Washington & Tehran

Does the U.S. seek friendship with Iran? Or at least a peaceful way out of the long-running feud with Tehran? I am struck by the contrasts in tone coming out of Washington lately.

As I blogged earlier, Under Secretary of State R. Nicholas Burns made some strikingly positive comments concerning U.S. attitudes toward Iran in congressional testimony last week:

"We are making every effort to improve U.S.-Iranian relations..."

"Any effective diplomatic strategy must provide one's adversary with exit doors when, as Iran has certainly done, it paints itself into a diplomatic corner..."

"I cannot emphasize this enough, we seek a diplomatic solution to the challenges posed by Iran..."

Burns's moderate tone was echoed on Saturday when the able U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, spoke to TIME's Eileen Shannon and other journalists about his encounters with Iranian diplomats at a conference on Iraq's future in Baghdad earlier that day.

When asked about his U.S. delegation's rare direct exchanges with Iranian counterparts, Khalilzad noted that he had raised the issue of Iranian interference in Iraq and then he politely noted that the Iranians had countered with a complaint of their own about U.S. forces detaining Iranians in Iraq. He summed up the exchange in surprisingly positive language, given the Bush administration's "axis of evil" rhetoric about Iran:

"There was -- overall mood was -- however, was businesslike, constructive exchanges and nobody was pounding the table or -- the exchanges were quite, I would say, not -- ordinary and there was, in a frank and sometimes even jovial exchanges...-- I think one has to be cautious about exaggerating the impact of what has happened, but what has happened, in my view, also cannot be dismissed. It was a good meeting."

Much sharper in tone was Dick Cheney's talk about Iran Monday night at the annual meeting of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee:

"In 2006, freedom's enemies struck back with new tactics and greater fury. In Lebanon, Hezbollah terrorists who are supported by Iran and Syria, attacked Israel, killing Israelis and sending rockets into civilian areas and have since worked to undermine Lebanon's democratically elected government..."

"So let me say that a precipitous American withdrawal from Iraq would be a disaster for the United States and the entire Middle East. It's not hard to imagine what could occur if our coalition withdrew before Iraqis could defend themselves. Moderates would be crushed, Shiite extremists backed by Iran could be in an all-out war with Sunni extremists led by al Qaeda and remnants of the old Saddam regime. As this battle unfolded, Sunni governments might feel compelled to back Sunni extremists in order to counter growing Iranian influence, widening the conflict into a regional war..."

"If Iran's allies prevailed, the regime and Teheran's own designs for the Middle East would be advanced and the threat to our friends in the region would only be magnified."

-By Scott MacLeod/Cairo