutionally not allowed. We will endeavor to get rid of them out of the Iraqi territory soon.''

The U.S. has said it will have no involvement in Ahmadinejad's visit. Ahmadinejad arrived in Iraq a day after Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, came to Baghdad on an unannounced visit with commanders and Iraqi officials.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari told The Associated Press that Ahmadinejad plans to leave Monday morning.

Though both are Shiite-majority countries, Iran and Iraq were hostile to each other throughout Saddam's regime. Their eight-year war after Saddam invaded Iran in 1980 cost about 1 million lives.

But when Saddam's Sunni-dominated regime fell and Iraq's Shiite majority took power after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, long-standing ties between the Shiites of both countries flourished again, though the two neighbors have yet to sign a peace treaty.

Many of Iraq's Shiite leaders lived in exile in Iran during Saddam's rule, and Talabani, a Sunni Kurd, speaks fluent Farsi.

With the trip, Ahmadinejad also may be trying to bolster his support back home ahead of parliamentary elections later this month. They are seen as referendum on the Iranian president, who has come under criticism in his country for spending too much time on anti-Western rhetoric and not enough on Iran's economic problems.

The U.S. has tried to downplay Ahmadinejad's visit. It has said it welcomed Iran's stated policy of promoting stability but that its actions have done just the opposite.

Rear Adm. Gregory Smith said the Iraqi government would provide the principal security for Ahmadinejad and had the capacity and equipment to do so.

''Iraq has a responsibility as a neighbor to provide security,'' he said during a press conference in the Green Zone, adding that the U.S. hoped the visit ''produces real and tangible results.''

President Bush denied that Ahmadinejad's visit undermined U.S. efforts to isolate Tehran, but had some advice for what al-Maliki should say to the Iranian leader.

''He's a neighbor. And the message needs to be, quit sending in sophisticated equipment that's killing our citizens,'' Bush said.

In Tehran, Iran Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini criticized Bush.

''His remarks are an intervention in the friendly, brotherly and sincere relations between Iran and Iraq,'' Hosseini told reporters Sunday after Ahmadinejad left Iran. ''Americans do not want the relations to grow.''

U.S. may sign Guantanamo accord with Algeria: agency

Reuters
Wednesday, February 27, 2008; 12:29 PM

ALGIERS (Reuters) - The United States may soon sign an agreement with Algeria on the possible return home of Algerian prisoners from the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, the official Algerian APS news agency reported on Wednesday.

Visiting Assistant U.S. Secretary of State David Welch told Algerian reporters that Washington hoped "to conclude soon an accord with Algeria" on the issue, APS reported.

Algerian newspapers have said there are believed to be between 17 and 25 Algerians held at the facility on Cuba.

U.S. President George W. Bush has said he would like to close the camp, which holds about 275 detainees and he calls a necessary tool in the war on terrorism.

Human rights groups and foreign governments have said holding suspects for years without trial violates basic international legal standards.

"The question is to know if we have prisoners who ought to be prosecuted," APS quoted Welch as saying. "Even if that is not the case, that does not mean that they are not dangerous.

"We want to send prisoners back to their countries of origin, but we must assure ourselves that they do not represent a danger, because we have seen examples of prisoners returning to their countries and who were later released."

U.S. officials say some governments will not take custody of their citizens held at Guantanamo, others would not treat their citizens humanely and still others are not willing to provide security guarantees Washington believes are necessary.

Algerian President Bouteflika offered an amnesty for Islamist rebels in 2006 as part of a reconciliation policy aimed at ending years of violence in the north African country.

As part of the reconciliation drive he authorized the release from jail of more than 2,000 former members of an Islamist armed rebellion that aims to overthrow the government.

Algerian newspapers say some of the released former fighters rejoined the rebellion after they were freed and have taken part in attacks on government targets in recent months.

(Reporting by Hamid Ould Ahmed; Writing by William Maclean, editing by Robert Woodward)

U.S. warns Europe of Iran missiles

Tehran is close to building arms capable of reaching major capitals, says an official promoting a defense system.
By Kim Murphy
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

February 29, 2008

LONDON — With American officials working to close a deal on a missile defense system in Europe, the head of the U.S. program warned Thursday that Iran was within two or three years of producing a missile that could reach most European capitals.

"They're already flying missiles that exceed what they would need in a fight with Israel. Why? Why do they continue this progression in terms of range of missiles? It's something we need to think about," Air Force Lt. Gen. Henry Obering III, director of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency, told a conference here on missile defense.

The message was aimed at staving off skepticism in Europe and clinching a deal for radar and interceptor sites in the Czech Republic and Poland. It underscored increasing concern among defense experts that while attention has focused on nuclear proliferation, nations such as China, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan and India have made significant strides in developing missiles that can reach far beyond their immediate neighbors.

"Our short-range defenses could protect Rome and Athens," Obering said, but he warned that London, Paris and Brussels would remain vulnerable "against an Iranian [intermediate-range missile] threat."

Many in Europe have expressed doubts that Iran would target European cities. But Obering said it was possible to imagine as little as seven years from now a nuclear-armed Iran shutting off oil shipments in the Persian Gulf, or Al Qaeda militants seizing freighters off Europe and arming them with nuclear-tipped Scud missiles "to punish the West for invasion of Muslim holy lands."

The timing of the warning was hardly coincidental, as Bush administration officials this week were attempting through talks in Washington to clear the last hurdles for agreements with Poland and the Czech Republic on the U.S.-run system of interceptor missiles and radar in Europe.

The Czech Foreign Ministry official in charge of security policy, Veronika Kuchynova Smigolova, predicted that the deal could be signed as early as next month's NATO summit in Bucharest, the Romanian capital, and ratified by the Czech Parliament by summer.

But Russia remains vigorously opposed to what it sees as a permanent new U.S. military infrastructure near its borders in Central Europe, and there are concerns on the continent about further alienating Iran and Russia. Some critics have questioned the wisdom of allowing the U.S., rather than the European Union or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, to take the lead in defending Europe against such missiles.

Malcolm Chalmers, a onetime foreign policy advisor to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, said the decision to locate the system in former Warsaw Pact nations may have sparked opposition in Moscow that otherwise "would be much less vociferous."

"Did we only deploy it there because that's the only place available?" said Chalmers, who is now a fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, which sponsored Thursday's conference.

Some Europeans have questioned whether Iran represents a genuine threat to Europe, and have accused the Bush administration of undermining existing arms control agreements by proceeding unilaterally on missile defense.

"This is firstly and foremostly an American choice and should be taken as such," said Yves Boyer, deputy director of the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris. "It has not been requested by any European state and . . . it does not answer the critical need for Europeans to process their own assessment of strategic capabilities."

Jane Sharp, senior research fellow in defense studies at King's College London, said the Bush administration had cost the West a once-cooperative relationship with Russia.

"Even if ballistic missile defense did look credible to a potential adversary, they're still destabilizing, because the logical response for any adversary for a credible defense is to acquire more offensive capability -- this is what the Russians are telling us every day," she said.

But reflecting the wariness of Russia long present among the European Union's newest members -- Poland has made it clear that it fears attack from Russia much more than from Iran -- Smigolova said the proposed defense program would restore equality of security on both sides of the Atlantic.

"Russia knows very well that one radar and 10 interceptors won't change the strategic balance and doesn't present any real military problem for them," she said. "But for them, a U.S. presence in Central Europe is the final confirmation of the loss of their influence over this part of Europe."

Smigolova said the Czech government was "well aware" of widespread public opposition to the system in that country and in Europe, but would be pushing to ratify the agreement after remaining concerns over environmental protections were worked out.

Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek met Wednesday at the White House with President Bush but withheld his approval for the system, citing remaining differences on environmental standards for the radar equipment. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk is scheduled to visit Bush on March 10.

U.S. negotiators are due in Poland today to discuss modernizing that country's military, a key Polish request in the missile defense talks.

Bush said in a news conference Thursday that he still hoped to persuade the Russian government to drop its opposition. "I believe it's in our interests to try to figure out a way for the Russians to understand the system is not aimed at them, but aimed at the real threats of the 21st century," Bush said.

U.S. officials and many European security experts have said the rate at which new nations are obtaining the capability to build longer-range missiles, with increasingly sophisticated maneuvering ability, is greatly expanding.

kim.murphy@latimes.com

Times staff writers Paul Richter in Washington and Janet Stobart in London contributed to this report.

Iraq braces for Ahmadinejad visit

The Iranian leader's visit is welcomed, but it comes at a time when Iraqi Shiite allies are growing wary of Tehran's role in their war-torn country.
By Borzou Daragahi
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

February 29, 2008

BAGHDAD — Hussein Athab visited Iran three times after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. The political science professor took in the religious sites and admired Iraq's bigger, richer and stronger Shiite Muslim neighbor to the east.

But his esteem for Iran's government has since plummeted over what many here view as Iranian meddling and subversion in Iraq.

"We thought Iran would extend the hand of friendship," said Athab, a Shiite. "But it looks like Iran considers Iraq a playing card, and we don't want to be used as a playing card."

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad arrives Sunday to an Iraq far more leery of his country than it was after the ouster of Hussein.

Publicly, Iraq's politicians welcome the hard-line president's arrival. He is the first leader of a Middle East country to visit Baghdad and grant the government the international recognition it craves.

But privately, Iraqi officials say that Ahmadinejad and his clique are part of the problem. Iraqis would prefer a visit by a less divisive figure, such as former President Mohammad Khatami, a reformist.

"We know that Ahmadinejad is a controversial figure and we have seen some policy changes since the time of Khatami," Athab said.

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, who visited Tehran in June, is to play host to Ahmadinejad, most likely at his heavily fortified compound outside Baghdad's U.S.-protected Green Zone. "The United States has no role in the visit," said Rear Adm. Greg J. Smith.

Ties between Tehran and Baghdad's current Shiite leadership run deep and stretch back decades. During the 1980s, Talabani and other Kurds as well as Iraqi Shiite political parties and militias found refuge in Iran and fought alongside Iranian forces against the Iraqi army. Iran was among the first countries to officially recognize the post-Hussein government.

But even among Iraq's Shiite majority, which has long looked to Iranian coreligionists as protectors and patrons, there is a wariness about Tehran's ambitions and tactical maneuvers in their country. Many feel that Iraq has become a battleground in the 30-year feud between the U.S. and the Islamic Republic of Iran, and that Tehran has few qualms about sacrificing Iraqi lives and stability for its strategic goals.

"There's a problem because the Iranians feel threatened by the Americans, and they want to act tit-for-tat with the Americans," said Haider Abadi, a high-ranking advisor to Prime Minister Nouri Maliki. Both belong to the Islamic Dawa Party, which Iran sheltered during Hussein's rule. "Whenever Americans pressure Iran outside Iraq, the Iranians respond in Iraq. We're paying for this in blood."

Iraq's Sunni Arabs and former Baath Party loyalists have long resented Iran's influence and ambitions. But over the last two or three years, tensions have also increased between Iraq's Shiites and Iran.

Abadi and other Iraqi officials said they would use Ahmadinejad's visit as an opportunity to warn Iran about its behavior in Iraq, including U.S. allegations that powerful explosives and other arms are smuggled from Iran into Iraq.

"The relationship between Iran and Iraq started off very good after the collapse of the regime," Abadi said. "But it has become worse because of this. The Iranians must see this. It is not in their interest to have the Iraqis as their enemies. Ahmadinejad will be told that we cannot have good neighborly relations while Iraqis are being killed by Iranian bombs."

Iraqi officials are also struggling to defuse what they view as the rationale for Iran's alleged transgressions: the fear that the U.S. presence in Iraq will be used to undermine Tehran. Both Iraq's Kurds and Shiites have vigorously lobbied leaders in Washington and Tehran to set aside differences, at least when it comes to Iraq.

"Officials in Iraq are still putting great efforts to improve this relationship. . . . Instead of being a place for war, [Iraq] will be a place for peace," said Sheik Hamid Muala, a lawmaker who is a member of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, which has deep ties to Iran. But Muala and others acknowledged that more Iraqis have grown sensitive to Iran's role.

"Whether we like it or not, the Iranian influence is at a very high level in Iraq," said Qassem Dawoud, an independent lawmaker with close ties to the Shiite clerical leadership in Najaf. "We really are looking forward to a period when this influence should disappear."

Abadi praised Iranian Ambassador Hassan Kazemi- Qomi as one of only two foreign diplomats who regularly make the rounds of ministries to facilitate business deals and increase contacts. Trade between the two countries now totals $8 billion a year, much of it Iranian exports. Iran is also giving a $1-billion loan to Iraq.

But U.S. and Iraqi officials allege that Iran's positive contributions come with a host of headaches. They accuse Tehran of supplying arms, training and direction to Shiite and Sunni paramilitary groups.

"They are bringing in tomatoes, potatoes, gas and electricity," said Jawad Bolani, Iraq's interior minister and a Shiite. "But then we also get rockets, weapons and missiles."

Abadi also said Iranians are interfering in Iraq's politics, supporting one faction over another with infusions of cash.

But Iraqi officials point out that even the pro-U.S. Persian Gulf monarchies such as the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have invited Ahmadinejad on state visits.

"This guy came to power by a democratic election," said Khudair Khuzai, Iraq's minister of education and a confidant of Maliki. "Whether he's radical or moderate, the Iranian people chose him."

daragahi@latimes.com

Times staff writer Tina Susman contributed to this report.

Iran: As Tensions Rise, So Does Rhetoric

By Jeffrey Donovan

September 28, 2007 (RFE/RL) -- To any reader of the English-language blogosphere, September appeared destined to be the month of the Iran war media blitz.

A first sign of an impending war of words over Iran came in late August. In an Internet blog, professor Barnett Rubin, a highly respected authority on Afghanistan at New York University, said a Bush administration insider told him there would be an "Iran war rollout" in the media in September.

Yet it was in Paris, not Washington, that perhaps the first salvo in the war of words with Iran was fired -- a drumbeat of rising rhetoric over the last month that Admiral William Fallon, the top U.S. military commander in the Middle East, has called "not helpful" and "not useful."

On August 27, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, speaking to a group of French diplomats, called a nuclear-armed Iran "unacceptable." He added: "I underline France's full determination to support the alliance's current policy of increasing sanctions, but also to remain open if Iran makes the choice to fulfill its obligations. This policy is the only one that will allow us to escape an alternative, which I consider to be catastrophic. Which alternative? An Iranian bomb or the bombing of Iran."

Iran Media Blitz

As if on cue, the language of U.S. President George W. Bush, speaking the very next day, also took a confrontational turn toward Tehran.

"Iran's active pursuit of technology that could lead to nuclear weapons threatens to put a region already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust," Bush told a gathering of U.S. war veterans. "Iran's actions threaten the security of nations everywhere. And that is why the United States is rallying friends and allies around the world to isolate the regime, to impose economic sanctions. We will confront this danger before it is too late."

Publicly, Bush has refused to take military action off the table if Iran does not comply with UN Security Council resolutions demanding that it suspend its uranium enrichment programs.

Led by the United States, the Western powers are seeking to pass a third round of even tougher Security Council sanctions against Iran. However, at a meeting today in New York, the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany agreed to delay a vote on tougher sanctions until late November at the earliest.

That outcome is a setback to U.S. and French efforts, yet their cooperation still signals a key break from the recent past.

Unlike during the Iraq war run-up, when France voiced fierce opposition to toppling Saddam Hussein, this time Paris is backing up Bush with tough talk of its own.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner weighed in with perhaps even stronger words than his boss, stating on September 16 that the world should brace for war with Iran if negotiations to end its nuclear program fail. Although he later tempered his comments, Kouchner and Sarkozy's rhetoric starkly contrasts with that of former French President Jacques Chirac, whose vocal opposition to war with Iraq dealt a blow to U.S.-France relations.

So what’s motivated France to talk tough now? Jean-Pierre Darnis, a political analyst at the University of Nice and Rome's Institute of Foreign Affairs, says the new French leader is partly motivated by a genuine desire to repair relations with Washington. Darnis adds that France clearly wants to avoid war with Iran, but sees its threat as a necessary prod to change Tehran’s behavior.

"Sarkozy said: 'I don't like the word war. I don't want to use the word war,' after Kouchner [used the word]," Darnis says. "But nevertheless, he is very open to a large panel of actions against Iran."

On September 25 at the UN General Assembly in New York, Sarkozy reiterated that an Iranian nuclear bomb would be an "unacceptable risk to stability in the region and in the world." He was echoed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who said, “If Iran were to acquire the nuclear bomb, the consequences would be disastrous."

Robert Whitman, who studies European foreign policy at London’s Chatham House think tank, says the tough talk from Paris, and to a lesser extent Berlin, is partly aimed at permanent UN Security Council members China and Russia to persuade them to drop their opposition to new Iran sanctions since the alternative -- namely, war -- should appear so much worse to them.

New France

But Whitman adds that Sarkozy’s rhetoric should also be taken at face value -- that is, it reflects genuine French concern over the danger of Iran’s nuclear program:

"I think that’s partly why the French have been using the language why they have, because they think the Iran case is a very serious test of the credibility of the international nonproliferation regime for nuclear weapons," Whitman says. "And I think that their analysis is that it will have grave consequences for nuclear proliferation in the Middle East if Iran is not stopped. And the French do believe that they are being a responsible international citizen by bearing down on the Iranians."

But what about the Iranians? Are they, too, somehow served by all the war talk?

Speaking on September 25 at the UN, Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad vowed Tehran would continue to defy any UN resolutions on Iran’s nuclear program. He said the nuclear question was "closed" as a political issue and that Iran would pursue the monitoring of its nuclear program "through its appropriate legal path," the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN's nuclear watchdog.

British analyst Whitman says the media circus that accompanied Ahmadinejad’s trip to the United States, along with the hard-line rhetoric against him, may actually be helping him in his domestic political battles back home. "Certainly, in terms of external criticism of the regime, and particularly criticism in the U.S., this will obviously assist him in terms of his struggle against moderates in Tehran," Whitman says.

Others have noted that every time the Iranian crisis escalates, the price of oil increases, further filling petroleum-rich Tehran's coffers.

The war drums have also been beating in the right-wing U.S. media, particularly among those "neoconservative" pundits who pushed successfully for the Iraq invasion and now reportedly seek to topple the clerical regime in Iran. Reports say their pro-Iran war views may be shared at least in part by Vice President Dick Cheney and others in the Bush administration.

According to the U.S. magazine "Newsweek," in its October 1 edition, David Wurmser, a former adviser to Cheney on the Middle East, was considering a plan to press Israel to strike Iranian nuclear targets in a move that could bring the United States into a war with Tehran. Wurmser, in remarks today to the "New York Sun" daily, categorically denied those allegations.

But in a clear signal of the mood in Washington, this week the U.S. House of Representatives approved a bill that would tighten sanctions on Iran. The bill, which passed by a vote of 397 to 16, also calls on the U.S. government to list Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist group. The bill calls for sanctions against foreign companies that have U.S. subsidiaries who invest in Iran's energy sector.

A day later, the U.S. Senate passed a similar nonbinding resolution on Iran. Critics such as Democratic Senator Jim Webb of Virginia said the motion "could be read as a tantamount to a declaration of war on Iran."

But if the martial rhetoric serves the interests of "hawks" in Washington, some say it also aides "hawks" in the Middle East opposed to Iran’s ascendance in the region.

Independent author Robert Baer, who spent two decades in the Muslim world as a case officer for the Central Intelligence Agency, predicted in a recent article for the website of the U.S. magazine "Time" that there would be a military strike against Iran "within six months."

Military Caution

Last week, U.S. Admiral Fallon told Al-Jazeera television that he believed there would not be war with Iran, and called the war talk unhelpful. Similarly, General John Abizaid, Fallon's predecessor as chief U.S. commander in the Middle East, said this month that while every effort should be made to stop Iran's apparent march toward nuclear weapons, the world could live with and deter a nuclear-armed Iran.

Baer, for his part, contends that part of the Bush administration, led by Cheney, wants to strike Iran for a number of reasons including the nuclear threat, Shi’ite Iran’s growing influence in Iraq and the region, its ties to terrorism, and its alleged threat to Sunni regimes friendly to Washington, such as Saudi Arabia.

The Saudis "are saying basically, if you want to keep your 10 million barrels or 9 million barrels [of oil] a day flowing freely in international markets, and keeping the price relatively low on oil, you better come to our protection," Baer recently said. "You better do something about Iran. And they’re telling us, or what they’re telling me, is that you have to decapitate the Iranian regime."

Today's UN talks in New York effectively gave the green light for IAEA chief Muhammad el-Baradei to carry on in his efforts to try and clear up doubts about Iran's past nuclear activities. El-Baradei recently gave Iran three months to clear its record in a move criticized by Washington as a tactic to stall sanctions and evade the key issue of halting enrichment.

Reports say the Western powers are considering their own economic and political sanctions against Iran, should efforts to pass a new resolution in the Security Council prove fruitless.

Where the Iran story ultimately goes is anyone’s guess. But as September 2007 draws to a close, some have recalled a famous remark by former White House chief of staff Andrew Card.

About Washington’s Iraq media blitz in September 2002, a half-year before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Card said, "From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August."