US plans new Iran steps: White House

The White House says it has more steps planned to entice Iran to engage in dialogue after President Barack Obama offered a "new beginning" to turn back the tide on decades of mutual animosity.

Obama's historic online video message marking the Iranian New Year Nowruz was the latest dramatic step in an emerging diplomatic strategy designed to prod Iran to the negotiating table or bring consequences to bear if it refuses.

Asked whether the White House hoped the message would launch an ongoing dialogue with Iran, as Washington and its allies try to halt Tehran's nuclear program, the president's spokesman Robert Gibbs said Friday "obviously, there will need to be some evaluation overall with our policies."

He told reporters that a follow-up move had already been penciled out, "and there are many more, but none of which I am going to get into today."

But The New York Times reported Saturday, citing unnamed officials and diplomats, that among other measures being weighed by the administration are a direct communication from Obama to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran?s supreme leader, and an end to a prohibition on direct contacts between junior US diplomats and their Iranian counterparts around the world.

Obama's appeal urged an end to decades of animosity and offered "honest" engagement with the Islamic republic.

In a decisive break with his predecessor George W. Bush, Obama called Nowruz celebrations a time of "new beginnings" and said Iran could take its "rightful place" in the world if it renounced terror and embraced peace.

"For nearly three decades, relations between our nations have been strained," he said. "But at this holiday, we are reminded of the common humanity that binds us together."

Iran responded by welcoming Obama's olive branch but urged him to take concrete steps to repair US "mistakes."

"We welcome the wish of the president of the United States to put away past differences," President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's press adviser Ali Akbar Javanfekr said.

"But the way to do that is not by Iran forgetting the previous hostile and aggressive attitude of the United States. The American administration has to recognize its past mistakes and repair them as a way to put away the differences."

Another complication in unfreezing the hostility between the longtime foes is Iran's presidential elections in June, whose outcome could have an impact on any potential engagement. Several reformist candidates are running against incumbent hardliner Ahmadinejad.

Iran and the United States have not had diplomatic ties since 1980, a year after Iran became an Islamic republic and in the wake of the 1979 hostage taking of US diplomats by Islamist students at the US embassy in Tehran.

Bush lumped Iran in an "Axis of Evil" with North Korea and Saddam Hussein's Iraq, then led international accusations that the Islamic republic is seeking to build a nuclear bomb and supporting militant Islamic groups such as Lebanon's Hezbollah and the Palestinian Hamas movement.

"The most important part of the message was the fact that President Obama explicitly stepped away from the tradition of the Bush administration, which was to very deliberately try to insert a wedge between Iranian leaders and the people," said Suzanne Maloney, an Iran specialist and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

"In this case what you have is President Obama speaking directly to the leadership and even referencing the country as the Islamic Republic of Iran, which if not unprecedented is highly unusual for an American leader."

Reeling from international sanctions that Obama has vowed to stiffen if Iran refuses his olive branch, the Iranian government maintains its nuclear program is peaceful.

The United States has also said that Iran will be invited to a March 31 conference on Afghanistan in the Hague to be attended by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.







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