Rice's Warning Call to Moscow

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As UN Security Council members in New York continued to try to hash out an agreement on how best to deal with Iran's nuclear ambitions, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice added her own personal touch to the diplomatic wrangling half a world away. Rice interrupted her travels Wednesday morning through Indonesia and Australia to place a call to her Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, in Moscow. A State Department official says they discussed how best to take "firm, meaningful action" to rein in Iran, which insists it has the right to enrich uranium for what it says are peaceful purposes. But another knowledgeable U.S. official goes further, asserting that Rice called Lavrov to voice concern about his government’s continued opposition to a joint U.S.-European plan to have the Security Council call on Iran to suspend its nuclear activities. The official said that Rice warned Lavrov that Russia was becoming isolated from the rest of the Security Council; she referred, he says, to Tuesday's "informal" gathering of Security Council delegates hosted by the French UN mission. During that session, the official says, 13 of 15 representatives expressed agreement with a French-British draft proposal to have the Security Council issue a statement giving Iran two weeks to comply with the demands of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the watchdog organization that works to prevent nuclear proliferation.

The two holdouts, not surprisingly, have been Russia and China. While officials from the two nations have agreed in principle that Iran must not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons and expressed some frustration with Iran's intransigence, they have both been reluctant to act too forcefully or quickly against Tehran. According to U.S. officials, since last Friday, in a series of meetings in New York among the veto-wielding "permanent five" members of the Security Council—the U.S., Great Britain, France, Russia and China—the Russians have pushed for changes in the French-British draft that are, one U.S. official complains, "designed to gut the proposed statement." In particular, one source says, Russia is opposing setting a short deadline for Iran’s compliance and is trying to move the issue out of the Security Council and back to the less potent IAEA board.

"They’re afraid that a tough measure [will provoke] Iran into an irrational reaction" that would spur the West to demand global economic sanctions," says the U.S. official. The Russians, he says, "are not ready for sanctions. They want to buy time, stretch the process out." But no one is making it easy on them. In addition to Rice's entreaty, U.S. Ambassasdor to Russia William Burns paid a call Tuesday on Lavrov, and, according to the Interfax News Agency, French foreign minister Philippe Douste-Blazy also telephoned him.

The U.S. and its Western European allies aren’t ready to discuss economic sanctions. But officials say some diplomats have begun talking quietly to one another and to other countries about where they might squeeze their commercial relations with Iran to force the Islamist regime to suspend its research on uranium enrichment and other techologies essential to constructing a bomb.

The backroom wrangling about the wording of the Security Council statement will intensify next Monday when Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns and his counterparts from the other Permanent Members of the Security Council plus Germany convene in Manhattan. As she did with Lavrov, Rice is expected to weigh in with her peers from the other countries, but it is possible that the Iran diplomacy may reach even higher levels of government. If it becomes necessary, says one U.S. official, President Bush himself could place a call or two to Moscow and Beijing.