WASHINGTON - Despite American concerns about Iran's suspected nuclear-weapons program, President Bush faces powerful diplomatic and military obstacles in trying to influence Tehran's nuclear ambitions.
After U.S. forces toppled Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, many in Washington hoped that Iran's leaders had taken away this message: The United States was back in the Middle East and Persian Gulf in force, determined to confront governments that maintained ties with terrorists and sought to acquire weapons of mass destruction.
But Iran, which Bush has dubbed part of an "axis of evil," is not Iraq.
While Iraq's economy had been crippled by a dozen years of sanctions, leaving its military brittle, Iran's has been buoyed by rising world oil and gas prices. While Hussein was isolated internationally, Iran's regime has global ties that it is strengthening thanks to the country's large oil reserves.
And with U.S. forces still battling Iraqi insurgents, the United States has few military options either for toppling Iran's regime or for striking its nuclear facilities.
The shrinking U.S. leverage prompts a growing number of analysts and Western diplomats to urge a course the Bush administration has resisted: direct contact between Washington and Tehran.
"If we continue to have an all-isolation, all-the-time policy from Washington, it's very likely that in four years Iran will have an operating uranium enrichment plant, bringing it right to the edge of a nuclear-weapons capability," said Matthew Bunn, a specialist in nuclear arms control at Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.
Having launched an invasion of Iraq based on flawed intelligence, the Bush administration has reason to be cautious in its assessments of Iran's nuclear program, which Tehran insists is intended to develop civilian nuclear power.
`Don't know enough'
"I was just in five countries in the Middle East meeting with intelligence officials, ours and theirs. And one thing we all agreed on, which is we don't know enough yet about the extent of the development of nuclear capability in Iran," Rep. Jane Harman of California, senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in a television interview Sunday.
But a series of reports by the International Atomic Energy Agency outlines a long record of Iran's attempts at concealment and show that it has made major progress toward mastering the technology that could either generate electricity or be converted to make weapons.
