MB Civic

Editorial  |  June 1, 2006  |  The Boston GlobeTHE BUSH administration’s dramatic turnabout on direct negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program is the right thing to do, and it appears to have been done at the right time.

When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said yesterday that “as soon as Iran fully and verifiably suspends its enrichment and reprocessing activities, the United States will come to the table with our EU colleagues and meet with Iran’s representatives,” she was not only heeding sage advice from allies and former secretaries of state such as Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright. As she emphasized repeatedly, she was also giving Iran a clear choice: to obtain economic and diplomatic benefits along with civil nuclear energy under conditions acceptable to the International Atomic Energy Agency, or to incur diplomatic isolation as well as economic penalties.

What Rice did not say is that the course reversal she announced yesterday also has the potential to provide the administration with a crucial policy option it had been denying itself. Until now, President Bush has confined himself to a choice between US backing for the fruitless talks that the EU3 — France, Germany, and Britain — has been conducting with Iran and a military option that no rational policy maker would wish to exercise.

European and Russian interlocutors of Iran have been saying for some time that any deal with Tehran to preclude the development of a nuclear weapons capability would have to be negotiated directly with the United States. This is because only Washington can provide what Iran’s rulers have hinted they most desire: a lifting of US sanctions on companies doing business with Iran, the unfreezing of Iranian assets, and some form of regional security understanding, if not an explicit set of US security guarantees to Tehran.

Rice was asked about security guarantees yesterday. She responded somewhat disingenuously by alluding to US concerns about Iran’s threats to security in Iraq, Israel, and Lebanon and by saying, “We have not been asked about security assurances and I don’t expect that we will be.” When asked about conferring legitimacy on a regime she accused again yesterday of being a major sponsor of terrorism, she effectively dodged the question, saying: “What’s being provided legitimacy here is the negotiating process to which we have long been committed.”

These evasions are probably unavoidable for the time being. Rice deftly engineered administration backing for EU3 negotiations with Iran, and now she has seized on relayed messages from Tehran asking for direct talks as well as European encouragement to make possible a peaceful, diplomatic removal of the threat from Iran’s nuclear program. At Rice’s urging, Bush has made the right choice. Now Iran’s rulers must do the same.