Obama to Assign Top Liaison for Iran, Official Says

from Global Security Newswire

U.S. President-elect Barack Obama is expected to assign a high-level foreign policy official to oversee efforts to engage Iran on its nuclear program and other issues, the Washington Times reported today (see GSN, Dec. 18).

Obama has expressed interest in pursuing dialogue with Iran aimed at achieving a halt to activities in the Middle Eastern state that could support nuclear weapons development. Iran has defended its nuclear program as a strictly civilian effort.

"The idea is that the position should build on the existing diplomatic framework," a State Department official said.

Independent analysts supported claims about the new diplomatic post.

"There is every indication that they are seriously considering going this way," said Patrick Clawson, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy's deputy research director. National Iranian American Council head Trita Parsi also agreed that the incoming administration planned to establish the position.

The post is necessary to help coordinate Iran work across the U.S. government, said Suzanne Maloney, an Iran expert at the Brookings institution. "There is a huge interagency component to this," she said.

John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, warned that Iran is not likely to halt its disputed nuclear work in exchange for financial and political benefits. "We've lost the (nuclear) race with Iran," he said.

A high-level diplomat is likely to receive the new post, even though coordinating positions are typically provided to midranking officials, according to the State Department source. Contenders include Dennis Ross, a former envoy in Israeli-Arab talks, and Ryan Crocker, now U.S. ambassador to Iraq, the official said.

James Dobbins, a former Bush administration diplomat and another prospective candidate, yesterday said the State Department should permit its envoys to regularly communicate with Iranian diplomats (Eli Lake, Washington Times, Dec. 19).

Meanwhile, The French parliament this week completed a report warning that an Iranian nuclear weapon could become reality in the next three years, the Associated Press reported. "Iran's access to the nuclear bomb is seen as inevitable and very dangerous, notably because of the risks of escalation with the United States," the report says.

The document is notable because "we state more clearly than others our belief that they are on the threshold of the nuclear weapon," said Jean-Louis Bianco, a French Socialist Party legislator who oversaw the report's creation.

The report also advocates "extremely open" multilateral discussions with Iran to address its nuclear activities, he said.

During a trip to Paris, former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday urged the international community to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear bomb.

"We have never had a situation in the history of the world in which a radical regime with a retrograde ideology and apparently known ambitions on the use of force will get access to the weapons of mass death," Netanyahu said. "The coming year or two -- this is the time table we are talking about -- will be a pivot of history. ... If Iran acquires nuclear weapons, then a terribly dangerous threshold will be crossed," he added (Associated Press/Google News, Dec. 18).

Elsewhere, U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey has declined to participate in the probe of a Manhattan property partly owned by an Iran-linked firm he helped represent in the 1980s, the Washington Post reported today.

The Alavi Foundation co-owns an office building with a firm suspected of funneling rental profits to an Iranian bank linked to Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile programs. Newsday reported in 1995 that the foundation itself was directed by senior Iranian clerics and that high-level officials in the organization had been connected to exports of weapons and technology to Iran (Glenn Kessler, Washington Post, Dec. 19).