U.S. suddenly and puzzlingly begins talking to Iran and Syria

By Helene Cooper
WASHINGTON: In the span of two weeks, the United States has agreed to high-level contacts with Iran and Syria and to start down the path toward formal diplomatic recognition of North Korea.Has the Bush administration gone soft on its foes?As recently as Jan. 12, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice repeated what has been a constant of Bush foreign policy — a refusal to bestow on Iran, Syria and North Korea the legitimacy of diplomatic engagement with the United States as long as they refused to bend on disputed issues."That's not diplomacy," Rice said, in defending, before a Senate panel, the administration's refusal to talk to Iran and Syria. "That's extortion."In public, administration officials insisted Wednesday that the new overtures, Including an agreement to join Iran and Syria in talks on Iraq, did not mean there had been a change in policy. "There is no crack," the White House spokesman, Tony Snow, contended. "A number of people have been characterizing U.S. participation in a regional meeting as a change in policy. It is nothing of the sort."But foreign policy experts, administration critics on Capitol Hill and former diplomats disagreed, saying that the Bush administration appeared to have recognized the extent to which it had tied its hands by insisting on talking only to friends. Even Rice called the opening to Tehran and Damascus a "diplomatic initiative." "The question isn't whether the Axis of Evil is dead; it's alive as it was yesterday," said Daniel Serwer of the U.S. Institute of Peace, a former diplomat who served as executive director of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group. "The question is whether the concept, as it was applied, is dead. And it's absolutely clear to me, that you have to talk to who you have to talk to in order to get things done." Within the administration, there has long been a tug-of-war between advocates of engagement, represented by the diplomats at the State Department and sometimes headed by Rice, and those who have sought to isolate enemies, headed by Vice President Dick Cheney and defended by John Bolton, a former ambassador to the United Nations. In the period leading up to the Iraq war and the years immediately after, those pushing for isolation appeared to have the upper hand. But last November's election results, along with the morass in Iraq and a yearning for some foreign policy home runs before the Bush administration ends, have made room for proponents of engagement. A senior administration official who advocates at least a limited engagement with America's enemies said "there wasn't one big aha moment, when suddenly we were being heard." ut, he said, "there seems to be more of a recognition of the limited success" of the approach. Rice has come under criticism from conservative hard-liners, both in and out of the administration. So far, her close relationship with President George W. Bush has allowed her to prod the administration toward more engagement, something she has managed while at the same time taking pains not to push Bush further than he is willing to go, administration officials said. In the North Korea case, Rice pressed for a UN Security Council resolution of sanctions against Pyongyang after it exploded a nuclear device in October. Then, three months later, she telephoned Bush directly from Berlin, where she was traveling, to get his approval for the United States to pursue the North Korea agreement. In doing so, she bypassed layers of governmental policy review that had derailed past efforts to negotiate an agreement, administration officials said. On Wednesday, the State Department announced that as part of the agreement, in which North Korea agreed to shut its main nuclear reactor in exchange for food and fuel aid, Washington and Pyongyang will hold "working group talks" on March 5 and 6 on the normalization of relations. In the case of Iran and Syria, Rice followed a similar strategy of bad cop, good cop. In the weeks leading up to Tuesday's shift, she joined the rest of the Bush administration in increasingly confrontational rhetoric toward Iran. She accused Iran of aiding Shiite militias in attacks against American troops. She referred to "increasing lethality" in those attacks, which she said the United States would not stand for.
One senior administration official said that the hard line helped Rice answer critics who accused her of being too soft. It also, the official said, allowed the United States to sit at the table with Iran and Syria from a position of strength. "The government of the U.S. now feels as though it has leverage," another senior administration official said. "People ask, 'What's changed?' That's what's changed." It remains unclear whether an administration that has been, for so long, committed to not talking to its enemies can make a sincere about-face. At this point, administration officials caution that they have no plans to negotiate one- on-one with Iran or Syria. But they said the same thing about talks with North Korea, insisting that the United States was willing to talk to North Korea only within the confines of multilateral "six-party" talks when, actually, U.S. officials were meeting one-on-one with their North Korean counterparts. Still, there are not many people in the administration who believe that Cheney has suddenly changed his mind and now favors engagement. That means that Rice will be under pressure to show results quickly, a tall task. "You can't expect miracles here," said Lee Hamilton, the co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group, which advised the United States to engage Syria and Iran. "There has to be a sustained effort," Hamilton said. "Successful diplomacy requires very careful preparation and very extensive follow-through."