WASHINGTON, March 18: The White House said on Saturday Iran’s offer to hold talks with the United States on Iraq was probably just a ploy to ‘divert pressure’ Tehran has drawn over its nuclear program.
Iran waited months to agree to a US proposal to take up the issue, and did so only after Tehran’s atomic program was referred to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions, said National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley.
“The concern, therefore, is that it is simply a device by the Iranians to try to divert pressure that they are feeling in New York”, Mr Hadley told a small group of reporters on Friday.
Tehran hopes ‘to drive a wedge between the United States and the other countries with which we are working on the nuclear issue, and, if you will, divert pressure and divert attention’, he said.
A senior US official was far blunter, calling Iran’s offer ‘a stunt’ and saying that Washington may agree merely to avoid ‘criticism’ that it did not do all it can to defuse bloody tension in Iraq.
The anonymous US official said that Washington also hoped to exploit apparent grumblings in Iran about hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s handling of the nuclear issue and his country’s economy.
“We want to provoke a debate, within the (Iranian) leadership, on the wisdom of these policies,” the official said.
Mr Hadley insisted that any talks should not be read as a signal that the United States was softening its take on Iran, saying: “Nothing has changed in the concerns that we have about the Iranian regime.”
“We don’t want to, in any way, by anything we do, to legitimate this regime, particularly in the eyes of their people,” he said.
Washington announced in November that it was ready to have direct talks with Tehran about Iraq, seeking to discuss charges that Iranian weapons have been finding their way to Shia fighters in Iraq.
Iran snubbed the offer at first, but Iran’s Supreme National Security Council secretary Ali Larijani came out on Thursday after a speech to parliament and declared: “We agree to negotiate with the Americans.”
Officials in Washington have sent mixed messages on the issue, calling Iran’s offer ‘interesting’ in one breath and ‘a stunt’ in another, saying it’s a new development one minute and old news the next.
Even though Washington announced late last year that its ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, was empowered to hold talks with Iranians to discuss US complaints, US officials have suggested that Tehran, not Washington, was reaching out.
Earlier, a White House official sought out reporters to downplay the importance of the offer, saying on condition of anonymity: “It’s almost puffery: We see this all the time.”—AFP