Analysis: Iraq talks may open new doors

The Bush administration says it's not going soft on Iran, but Washington's new agreement to talk to the clerical regime about violence in Iraq could crack the door for other discussions with the last holdout among President Bush's old axis of evil.

Iraq said Wednesday that its neighbors, including U.S. adversaries Iran and Syria, will attend a March 10 session on the country's security crisis. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made the surprise announcement Tuesday that a U.S. diplomat will also be there and that she herself will go to a later session.

It wasn't exactly an olive branch, but Rice's mild overture looked dramatic after escalating U.S. allegations that Iran is contributing to the spreading chaos in Iraq and a calculated show of U.S. military might in the Persian Gulf.

Bush administration spokesmen were quick to note that the talks are at Iraq's invitation, not Washington's. And the sessions are supposed to be about Iraq, not Iran.

"The Iraqis are putting together a meeting, and it's going to be a businesslike meeting," White House spokesman Tony Snow told reporters. "If you're expecting, suddenly, new chummy relations, you've created a scenario that is not justified by the facts on the ground or the precedents."

"Going wobbly, shift, turnabout, change," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack mocked, using several terms pulled from the morning newspapers. "Look, the administration has continued to act on a certain set of principles that it has outlined," and will keep doing so, he said.

Yet there were hints that the administration is testing Iranian, and domestic American, willingness to go further. In the diplomatic world, tough talk can sometimes be a cover for more conciliatory gestures.

"While I'm not going to point you in the direction of any particular engagement with any particular delegation ..., I'm also not going to exclude any particular diplomatic interaction," McCormack said when asked about prospects for U.S.-Iranian contact at the meetings.

The subject of sophisticated homemade bombs might come up, McCormack said. The Bush administration claims that at least one element of the Iranian regime is supplying Iraqi insurgents with especially lethal bombs that kill U.S. troops.

As for Iran's disputed nuclear program, the subject of U.S.-backed efforts to apply punishing international sanctions on Tehran, the United States won't bring it up, McCormack said.

If the Iranians want to talk about it?

"I'm sure that people would listen politely," McCormack offered, before adding that the United States is not backing off its insistence that Iran drop its uranium enrichment program as a price for escaping sanctions.

Ahmad Bakhshayesh, a Tehran Allameh University teacher in politics, said the nuclear issue probably sinks any chance of a short-term improvement in U.S.-Iranian relations from the upcoming Iraq conferences.

"However, it may lead to a broader path for negotiations between the two countries," said Bakhsayesh.

Although the United States directly accuses Iran of supporting militants in Iraq, "Iran attends the conference to indicate to the U.S., Iraq and the region that Tehran supports stability in Iraq," he said.

The United Nations Security Council has begun to consider a second, tougher round of sanctions on Iran, including a ban on travel abroad by officials involved in the nuclear program.

Rice made a bigger overture to Iran on that point last year.

If Iran shelved activities the West feared could lead to a bomb, Rice said the United States would join Europe in face-to-face talks with Tehran. That amounted to a U.S. proposal for rapprochement after more than 25 years of estrangement, but at a price Iran's hardline leaders were unwilling to pay.

The gambit was popular in Europe but unpopular in some quarters of Bush's own government. The administration has since toughened its rhetoric on Iran, flexed its muscles at the U.N. and sent two carrier battle groups to the Persian Gulf.

The White House had dismissed the recommendation from the bipartisan Iraq Study Group in December that it reach out to Syria and Iran to try to stabilize Iraq, saying both nations would try to use the opportunity as leverage in unrelated confrontations with the West.

Syria would want a free pass on allegations it is behind the assassination of a Lebanese politician, Washington said, while Iran would make cooperation in Iraq part of discussions about the nuclear program.

So, is the administration now becoming more flexible? After a separate diplomatic overture to North Korea, does the latest shift on Iran portend a retreat from the Bush administration's famously hard line against unsavory regimes?

The State Department's McCormack rolled his eyes.

"This just didn't happen overnight. This happened as a result of careful policy and diplomatic ground work that has been laid over the course of the years of this administration," but only now bearing fruit, he said.

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Associated Press writer Nasser Karimi in Tehran contributed to this report.