WASHINGTON: The Bush administration has abandoned hopes it can work with President Mohammad Khatami and his reformist allies in the Iranian government and is turning its attention to appealing directly to democracy supporters among the Iranian people, administration officials said.

The policy shift, which scuttles a five-year effort in which the United States tried to explore ways to work with Khatami and encourage a reform agenda in Iran, follows an intensive review within the administration over whether to adopt a harder line toward a government President Bush has labelled part of the “axis of evil.”

A senior administration official said Bush has concluded with his senior foreign policy advisers that Khatami and his supporters in the government “are too weak, ineffective and not serious about delivering on their promises” to transform Iranian society.

Instead, the official said, “we have made a conscious decision to associate with the aspirations of Iranian people. We will not play, if you like, the factional politics of reform versus hardline.”

Bush signalled the change publicly in a strongly worded presidential statement in which he praised large pro-democracy street demonstrations in Iran. The shift cheered foreign policy experts who had urged a tougher approach toward Tehran and was a setback for the State Department, which had spearheaded efforts to engage the Khatami leadership.

In the statement, Bush said that “uncompromising, destructive policies have persisted” in Iran despite recent presidential and parliamentary elections that have brought reform advocates to power.

He accused Iranian leaders and their families of continuing “to obstruct reform while reaping unfair benefits” and demanded that the government listen to the Iranian people, who he said have “no better friend than the United States.”

Bush approved the statement earlier this month after pro- democracy protesters and Iranian security forces clashed at the demonstrations, and a top Iranian cleric, Ayatollah Jalaleddin Taheri, resigned his post to denounce what he called the “incompetence of the authorities and the failure of the political structure.”

Bush’s statement spawned fierce complaints from Iranian officials and resulted in government efforts to organize anti- US demonstrations in Tehran last week.

The Bush administration broadcast its support to the Iranian demonstrators through the Voice of America, which carried reports on Bush’s statement. Zalmay M. Khalilzad, a senior director at the National Security Council responsible for Iranian policy, gave a television interview in Farsi on Friday promoting the policy. The interview was beamed into Iran via VOA.

Since Bush grouped Iran with Iraq and North Korea as members of the “axis of evil” in his State of the Union speech in January, there has been an intense debate within the administration over how hard to signal its support for the reform movement. With signs that the demonstrations were gathering momentum, the debate this month swung toward the approach urged by the National Security Council and Pentagon, taking the State Department by surprise, officials said.

Martin Indyk, a former US ambassador to Israel now at the Brookings Institution, said the new approach carried significant risks. “This may help those we are trying to harm and harm those we are trying to help,” he said, because reformers may be tagged as agents of the United States.

Some administration officials believe the reaction inside Iran to the statement is evidence it is having its desired effect. “It has increased tensions within the regime,” an official said, citing a dispute over the weekend between the Republican Guards and reformers over whether the democracy advocates were “pawns” in a US plan to invade Iran.

But another administration official said the jury is still out. “There is a view that the country is ripe for a change,” he said. “We need to wait and sort this out. There is a question about whether opinion leaders in Iran will consider this as gross meddling or whether they will see it as well-timed.”—Dawn/The Washington Post News Service.