SEN. RICHARD G. LUGAR (R-IN): This hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is called to order. The committee meets today to examine the United States' policy toward Iran, with particular focus on our response to Iran's continued pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability.

The United States has a clear interest in preventing such an Iranian capability. Iran has been a destabilizing force in the Middle East.

As former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wrote in The Washington Post last week, and I quote: "Everything returns to the challenge of Iran. It trains, finances and equips Hezbollah, the state within a state in Lebanon. It finances and supports Muqtada al- Sadr's militia, the state within a state in Iraq. It works on a nuclear weapons program which would drive nuclear proliferation out of control and provide a safety net for the systemic destruction of at least the regional order." End of Henry Kissinger's quote.

Diplomatic efforts to persuade Iran to halt its enrichment and reprocessing activities have continue in fits and starts. In July and August, Iran turned down a package of incentives offered by the five permanent members of the Security Council, plus Germany. Iran also rejected U.N. Security Council Resolution 1696, which required the suspension of its enrichment activities.

In recent days, we have seen reports of additional European attempts at dialogue with Iran, against the backdrop of impending United Nations sanctions.

This committee has devoted much attention to examining Iran's nuclear intentions and U.S. policy options. Last May 17th and 18th, we held a two-hearing series on this topic.

Our witnesses -- experts from academia and policy organizations -- judged that the Iranian leadership is highly motivated to pursue a nuclear weapons capability by national pride, the desire to have a potent military deterrent, and the goal of greatly expanding influence in the region.

Our experts said that Iran will not easily be dissuaded from its current path, but that the leadership would not be prepared to sacrifice everything. They also noted that there are some divergent views within the Iranian regime on the wisdom of pursuing a nuclear weapons capability in defiance of international will.

The task for American diplomats must be to bolster that international will and construct an international consensus in favor of a plan that presents the Iranian regime with a stark choice between the benefits of accepting a verifiable cessation of their nuclear program and the detriments of proceeding along their current course.

The United States currently has in place extensive unilateral economic sanctions against Iran. Some have suggested that the Congress should pass legislation targeting additional unilateral sanctions against foreign companies that invest in Iran.

I understand the impulse to take this step. But given the evident priority that the Iranians assign to their nuclear program, I see little chance that such unilateral sanctions would have any effect on Iranian calculations. Such sanctions would, however, be a challenge to the very nations that we are trying to coalesce behind a more potent, multilateral approach to Iran.

We should not take steps that undermine our prospects for garnering international support for multilateral sanctions, which offer better prospects for achieving our objectives than unilateral measures. If we're able to proceed with multilateral sanctions in the U.N., we should recall the lessons of the United Nations sanctions regime against Iraq.

To the extent possible, the sanctions should be targeted on the Iranian regime, or on maximizing popular disconnect with the regime. Sanctions also must be designed to achieve the broadest international support over potentially many years. If a sanctions regime lacks the full commitment of the international community, it is more likely to be undermined by leakage and corruption.

If the United States pursues sanctions in the United Nations, it's important that we continue to explore potential diplomatic openings with Iran, either through our own efforts, or those of our European negotiating partners. Even if such efforts ultimately are not fruitful, they may reduce risks of miscalculation, improve our ability to interpret what is going on in Iran, and strengthen our efforts to enlist the support of key nations to oppose Iran's nuclear weapons program.

We're delighted to be joined today by two distinguished panels, to help us assess these issues and evaluate policy options.

On the first panel we welcome back our good friend, undersecretary of state for political affairs, Mr. Nicholas Burns. And we look forward to his assessment of current diplomatic efforts.

On the second panel, we welcome three experts in the field.

Dr. Ashton Carter, co-director of the Preventive Defense Project at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. He's a former senior official in the Defense Department, who, with former defense secretary, William Perry, has recently led a blue ribbon workshop on the Iranian nuclear issue.

Ambassador Martin Indyk, director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. He grappled with the challenges posed by Iran as assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs in the 1990s.

And Dr. Ray Takeyh, senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He's an expert on Iran's complex internal politics.

We welcome all of our witnesses, and we look forward to your testimony.

First, I would like to call upon the distinguished ranking member of our committee.

Senator Biden?

BIDEN: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And I'd ask unanimous consent that my entire statement be placed in the record as if read.

LUGAR: It will be placed in the record in full.

BIDEN: And let me just say that, to state the obvious, Iran has failed to comply. This is a very important moment for a real test for our diplomacy, a real test for the U.N.'s tenacity, and for our partners' seriousness, and no easy answers.

I am looking forward to the testimony today of a very, very distinguished panel. And I know one thing will come out of this. And that is, the tendency occasionally on this debate is to hype and exaggerate on the one side, or completely dismiss on the other, the consequences of Iran failing to change course.

The one thing I know from the witnesses before us, we're going to get a balanced, reasoned number of suggestions from them as to how to proceed.

And I am more interested in hearing what they have to say than essentially seconding everything you said in your statement, because if you read my statement, you'll see it's very, very similar.

So, I'm delighted that the undersecretary is here. I have great admiration for Nick Burns, and I'm anxious to hear his testimony.

LUGAR: Thank you very much, Senator Biden.

Now to you, Secretary Burns. Your full statement will be made a part of the record, and please proceed as you wish.

 

STATEMENT OF

R. NICOLAS BURNS
Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs
U.S. Department of State

 

BURNS: Mr. Chairman, thank you very much for the invitation to be with you and Senator Biden, other members of the committee. Thank you very much for this opportunity.

I will -- I have introduced my full statement for the record. I will not read it to you. I thought what I would do is just try to frame the issue of how we deal with Iran as a country, and then go into the nuclear and terrorism issues, both of which I assume will be of interest to the committee.

Mr. Chairman, it was a turbulent summer in the Middle East. And in the aftermath of that, there's no question that the United States faces a considerable challenge from the Iranian government.

Iran was offered -- has been offered -- a historic opportunity to reintegrate into the international community. But its leadership, in our judgment, is continuing along a path of confrontation and isolation, because it's refusing to abandon its pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Iran, in recent months, escalated its efforts to sow discord and to foment violence in both Iraq and in Lebanon. At home, the Iranian regime renewed its campaign against journalists, against intellectuals and against democratic activists, as President Ahmadinejad tried to turn back the clock and re-impose the obsolete orthodoxies of the revolution of 1979.

Individually, these aspects of Iran's foreign and domestic policy, its nuclear ambitions, its support for terrorism, its efforts to subvert our interests in the regime and internal repression, present a profound set of concerns for the United States.

Viewed comprehensively, it is clear that Iran's regime poses a complex and multidimensional threat to an array of fundamental American interests, both in the Middle East and globally.

The United States has no higher priority than facing and overcoming this threat, and we look forward very much to working on that basis with both this committee and with the Congress.

The challenge of dealing with Iran is further complicated by history, and especially of the painful events of a generation ago. We still remember in the State Department, Iran's seizure of our embassy in Teheran in November, 1979. They took 52 American diplomats hostage and held them there for over 400 days.

And one bitter legacy of that dispute is the absence of formal diplomatic relations, and even any kind of regular diplomatic contacts between our country and Iran. And that's been going on for nearly 27 years.

We have no illusions about the nature of the Iranian regime, or about its objectives. We believe that Iran's leadership aspires to preserve their place in power, and to extend and entrench their influence over their neighbors in the Middle East.

They view the presence in the region of the United States, and of our allies, as the paramount obstacle to their regional ambitions. In many ways, the current leadership -- especially President Ahmadinejad and his supporters -- are attempting to make Iran once again a revolutionary power in the Middle East.

They're seeking radical change inside Iran by returning to the zeal and purity, as they see it, of the early years of the revolution under the Ayatollah Khomeini.

In their foreign policy, they are pursuing a course of aggressive behavior from their arming of Hezbollah with long-range rockets to strike Israel -- this past summer they held a million Israeli civilians hostage for 30 days during that campaign -- their efforts to create a nexus of terrorism, as they have routinely held summit meetings and planning meetings with Syria, with Hamas, with Hezbollah, with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command.

This is a newly aggressive foreign policy. It is different from what we have seen in recent years. And it is expressed most ominously in what most countries conclude around the world to be a national effort by Iran to acquire a nuclear weapons capability. That is the challenge as we see it.

Now, the urgency and complexity of that challenge requires an equally vigorous and multifaceted response by our country and by our allies. And during the past 12 months we have worked, as you know, very hard to mobilize a strong international coalition, designed to make clear to Iran that there will be an increasing cost to its behavior on the nuclear front, as well as to its support for terrorism, and there will be consequences in a variety of ways, first and foremost at the United Nations Security Council. And that is in play this week.

We have been intensifying pressure on the Iranian regime since a year ago, since Ahmadinejad's inauguration, and since he abruptly and unilaterally walked out of Iran's negotiations with the European Three countries. Since then, we have worked in the IAEA to pass two resolutions, that have found Iran not to be in compliance with their international obligations concerning nuclear power and nuclear research and their scientific activities.

We were joined in those votes, not just by the E.U.-3, but by Russia and China. And Russia and China have been a big part of this coalition. We were also then joined by India and by Egypt, and by Brazil in the second vote, in the IAEA on February 4th, which we believe sent a resounding message to Iran, that it is increasingly isolated on this question.

And then -- against the predictions of the Iranian government and a lot of people who didn't think that we'd be able to do this -- we were able to move this issue to the Security Council in March, and we have set up a series of escalating steps to pressure the Iranians since then.

Now, our strategy towards Iran does not begin and end with the Security Council. We're also working in coordination with the government of Lebanon in the aftermath of the war, and with our European allies, to reinforce the arms embargo provided in Resolution 1701 -- the resolution that brought about a cessation of hostilities.

One of the causes of the war, in our judgment, was the fact that Iran had so heavily armed, as well as Syria, Hezbollah, and that it allowed Hezbollah to undertake the attack across the border that it did. We want to enforce the U.N. Security Council arms embargo to make sure that those types of shipments do not continue.

We are also working with the Iraqi government to mitigate Iran's influence there, and to try to stem the assistance that we know Iran is giving to insurgent groups, including the provision of very sophisticated IED technology, that has been injurious to our troops, as well as to British troops.

More broadly -- and I think you saw comments from Secretary Paulson, following his meeting in Singapore the other day -- we are working with the financial community worldwide to impress upon them the cost of doing business with Iran, and we're making the case that Iran is not a good risk for further investment in any field. We're beginning to see banks decide that they will not continue with new lending to Iran, and some European and Asian banks actually curtailing their operations quite significantly.

Mr. Chairman, we very much agree with you. The United States will not be successful in confronting the Iran challenge by unilateral measures. We have had unilateral sanctions in place in Iran for nearly a generation, for 25 years.

What is more important now is to fashion this larger international construct of countries on the diplomatic plane at the United Nations, financially through the efforts of Secretary Paulson and others, to raise the cost to Iran of its present behavior, on both the nuclear and terrorism issues.

And we intend to proceed on that basis. And having established this international consensus, with just a few exceptions over the past year, we're confident that this is the best way to give diplomacy a chance -- and we wish to give it a chance, as President Bush said that other day -- and to make diplomacy effective.

The only countries that we can find that clearly do not agree with this international consensus on Iran are Cuba and Venezuela and Belarus and Syria. The four of them have consistently voted to protect Iran, whether it's in the IAEA or in the United Nations.

But Iran can't count on the Perm Five countries. In fact, it can count on us to impose a sanctions regime, should that become necessary, and we can talk about the specifics of that.

It can no longer count on leading members of the Nonaligned Movement, and I mentioned some of them -- Egypt and Brazil and India, all of which have voted against Iran.

So, we think this is the best way forward. I'll be very happy to answer to any questions that you and the other members have on that basis.

I thought I should just -- since it's so much in the news, Mr. Chairman -- just brief you, give you an update on where we stand on the effort to sanction Iran in the United Nations Security Council.

You'll remember that we made an offer to the P-5 countries and Germany to Iran back on June the 1st. And we said there are two paths forward. If you are willing to suspend your enrichment-related and reprocessing programs, your nuclear research at the plant at Natanz, we are willing, all of us, to offer a package of economic and scientific and technological incentives.

President Bush talked the other day about the willingness of the United States to see an international effort to try to create nuclear power for Iran's civilians. And that was the positive offer made on June 1st.

There was also a second choice, a negative offer, made to Iran then. And the second choice was, if you can't do this, if you proceed unfettered in your nuclear activities at Natanz, then we will proceed with the sanctions resolution. That was on June 1st.

There were then a series of meetings that Javier Solana, representing the P-5 and Germany, had with the Iranian leadership, but he didn't get anywhere with them, in the month of June and the month of July.

On July 12th, our foreign ministers all met in Paris, and they said in a statement, should Iran not meet these conditions by the 31st of August, we will proceed to a sanctions resolution. And then on July 31st, we were able to pass, by a vote of 14 to one, a sanctions resolution, in essence, authorizing sanctions -- Resolution 1696.

We've said that we would act under Chapter VII, Article 41, to impose a sanctions regime in Iran, should it not meet the conditions. Well, the deadline expired on August 31st, and then it appears the Iranians got interested in putting forth serious views.

So now, Mr. Chairman, we are, in effect, in extra innings. And at the Security Council this week, we assume that Dr. Ali Larijani, the secretary of the Iranian national security council, will show up in New York. We assume that he will have a series of conversations with the European leadership -- not with the United States -- and we hope that on behalf of his government, he will say that Iran is willing to suspend all of its nuclear research programs. And that will be verified by Dr. ElBaradei and the IAEA apparatus in Vienna.

Should that be the case, President Bush and Secretary Rice have been very straightforward. The United States will appear at the negotiating table with Iran for the first time in 27 years. We will seek to end their nuclear research programs through diplomacy.

But should that not be the case, and since we're in extra innings, we can't wait forever -- and there's a very short timeline here -- then President Bush and Secretary Rice, as recently as this morning, said publicly that we will seek to impose a sanctions regime on the Iranian government.

We believe, as you suggested, Mr. Chairman, that those sanctions in their first phase -- and there may be multiple phases of graduated sanctions on Iran -- should be focused on their leadership and should be focused on their nuclear program, and should be designed to curtail the kind of dual-use exports that we believe make it possible for the Iranians to conduct nuclear research by using technologies that are now permissible under the international trade guidelines.

We believe we have unity among the Perm Five countries and Germany to do this. And as recently as yesterday afternoon, that unity was in place.

So, the Iranians have a clear choice to make. That choice is in New York this week. And we very much hope that Iran will make the right choice, so that negotiations can proceed and diplomacy can proceed.

Mr. Chairman, if I could just make two more points and I'll conclude these opening remarks.

We're also concerned by Iran's support for terrorism. We've often said -- and I believe in testimony before this committee -- that, in effect, Iran is the central banker of Middle East terrorism.

If you look at the three or four major terrorist groups -- the ones that are designed, that have as their objective the destruction of the state of Israel, that have carried out terrorist attacks against Israel and against other allies of the United States -- they are all being funded by Iran. The Iranian leadership meets with them routinely, and we believe there is also political control over many of these organizations by the intelligence services of the Iranian state.

That is a very serious challenge to our country. We take it seriously, and you can believe that we're taking measures to confront that challenge.

We also have a challenge of Iran in Iraq. There's no question that Iran is not standing up for unity among the various groups in Iraq -- quite the contrary.

And there's also abundant evidence, as we have said now for a solid year, that the Iranians have supplied sophisticated IED technology to Shia insurgent groups, and that that technology has been used against our soldiers and the soldiers of the United Kingdom. That is a very serious matter. We're also confronting that issue.

We also know that after the destruction of Al Qaida in Afghanistan, in the autumn of 2001 and the winter of 2002, after they fled, some of the Al Qaida membership fled to Iran. It is sometimes said that they are under house arrest there, but Iran has not prosecuted them. Iran has not turned them over to their countries of origin. And we have serious concern that these people may be able to operate in a somewhat free environment. And that is, of course, of great concern to us, as well.

So, terrorism -- going back now to the early 1980s and the creation of Hezbollah and Iran's sponsorship of Hezbollah, continuing through the attacks against us in the Gulf in the '90s -- terrorism is an abiding concern that we have with Iran. It's a front order concern, and we are facing it squarely.

Finally, I just wanted to thank the Congress, this committee, the Senate and the House, for having given us, in supplemental fashion this year, $66 million, so that we might proceed in our efforts to promote democracy in Iran, and to help those inside that country who wish to have a different future.

We're using the majority of that money to increase the ability of VOA Persian broadcast to broadcast into Iran from one hour a day a year ago to 12 hours a day by January of next year -- January of 2007 -- also to increase the ability of Radio Farda, our Persian language radio service, into Iran.

Because there ought to be a competition for ideas in Iran, and there ought to be a political debate informed by free ideas and free information. And so, we take that responsibility seriously. And we thank the Congress for the financing that you've given us that enabled us to expand these programs.

President Bush said the other day in his press conference, that he also hoped that we would be able to dramatically expand the people- to-people contacts between Iran and the United States.

This is a most unusual relationship. I can't think of a relationship with any country in the world that is more unusual and more closed than that of the relationship between Iran and the United States.

We're now planning athletic exchanges, medical exchanges, professorial exchanges, people-to-people exchanges from people in all walks of life, so that we can bring Americans in much larger -- Iranians, excuse me -- in much larger numbers to this country, and hopefully have the kind of exchanges that, in the long term, might help us over the horizon to begin to have a more normal relationship and a more normal dialogue, especially between Iranians outside of their governmental apparatus.

And third, we're using some of the funding that you've provided us to try to give support on a grassroots basis to the nongovernmental community in Iran and to those who wish to see democracy as the future of Iran.

There's not much that one can say in open session about this. We're trying to be very careful not to in public release the identity of the people with whom we're working, for obvious reasons. But there is a lot more we can say in closed session, and I'd be happy to do that, should you be interested.

So, Mr. Chairman, that constitutes a summary of my opening remarks. You have the full statement that we provided for the record last evening, and I look forward to your questions.

LUGAR: Well, thank you very much, Secretary Burns.

The chair notes that we have good attendance, and perhaps more coming, and likewise, the distinguished panel to follow. And a roll- call vote at approximately noon, or thereabouts.

So, with all those constraints in mind and doing the math, I'm going to suggest an eight-minute limit, and I hope that members will adhere to that as much as possible so that we will be able to hear the second panel and have a good questioning of them, too.

Let me begin the questioning, Secretary Burns, by just asking, because of your experience in dealing with Iran close up for some time now, most of the accounts of Iran in the popular press stress the large number of very poor people in the country, that there are large stretches of the countryside in which whatever oil wealth, or other wealth that might have come from commerce, has not been widely shared, and that these, in a normal state, would be daunting -- maybe are -- in Iran.

But this by-play (ph), at least between those persons looking for a better life -- maybe a majority of the people of the country -- and those in control, do not really surface often. And so, I raise it today.

Secondly, we're often told about the students, or the young people, population of Iran -- apparently, a majority under 25, or some such age as that -- of persons who may or may not share the strength of the theological views of the leadership.

On the other hand, have never shown particular signs of resisting, either, of cell groups or others attempting to get into regime change on a generational level, apparently waiting for the old people to die out in due course, and then they come into their own.

So, these are two significant groups of people in a complex country, admittedly. And as you've said, conceivably always, a possibility for person-to-person exchanges, which haven't occurred.

Many people who have been to Iran have enjoyed pretty good colloquies as young people. I've visited with young people in our country who have gone in there and had quite a good time, with the thought that essentially, so long as they kept it private, they would not get in trouble with their elders and the religious folk, and so forth.

Now, on top of that, the current president of the country, who will be speaking to the U.N. shortly after our president, is something else altogether.

And here, people who are into historical quests say, listen, Iran is a country that in its tradition and its historical, its ancient history and its aspirations, is destined, if not to rule the world, to be a dominant force in pulling together either people in the Middle East or on a religious basis, or so forth.

In other words, what we're witnessing is the clash of civilizations idea. And Iran's seeking nuclear weapons -- see that as a very important point of at least having all the resources necessary to be a dominant power, not only in that area, but universally in the minds, at least, of more grandiose scholars about this situation.

Now, with these conflicting views coming and going, how do Iranian statesmen actually come to a point, as you're discussing -- and Mr. Ahmadinejad may, in New York today, have distilled at least something out of conflicting groups within the government, if not within society, that might bring about negotiations first with the Europeans, as you suggested, then maybe even with us.

How does this come about? How have you witnessed the development of diplomatic policy in Iran?

BURNS: Mr. Chairman, thank you. I think you have asked the central question.

What are the objectives of the Iranian government? What type of world do they wish to live in? What type of policies do they seek to establish in the Middle East, as they clearly flex their muscles in the Middle East region?

We are limited somewhat, because, as you know, we have no diplomatic contact with them. I've been in the United States Foreign Service for nearly 25 years. I've never met an Iranian government official. And that's true with nearly all of my colleagues.

And so, we observe. And there's been a great deal of observation taking place.

As you know, we've recently established in Dubai a section of American diplomats who are solely focused on Iran. That was something we felt we had to do to increase our understanding of that country. We built up a new Iran desk in the State Department at Secretary Rice's instruction, so that we might devote greater resources to the effort of understanding the Iranians.

But I think it's clear -- and I know Ray Takeyh is the great expert on this, and he'll follow me -- I think it's clear that we're not looking at a monolith. This is a country undergoing a vast transformation in a way that views itself, both in its internal arrangements. There's a furious debate about the lack of democracy, about the repression of journalists and the repression of students and democrats.

There's also a great debate in Iran about its foreign policy, about what kind of country it should be in the world. You saw some of that in the recent visit of the former Iranian President Khatami, who came here and spoke to many Americans.

He said that, in his view, as I understood it -- we did not meet with him, but I read his comments -- he didn't agree with President Ahmadinejad that Israel should be wiped off the map of the world. He didn't agree that the Holocaust, the historical accuracy of the Holocaust, should be put into question.

So, there are many voices.

And what we hope will emerge is an Iranian government that realizes that a policy of the type espoused by Ahmadinejad -- of aggressive behavior in the region, which has a lot of the Arab countries very concerned, a clear effort to create a nuclear weapons capability and a clear effort to continue the funding of terrorist groups -- that's going to create a vast international coalition against Iran.

And that is happening. And you can see that today.

On the other hand, there are others in the Iranian government and political system arguing for integration with the rest of the world, investment and trade, more moderate foreign policies that don't frighten the Sunni Arab regimes, that don't pit themselves against the United States or Russia or China or the European countries on the nuclear issue. And so, we'll have to see how this debate plays out.

It is often said that the youth of the country are frustrated, that they want democracy in their country; they don't want to live under these very harsh provisions of the Islamic theocracy, the ruling of theocracy.

And so, it's going to be very important that we understand these challenges inside the country. That's why we're devoting so many more resources of our government to do so, and to react to it.

What concerns us is the policy of President Ahmadinejad and his supporters. We have to take seriously what they say.

They seem to conceive of themselves as a revolutionary power. And they want to stir up some of the revolutionary sentiment of a quarter of a century ago and embark both internally and externally with the type of policies with which we have to profoundly disagree.

And so, our job and our challenge is to confront those policies and to blunt what the Iranians are trying to do on the terrorist issue and nuclear issue, and turn them back.

As President Bush and Secretary Rice have been saying, we are choosing diplomacy. We are seeking a diplomatic way forward. We've invested a tremendous amount of our energy and diplomatic capital in diplomacy.

We believe that there can be -- it's not assured -- but there can be a diplomatic way forward on this nuclear issue. That's why we're working so hard in New York this week at the Security Council, to see if the Iranians can stand down in the nuclear program and agree to negotiations.

Secretary Rice said this morning, if they do that and if it's verified, Secretary Rice will appear at the negotiating table and engage them -- in a very tough way -- on all these issues.

LUGAR: My time has concluded. I would just say, I appreciate the thought that all of us -- people in public life and Americans -- might become much better informed about Iran in a hurry. We really need to know the country and the people well.

This is very serious. And I think, in terms of any background as the public continues to focus on this, everything you can do to work with us to make that possible would be appreciated.

Senator Biden?

BIDEN: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Let me say at the outset. I don't have a question, and I'm going to try not to take my full eight minutes.

Nick, I'm more encouraged by what you said today than anything I've heard from the administration. The president likes to kid when I said to him about a year-and-a-half ago in a meeting.

He said -- he asked me a question and I said, "Well, that's nuance, Mr. President." And he kiddingly put his hands on my shoulder and said, "I'm George Bush. I don't do nuance."

It's -- obviously, you're figuring out we have to do nuance here.

The fact of the matter is, I think we are woefully uninformed. And at least in the public forum, there's virtually no discussion about the nuance that exists within Iran.

You said several very interesting things. And you talked about moderates within Iran. You talked about the distinction among some of the present and former leaders and their attitude toward Israel, their attitude toward a number of different issues.

It seems to me the central question is, how do you isolate the extremists without killing the moderates?

Most of what we suggested, it seems to me -- and I'm anxious to hear the panel talk about this a little bit -- is that, I think we've actually underestimated -- and I don't purport to be an expert in Iran -- we vastly underestimate recent history and its impact upon the attitude of Iranians generally, and how it has affected all the strata of political leadership.

You look at Saddam's use of chemical weapons against the Iranians years ago, with apparently the blessing of the West and the rest of the world, everyone remaining silent.

You have to ask the question, which is not popular to ask among all of us in public life. You have ask, you know, sometimes paranoia is well founded. You know, if you were sitting in Iran and you had a democratic government, would you want a nuclear capability? If the answer to that would be "yes," then it seems to me that indicates there's got to be other kinds of incentives to deal with that.

If it's not just -- the way we make it out to be is, they're just a bunch of these crazies -- and some of them are crazy -- and Ahmadinejad out there, as if he's one in line with the clerics.

I'm going to ask the panel. That's not my information. My information is there's an internal struggle -- an internal struggle between Ahmadinejad and the theocracy, that the question is, how long are they going to let him -- how long is the leash going to be?

The discussions I have with Iranian experts relates to the conflict that exists at that level. Yet we talk about it -- and until you spoke today -- I'm sure the administration has said what you've said before. I just haven't heard it.

What I've heard mostly is absolutes, that we seem to know exactly what's happening.

I find -- it seems to me, one of the most hopeful prospects for us is, in order for us to succeed in dissuading Iran from making this next leap, are the Iranian people.

If I'm not mistaken, we are at least as well off, if not better off, in terms of public opinion in Iran than we are in other countries who supposedly our allies, in France. And that seems to me, there's a hell of a -- heck of a pull (ph) there to deal with.

And it always surprises me, our unwillingness to publicly engage on a world stage even the bad guys in Iran, in order to give some sustenance or some argumentation, some support for those moderate voices inside Iran.

You pointed out that there's a need to vastly -- I think you, maybe you didn't say "vastly" -- but significantly expand exchange programs.

What's the purpose of that? Well, the purpose of that is to expose Iranians to our point of view.

Yet Iranians don't get exposed to our point of view. All they really get exposed to is our bellicose response to generally bellicose initiatives by the Iranians. There's hardly anything else that I see that comes forward.

And so, the fact that we talk and we use terms like, you know, this is really a religiously motivated attempt to reestablish the caliphate and the nuclear weapon over there -- if I'm not mistaken, only 15 percent of the entire Muslim world is Shia. And if I'm not mistaken, they aren't very well suited to lead the 85 percent of the Muslim world that is Sunni.

That kind of -- maybe I'm confused about that. Yet we conflate the two all the time. We talk about it as if there is only one concern we have, and it's all -- they're all basically jihadists who sup from the same cup.

I don't see it that way. And I hope that you continue to -- and the secretary, assuming, Mr. Secretary, have influence -- to get a much more nuanced picture of what's going on inside this country.

It seems to me that nationalism plays a pretty significant part. For example -- and I'll end with this -- you hear constantly calls for the need for us to go "take out" the Iranian nuclear facilities as best we can -- take them out now, don't wait to do that.

First of all, we can't take them all out, but we could take some out and slow things up.

I may be mistaken -- I'm going to ask this question -- but my concern is, that may be the single most unifying act we could engage in, the thing that would most unify all those moderates to extremists in that country.

So, I hope we are much more sophisticated than we were when we went into Iraq. I hope we are much more sophisticated than we have been since we've gone into Iraq.

And I look forward to -- and I mean this sincerely -- your influence on the administration, or your representation of the administration, that seems to be moving in the direction that understands that there may not be any single answer, and we may be leaving some of our best assets on the table in terms of this issue.

In conclusion, I find it difficult -- my dad used to say -- when I was kid I'd say something and he's say, "Champ, if everything's equally important to you, nothing is important to you."

What's most important to us, stopping their nuclear program or stopping their support of terror? They're both very bad things. Very bad things.

If we could get a verifiable deal on enrichment, verifiable deal on missiles, would we make a deal with them and recognize them, and then fight them on a different front in terms of their support of terror? Or do we have to have a total deal to change the relationship?

And I also, as I know three of the people sitting in the middle here, at least, have said in some form or another relating to other countries, the policy of regime change makes it difficult to negotiate.

It's a little like my sitting down and saying, you know, I want to work out an agreement with you about how we're going to deal with that property next door that we both have an interest in. And then after we do that and work that out, then I'm going to eliminate you. And then I'm going to take out your property. I'm going to deprive you of ownership.

I find that kind of fascinating, why we think someone's going to sit down and actually make a deal, when they know at the end of the deal we still say they should be gone.

But sometime maybe we can talk about that. My time's up.

LUGAR: Thank you very much, Senator Biden.

Senator Hagel?

HAGEL: Mr. Chairman, thank you. Secretary Burns, welcome.

I would like to follow along the comments of Chairman Lugar and Senator Biden, Mr. Secretary, and just reemphasize that we are dealing -- as you have noted, and we will hear more specifically from the second panel on this issue -- with a country that, as we all have some sense of this, has deep internal complications.

And as you have suggested -- using a current example of former President Khatami's days here in the United States and what he said and the disagreements that he expressed with the current leadership -- we should not undervalue or underestimate those deep internal complications -- I think, contradictions.

I think we are dealing with a country -- and I am no expert on Iran or any other country, but I do listen to experts carefully. And I think we are dealing with a country at a time in its history that is, in fact, full of contradictions.

If there's anything that I hope we have learned from our invasion of Iraq in not planning carefully about who was going to govern after we disposed of Saddam Hussein, it is surely that those next sets of questions that are always difficult to answer, but need to be answered and certainly challenged as we work our way through these great diplomatic challenges of our time.

Iran presents for us and the world the consummate example of what we didn't do right in Iraq, in my opinion. We are in a mess in Iraq and in the Middle East, partly because we didn't do enough to understand those complications -- religious, tribal, historical -- a lot of differences, just as Senator Biden has noted, between Persian Shias and Arab Shias.

And I think what is most important, at least in my opinion here, Mr. Secretary, is that we carefully examine all of these pieces before we put ourselves, our country and the world in a very dangerous position, that we have worked ourselves into a corner and we can't get out.

In fact, if, as you have noted regarding influence that Iran has in Iraq -- and that's, I suspect, debatable, and we'll hear more about that from the second panel -- I happen to believe that Iran probably has more influence in Iraq today than any other country for a lot of reasons.

And I say that partly because, if you look at the current Iraqi leadership, as you know, we have just had a visit in Iran with the Iranian leadership from the Iraqi prime minister. The Iraqi president has been there.

We also know that the Iraqi and Iranian oil companies are doing business. As a matter of fact, we know that, because Iraq does not have the kind of refining capacity that it needs, that it is shipping crude to Iran, and Iran is exchanging that crude with refined products.

There is a very significant amount of not only commerce going on, but diplomacy, as well as other exchanges.

That says to me, Mr. Secretary, that aside from the fact that Iran is in some way involved in -- as we know from some limited intelligence -- other activities in Iraq, I have believed for some time that we will see no peace, no stability, no security in the Middle East until Iran is part of that.

I don't see how it can happen, whether it's the Israeli-Arab issue, or whatever dimension that you apply to security in the Middle East.

Now, I would ask you this question. You say that we are -- the United States -- leading a coalition that is becoming, I think in your words, a vast international coalition against Iran to isolate Iran.

But how can you say that, when we have, for example, one of the permanent members of the Security Council's comments -- President Chirac today on the front pages of all the papers talking about sanctions -- sanctions is not the responsible way to go?

We know there are two other members of that permanent Security Council, Russia and China, who have difficulties with our approach.

I'm not so certain that -- because I believe that the Middle East is the most, is in the most combustible, dangerous situation we've seen since 1948 -- I'm not so sure, the way this is going, Mr. Secretary, that the United States is not isolating itself in the Middle East.

Now, when we also hear of tough talk from some in this administration about, well, we'll use the military option, let's start with that question.

Under what conditions would this administration use military force against Iran?

That's a question to you.

BURNS: Thank you very much. Thanks, Senator Hagel.

Responding to your two questions gives me an opportunity just to also respond to some of the thoughts put out by Senator Biden, and I'll try to do that together.

First of all let me say that President Bush and Secretary Rice have been very clearly nearly every time they talk about Iran, that we haven't taken, and will not take, any of our options off the table. And that is commonsensical.

And that is supported, by the way, by the great majority of our allies, that position, the thought that is, you never take -- you'd never want to limit your power and options ahead of time.

Secondly, the president has made it very clear -- and he spoke on Thursday and Friday about Iran quite extensively -- that we are on a diplomatic course. We've been on that diplomatic course since March of 2005. That's when we decided that we would support the E.U.-3 diplomatic efforts.

And for the past 18 months we have been vigorously trying to put together this diplomatic coalition as a way to use diplomacy to resolve this nuclear crisis. That's our first choice. That's where the great percentage of the energy of our government is going right now, to make diplomacy succeed. That's what the president and Secretary Rice are doing this week in New York.

And I think we've proven our commitment to diplomacy by standing by the E.U.-3 for the last 18 months, by bringing Russia and China into that coalition, by passing Resolution 1696 -- by the way, to answer your first question -- does commit the French government, the Russian government, the United States government, to a course of sanctions under Article 41, Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter, should Iran not meet this basic condition, suspend your enrichment-related and reprocessing activities.

And so, we assume, and we believe, that all the governments that voted for that resolution back on July 31 will honor it. And I can tell you that over the last 10 days I've been to Berlin to discuss the sanctions regime with the French, British, Germans, Russians and Chinese. Last week we had two very long conference calls.

We had specific discussions on which sanctions we would like to employ in the first round. We haven't come to an agreement yet, but we are actively discussing the sanctions. Secretary Rice will pursue that this evening when she meets the foreign ministers of all these countries in New York.

And so, I can assure you we are on a diplomatic path. That's the focus of our energies. We believe diplomacy could possibly succeed, it may succeed. And we hope it will, because it's a vast preference over all the other options.

I would also say this. I agree with both you and Senator Biden that -- and the chairman; he made this point, as well -- that it's very important that we understand this country. And we're limited.

We're limited, because we haven't had a single diplomat, a single representing us in that country for 27 years. And so, we're making an enormous effort to do that.

It's important to distinguish about these moderates, too. Iran is not a monolith. There are lots of different voices in the governmental structure as well as in the society.

But it's also important to note that the moderates, the so-called moderates, when they were in power between 1997 and 2005, they continued the war on terrorism against us. They continued and accelerated the nuclear research program.

So they may be called moderates in that country's political spectrum, but we have profound disagreements with people like former president Khatami. And it was good to see -- we chose not to meet with him when he came to Washington and New York and Boston. But we know that a lot of Americans put those issues to him.

Why did you continue the support for terrorism when you were in power? Why did you continue the nuclear programs?

It's important that we continue to understand that even the moderates are espousing policies that are directly contrary to American national interests.

And I'll just say for your final question, senator, about Iraq, the Iranians are not acting in a way that would argue in favor of a unitary state in Iraq. They're not supporting a political compromise among the three major groups in Iraq.

They clearly have their preferences, and they're open about it. And they're also arming insurgent groups that are contributing to the problem of terrorism and violence.

So the Iranians have a lot to answer for in their policies in Iraq. They may be influential. I don't agree, respectfully, that they're the most influential country vis-a-vis Iraq.

I think we have more influence, and we will exercise that influence. And we'll do it in a very aggressive way, designed to protect our national interests, because that's our job.

I hope I've answered your question. If I haven't...

HAGEL: Well, actually, you have not. I know you wanted to keep a tight rein on this, Mr. Chairman, but I asked the question, under what condition would the United States use military force in Iran?

BURNS: And I would answer that question, respectfully and specifically, by saying, Mr. Chairman, we haven't taken any option off the table, but we are focused on diplomacy. I don't believe any senior member of our government has ever answered that question specifically, nor should we.

But I can assure you that while we're always prepared to defend ourselves, we are seeking a diplomatic solution to the nuclear problem.

And Senator Biden asked a related question, which I should answer. He said, you can't have too many priorities. You've got to distinguish among those priorities.

I think we signaled that back on May 31st, when Secretary Rice made her very long public statement about Iran, in which she said that we're willing to negotiate for the first time in 27 years -- no prior administration, Republican or Democrat, had made that offer in 27 years -- that we're willing to do it on the nuclear issue, because we see the nuclear issue as uniquely dangerous to our country and to our allies in the Middle East.

And she said in that statement, should we ever get to the negotiating table on the nuclear issue, we also feel so strongly about the terrorism issue, that we'd raise it there. But we're obviously willing to enter into a course of negotiations with Iran on the nuclear issue, because that has to be the place we stop the Iranians first.

We can't imagine this particular Iranian government, of President Ahmadinejad, in possession of nuclear weapons, and nor can our allies in the Middle East, the Arab countries, or the members of the Perm Five.

The last thing I'll say in answer to both of your questions is, I've made, I don't know, 15 or more trips to the Middle East and Europe over the last 18 months on this Iran issue. I have not encountered a single senior official of any of the serious governments in play, who believe that Iran is not trying to develop a nuclear weapons capability. Everyone believes they're doing it.

The 18.5 years of lying to the IAEA has all of our suspicions aroused. And we want to use the concern that Russia and China and the Europeans have to mobilize an international effort to isolate the Iranians.

And, Senator, I would disagree. I think Iran is being isolated, not the United States. I think the story of the last 12 months is that the United States has been engaged in multilateral diplomacy. We've helped to build a big coalition.

We're not isolated. It's Iran that's isolated on this particular issue, in my judgment.

HAGEL: Thank you.

BIDEN: I'd last to ask unanimous consent that -- on this point -- that the testimony in response to a question by me when Secretary Rice was here in her first appearance, on the very question of priorities, and if there was a verifiable agreement on missiles and on nuclear enrichment, would we then build a relationship. And I want her answer to be part of the record, if I may.

LUGAR: It will be made a part of the record.

Thank you, Senator Hagel.

Senator Feingold?

FEINGOLD: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for holding this very important hearing. And Secretary Burns, as always, it's good to see you and to listen to you. I appreciate your candor today.

I know it is difficult to answer some of the questions, given the sensitive nature of the day-to-day diplomacy that's occurring.

But that said, and like the rest of my colleagues, I feel it is important to recognize the grave nature of the threat that Iran poses to our national security, specifically, and to the security of the Middle East and the international community in general.

While far from over, and I recognize that, current diplomatic efforts don't seem to be working. The role that China and Russia are playing in this standoff is troubling, and I remain skeptical about this administration's democracy promotion programs within Iran.

If we learned anything from the United States intervention in Iraq, it was that disjointed or shortsighted efforts to change regimes don't work.

It's also frustrating to me that this administration appears to be rejecting outright the notion of engaging one-on-one with Iran's leadership.

While I acknowledge the work being done by our diplomats in the E.U.-3, it is clear to me that diplomatic engagement should not be ruled out. In my opinion -- and you have stated this, and I agree with you -- no option should be ruled out.

That said, and again, I want to thank you for coming today, I'm hopeful that we can work together on this issue, and I want to ask you a couple of questions.

I'd like to move into the issue of Iran's relationship with India. As we all know, these are two countries that have a long and complicated relationship and a history of close ties.

According to a news report from the Islamic Republic News Agency yesterday, the Iranian president and the Indian prime minister had a meeting in the sidelines of the Nonaligned Movement summit taking place in Cuba.

Following the meeting, Prime Minister Singh stated that, "India is determined to consolidate cultural, economic and political ties with Iran," and he expressed regret over the, quote, misunderstanding caused about India's stance on Iran's peaceful nuclear program, stressing that India "would never join any efforts against Iran."

What do you think India's reaction will be if we pursue sanctions against Iran? And assuming that we can take the prime minister of India at his word here in saying that India would never join in any efforts against Iran, how effective will our efforts be without India's support?

BURNS: Senator, I'm happy to answer that question, if you'd like me to.

The Indians -- India was the first of the nonaligned countries to vote against Iran at the IAEA back in September, late September of last year, and also in February of 2006, of this year. So, India led the effort that others subsequently joined, to say that the Iranians were not meeting their IAEA requirements, and that they ought to come in line with those requirements.

We have found that Indian support to be essential in building the wider coalition that included countries like Egypt and Sri Lanka and Brazil. And the construction of this large coalition, I think, was made possible, in part, because, frankly, of the courage of the Indian government in taking that decision last December.

FEINGOLD: So, you just assume that the prime minister's words don't mean what they say?

BURNS: Well, you know, lots of countries have different relations with Iran. Some of our best allies in NATO, the European countries, have multi-billion-dollar trade and commercial relations with Iran.

And so, I don't think it would be fair, if you're asking about India, to hold India to a standard that we're not asking Italy or Spain or France to meet.

I will say this, that we put forward the Resolution 1696 on July 31, that will set up a sanctions resolution, with the idea that if the Security Council does agree to sanctions should Iran not meet the requirements of our offer, then all countries of the United Nations would be bound to follow those sanctions. And we'd include every country, obviously, including India, to follow the wishes of the U.N. Security Council.

FEINGOLD: Well, I assume obtaining India's support for such sanctions would be one of our highest priorities with our relationship with India, just as it should be with other countries, such as Indonesia and others. This is, I think we all agree, just a major priority for us on a list of many important priorities.

According to another report, India and Iran are moving forward on plans for an Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline. If this project is completed, what effect do you think it will have on the regional political balance?

It seems somewhat likely to me that India may be even less inclined to support any efforts against Iran, if a large portion of its energy comes from an Iranian pipeline. If you'd react to that.

BURNS: Yes. There have been stories for the past year-and-a- half that that pipeline is under consideration. In our conversations with the Pakistani and Indian governments, we have encouraged them not to invest with Iran in a pipeline. We have told them that we think Iran would be a bad insurance risk and a bad risk politically, and that Iran can't be counted on.

I can check this for you, and I'd be happy to give you a written response, because I want to give you a full answer. But my sense is in talking to both Pakistani and Indian officials, is that that project hasn't gone anywhere.

FEINGOLD: I'd appreciate it.

BURNS: That it may be currently being discussed, but I am not sure there have been any significant agreements that would put it into motion. But I can give you a written answer, because I want to give you a complete answer.

FEINGOLD: Appreciate that answer, look forward to the written answer, Mr. Secretary.

Can you give me an update on the administration's democracy promotion efforts in Iran? You've talked about this in your statement.

I'd like to know if you're confident that current efforts to engage the diaspora and to support opposition groups within Iran are not in any way undermining efforts to find a diplomatic solution to the nuclear standoff.

BURNS: Senator, we're grateful for the funding by the Congress for our democracy programs. Our democracy programs have no other purpose than to support those who wish to be free, and who wish to speak freely and who wish to build nongovernmental organizations, and who wish to have freer elections.

There's no other purpose than that. We've never said -- we've never ascribed any other purpose to them. I want to reassure you on that basis.

These are difficult programs to conceptualize and to run, because in the political environment that currently exists in Iran, people who openly work with Britain or France or the United States are sometimes jailed, and sometimes have other liberties taken away.

And so, what I said in my opening statement was that these programs are designed very simply to support organizations to grow and to increase contact between Europe and North America...

FEINGOLD: How effective is this being? You know, I understand that the intentions probably were equally appropriate with regard to Iraq, but there were serious questions about the effectiveness of it. Is it working?

BURNS: To be honest, I think it's too early to answer that question.

You ask the good question, because you gave us the money. We now have to come back to you at some point and say, here's how we spent the money, and here's how effective we think the program was.

We're just starting. We're just starting...

FEINGOLD: (inaudible) take into account...

(CROSSTALK)

FEINGOLD: ... lessons learned, some problems with this kind of attempt in Iraq.

BURNS: In everything we do, we try to learn from past experience. We try to be good at what we do, and effective.

And obviously, if there have been limitations in the past, or mistakes in the past, we try to learn from them. Whether it's -- in any situation around the world, not just limited to the Middle East.

So, we're just starting. We're doing it in a way that we're trying not to expose publicly the people with whom we're working. And the only purpose here is to support them and to see grassroots organizations grow.

And by the way, we're joined in that by many of the European countries, by the European Union. All of us have the same -- and I think we're working well with them -- all of us have the same motivation here. And this is to simply, because we say, because we're democrats in our countries, we wish to support those in Iran who argue that there should be a democratic future there.

FEINGOLD: I thank you for all of that. I just want to say, obviously, of course you always want to be mindful of lessons learned.

But the Iraq situation is such a clear example, in my view, of things going awry, that I would hope that this is heavily and carefully reviewed as this effort goes forward.

And I think that Congress is going to be very interested in making sure that the same mistakes are not made again. But I do thank you. Go ahead, if you'd like to respond.

BURNS: I just wanted to say, I think we have an obligation to come forward, maybe after a few more months have passed, and give you an accounting of how the democracy programs are going. We'd be happy to brief you in full in closed session.

Before you arrived, I also said that we're using most of the money to expand our television and radio broadcasting in Farsi into Iran, because, as you know, there's a great deal of repression and restrictions on free information.

And we're also -- President Bush said the other day, he wants to vastly expand our exchange programs, because if our two governments can't work together -- and right now we can't, directly -- over the long term we have a national interest in getting to know that country better, and to having Iranians get to know our country better.

So, we're looking into ways to do that in a quite ambitious...

FEINGOLD: Strongly agree with you on that point. I thank you, Mr. Secretary. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

LUGAR: Thank you very much, Senator Feingold.

Senator Allen?

ALLEN: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. This is obviously a very good time to hold this hearing, as the United Nations at the same podium, they'll hear from President Bush, and they'll hear from the leader of Iran.

They may share the same podium, but they certainly share different philosophies, our president representing a country where we are an open society with freedoms, and the other a repressive country, and one that sponsors terrorism.

It is also important to recognize that the path that our administration and the United States is taking is not alone. It's actually working with our allies, as best we can with the Europeans, who are taking a path of negotiations, of diplomacy.

Now we see -- and Senator Hagel kind of mentioned -- one of the European presidents making a comment. Well, you know, it seems like Iran doesn't care to negotiate. They don't care to look at the incentives.

And, in fact, appeasement of Iran, and letting Iran decide when they want to start negotiations after they continue development, is not an approach that I think is going to get to the result we desire.

The question was made and the point was made about India, for example. And I've, Secretary Burns, enjoyed working with you on the U.S.-India civilian nuclear pact. It's outstanding work in cementing a marriage with a country, India, that shares our views of tolerance, and has the same mission for Asia and the world, which is peace.

It also indicates, I hope, to all of us here, of how over- dependent we are, and other countries, on foreign oil, and in particular, oil from the Middle East and other hostile countries around the world.

It seems to me, as you see Iran joining up with Venezuela, which has joined up with Cuba -- and somehow North Korea gets dragged into it, and China -- that they're setting up these coalitions, making an oil cartel of their own.

We need to do that same sort of negotiations, in my view, and strategic alliances with countries to make sure that we do not have oil used as blackmail. And that is part of the problem we have with other countries, that if there were sanctions imposed, because of the recalcitrance of Iran, that that's going to hurt their economies, hurt their people.

And so, energy is a national security issue. And we ought to have more oil and natural gas developed in our country, rather than sending out hundreds of billions of dollars every year to other countries.

We ought to have more clean coal technology in this country. We're the Saudi Arabia of the world in coal, and we ought to be using coal -- advanced clean coal processes, not just for electricity, but made into a fuel and gasified.

Same with advanced nuclear. We ought to be moving forward, Mr. Chairman and my colleagues, to every available, economically logical alternative approach, whether those are biofuels, whether that's solar, whether it's nanotechnology-enabled batteries. And we also need more young people actually interested in using their minds and American creativity for this energy independence.

Now, this situation with Iran and why we care about Iran having nuclear weapons, we would care about any country having nuclear weapons. We particularly care about them, because they are clearly state sponsors of terror.

And while it was very nice, I suppose, to listen to Khatami, I was glad to hear you say, Secretary Burns, that he was, when he was in power, the so-called moderate started a nuclear program.

The rockets that were in southern Lebanon in Hezbollah's hands that were raining in on Israel did not just come in since Ahmadinejad has been in power. Those were going in there for many, many years, those thousands of rockets.

Now, the question before us is a multifaceted one. But I think the administration is being patient. They're negotiating. We're trying to build a consensus to let Iran know that if you want peaceful nuclear power, they can work with us and work with the rest of the world to come up with a credible regime.

The Europeans heretofore have been with us, although it seems like one of them is maybe getting a bit -- well, I'll not make any comments until he clarifies his remarks.

China and Russia, though, are crucial to this, because they are going to be important.

And I would like to ask Secretary Burns a couple of things, based on Russia, China, where we're going to go from here, and also the comments you made about how Iran is sending and supplying advanced weapons and advanced IEDs to kill U.S. and British troops and Iraqis there.

There are so many questions. Let me just ask you this.

In the efforts that we're making to stand up a free and secure country in Iraq, to what extent is Iran interfering in Iraqi politics? And how are Iran's policies in Iraq affecting the level of violence there, if at all?

BURNS: Senator Allen, thank you very much. And may I just take this moment -- forgive me for doing it -- by thanking all of you for your support for the U.S.-India civil nuclear agreement. We're looking forward, we hope, to a vote in the full Senate shortly.

That's a major priority for President Bush and for our administration -- and, I think, for our country. And thank you, senator, for all the help, and all of you on that issue.

We don't believe that Iran is playing a productive or a constructive role in Iraq. It seeks influence. Obviously, many Iranians believe that perhaps their national interests have improved because of the downfall of Saddam Hussein, their enemy.

But if the challenge in Iraq is to help the Sunni and Shia and Kurd to form one government, one society that works well, to reduce the level of terrorism, we don't see the Iranians contributing to that. Not in their public comments, which have not been fair to some of the other groups, not in where their attention is as a government, and certainly not in the way that they are arming some of the Shia insurgent and terrorist groups.

And so, we have a beef with Iran on the subject of Iraq, and we've made it clear that we're unhappy.

And it's not just us. It's many of our allies, that also have troops in Iraq, that are very unhappy with the fact that Iran has missed an opportunity. They're not at all playing a role anything close to being statesmanlike. In fact, it's the reverse.

So, we have those concerns.

While we don't have diplomatic relations, of course we have ways of communicating unhappiness, and ways of communicating with that government. The Swiss have been acting as our protecting power for the last 27 years. We are able to pass written messages through the Swiss -- and we do -- on this issue of Iraq.

And, of course, a lot of our friends around the world, that speak to the Iranians directly, amplify our concerns.

And so, the Iranian policy in Iraq, and Iran's policy in Lebanon over the past summer, reveal something very interesting.

They have a concept that Iran's a revolutionary power, and all of their efforts seem to be directed toward destabilizing the Middle East, not to bring peace or stability.

They arm Hezbollah. They helped to arm Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, PFLP General Command.

They play a major role in the war in Lebanon by providing the long-range rockets that held those million Israeli civilians hostage, all the way from Haifa to the northern border of Israel.

This is a government that on the leading issues in the Middle East -- the peace process between Israel and Palestinians, Lebanon, the war in Iraq -- has consistently taken the opposite view from all the rest of us, the moderate Arab countries, the European countries, Russia and the United States.

And so, it's a country that's very much out of step. And the challenge for us is, over the long term, to convince the Iranians that the only productive relationship we could possibly have would be if they helped to construct a stable and peaceful Middle East, not the reverse.

But unfortunately, they are an agent of negative change and of violence. And it's the only way I can describe what they're doing in Lebanon, in Israel -- or towards Israel -- and certainly in Iraq itself.

ALLEN: Thank you, Secretary Burns.

BURNS: Thank you, senator.

ALLEN: Appreciate your great leadership, knowledge and experience.

BURNS: Thank you.

LUGAR: Thank you, Senator Allen.

Senator Voinovich?

VOINOVICH: Mr. Chairman, thank you for having this meeting today, and welcome, Secretary Burns.

First of all, I congratulate the administration on their patience in terms of working with the IAEA. I think there were many people in this country that thought that we'd never get a resolution through the Security Council dealing with Iran. And you're continuing to try and work with the P-5-plus-1, to see if we can't make a difference.

The real issue here is -- and you just stated it eloquently -- as I perceive it, for some reason Ahmadinejad -- I call him "I'm out in the head" -- I think he's a Hitler type of person. He has made it clear that he wants to destroy Israel. He's made it clear he doesn't believe in the Holocaust.

He's a -- well, we all know what he is.

I don't believe that as long as he's there, that we're going to ever solve Iraq. They don't want Iraq to be a multi-religious democracy, if you look at the relationships that Mr. Sadr has had with Iran, and you look, go back to the family history, as long as that relationship is there. And Mr. Sadr, I believe, wants to be the next ayatollah of Iraq and have a theocracy like they have in Iran.

Iran wants to continue to meddle in Lebanon and with Israel.

There seems to be a very deliberate, premeditated effort on their part to expand their influence in that area, and this nuclear issue is just part of it.

The question I've got is, that's the way I perceive it. And I suspect it's pretty well, you know, the way you perceive it.

The question is, how do our allies perceive it? In other words, if we feel so -- as I say, I'm so concerned about it, as others are.

But how do the Russians feel? How do the Chinese feel? How do the other countries that we're working with feel about it? Are they just as concerned about this as we are?

Because if they're not -- this whole business about working out something on this nuclear proliferation, the issue of sanctions in terms of how significant those sanctions are going to be -- we're just not going to get the job done.

BURNS: Senator Voinovich, thank you.

I think you're right to start with President Ahmadinejad. He's addressing the United Nations General Assembly later today.

We found, over the past year or so, that he provides some of the glue that holds this international coalition together. When he spoke on September 17th of last year at the U.N. and made those extraordinarily vicious comments about Israel, a member state of the U.N., that helped us to form the larger coalition, which we were just then beginning to bring about with Russia and China, and to bring it together.

And every time he makes an outrageous statement, you find that there's more and more concern around the world...

VOINOVICH: Mr. Secretary, how about the Sunnis, you know, and their relationship? The Shiites, the Sunnis -- we know in Iraq what's going on there.

But what kind of pressure -- are they concerned about this? I mean...

BURNS: Senator, I'm not in a position to speak for each of the Arab governments. But I can say in general, there is a great deal of concern in the Gulf, in the Levant, in North Africa, about what President Ahmadinejad is saying, and whether...

VOINOVICH: Are they helping us?

BURNS: ... (inaudible) the Iranian government.

In many ways, yes. In many ways, yes.

And you asked a very important question about the coalition that we have formed on the nuclear issue. It's a coalition of countries with sometimes different interests.

I can't say that Russia and China see the Iranian nuclear issue exactly as we do, but we held together at the key junctures over the last 12 months.

We brought Iran to the IAEA board of governors and rebuked them on February 4th. March 29th, the presidential statement to the Security Council, July 31 resolution. And we're now all committed to sanctions.

So, obviously, if you put all the leaders up on a stage, of our coalition, they will speak differently. They'll have different points of emphasis. Some will be tougher, and some will not be as tough.

VOINOVICH: Well, will they support sanctions that are significant enough to impact the citizens of Iran to extent where some people would start to question whether or not they can afford to have a president like this man?

And this has been brought up earlier, what's the relationship between the mullahs and this man? Is there any kind of feeling that maybe he's gone way beyond where they thought he would go?

I mean, that's the real issue. How do you get the Iranians to realize that the course of action that they're following is not in the best interest of the Iranian people?

BURNS: Right. I believe that the coalition against Iran will stay together. And should the Iranians, within the next week or so, not suspend -- agree to suspend -- their nuclear programs, as we have requested, I do believe the coalition will stay together and pass a sanctions resolution that will be focused not on the Iranian people, but on the Iranian government and its nuclear industry.

VOINOVICH: You're confident that the sanctions really will make a difference?

BURNS: That's a different question. We hope the sanctions will make a difference.

The agreement we have in the Perm Five, among all the countries, is that the sanctions will be graduated, so we would not start with comprehensive economic sanctions against Iran, we would start with targeted sanctions. And we'd escalate the severity of the sanctions should Iran not comply down the road.

You know, the history of sanctions over the last generation or so all around the world is one of some success and some failure. And so, we hope that sanctions will be effective. We believe in this case they can be, for one reason.

VOINOVICH: You're hopeful, but you're not confident.

BURNS: I can't testify to you that I'm 100 percent sure that any sanctions regime will have an absolute effect that you want on the Iranian government. We hope that it will.

And the point I was going to make is, Iran is very different than North Korea. North Korea is a country that seems to thrive in isolation.

Iran is a country that wants economic integration, it wants investment. It's got a multi-billion-dollar trade relationship with the countries of Western Europe and some of the major countries in Asia -- China and Japan.

What Secretary Paulson has been talking about over the last few days is an effort to working in the private sector, to see if banks will begin to restrict their lending to Iran. We're beginning to see that happen.

And if you get the kind of commitment currently (ph) with that, economic or -- excuse me, nuclear sanctions -- focused on their industry, which I believe we can get in the next few weeks, should they not comply.

But that's going to be a powerful message to Iran, if it happened...

VOINOVICH: I hate to interrupt you, but will that have any influence, do you think, on what the relationship is in terms of Iraq, or in terms of their meddling in the Lebanon-Israeli situation? Syrian?

BURNS: First and foremost, these sanctions would be designed to have an impact on their nuclear policy and on their present disinclination to abide by the terms of the IAEA resolutions, and to stop their enrichment programs.

But we also hope that the increased cost to Iran of its increased isolation would have a modifying impact on their behavior in Iraq, as well. Yes.

VOINOVICH: Well, I hope you're right.

I think the real question here is, what influence will it have on the Iranian people and their feeling as to what's in their best interest in the long run?

How do you get them convinced -- how can they be convinced that to be a good citizen in the international community is actually in their best interest in terms of their future, and not the course that they're on right now?

BURNS: If I could just say -- I don't know if time is up, Mr. Chairman -- but I think you've asked a central question, senator. And that's why three months ago, or 3.5 months ago, what we didn't say -- we didn't say to Iran, we've only got one negative card to show you.

We offered a set of positive incentives that we've not made public, but we've made available to the members of this committee, which would have entailed very significant technological, scientific and business exchanges with the Iranian government, benefits to them should they give up their nuclear weapons program and just focus on civil nuclear power.

One of the things that President Ahmadinejad is fond of saying -- and he's absolutely untruthful in saying it -- is that we in the West are trying to deprive the Iranian people of civil nuclear energy.

President Bush has been saying for 10 months now, we would support a Russian or a European-led consortium to provide nuclear fuel to nuclear power plants in Iran, but we want to deny them the sensitive aspects of the fuel program, because, frankly, we don't trust them. And neither do our partners in the P-5.

The Russian government position is Iran should not enrich, should nor reprocess, should not have fissile material. That's what unifies this coalition.

So we're saying "yes" to nuclear energy, but "no" to nuclear weapons. And we gave Iran this choice and they've been fumbling it. They essentially haven't responded for 3.5 months. We're now in extra innings. We're in the last possible moment.

They're going to have to make a decision, and it's going to have to be soon as to what they're going to do. And if they can't say yes to the positive offer, then, as Secretary Rice said this morning, for our credibility in the P-5, we're going to have to pass a sanctions resolution, because that's what we said we'd do.

So that in a nutshell is where the diplomacy is as of today.

VOINOVICH: Thank you.

LUGAR: Thank you very much, Senator Voinovich.

Now, I'm going to recognize Senator Obama for his eight minutes, and then this will conclude our questioning of you, Secretary Burns, because we do wish to move on to the other distinguished panel.

Senator Obama?

OBAMA: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I apologize for being late. I had a conflict.

Secretary Burns, I missed much of your testimony, so forgive me if I end up being repetitive. I'll try to -- I received some notes on where you've already discussed some issues, and see if I can avoid overlap.

I'm interested in the role of Russia in this whole process, because it strikes me that they can play a very constructive role.

My sense is that a nuclear-armed Iran would pose fairly serious security issues at Russia's own doorstep, perhaps even more than the security issues for us. And given that they have their own problems of Islamic separatism and fundamentalism in southern Russia and parts of the former Soviet republics, it just strikes me that this would be an additional complication for them.

As a consequence, I guess I'm curious as to what their thinking is right now and their rationale for a go slow approach on sanctions and other punitive measures.

If you could discuss your best understanding of how they're thinking about the problem, and also what we're doing to help shape their attitudes and approach -- well, why don't I stop there and let you proceed.

BURNS: Senator Obama, thank you very much. Obviously, I can't speak for the Russian government. I'll just try to, in this session, answer your question as best I can by saying that Russia and the United States have very different views about Iran in general, because of our very different geographic proximity to Iran and because of our different history.

Nonetheless, the Russians have been a key part of this coalition that we've built over the last 12 months.

A year ago today, there really wasn't a coalition. The E.U.-3 had been trying to negotiate with the new Ahmadinejad government. Ahmadinejad walked out unilaterally, suspended the negotiations and then proceeded with this tremendous increase in centrifuge research at the plant at Natanz that we've seen.

President Bush and President Putin talked in October and November of last year. And they fashioned a union on this, where the Russian government said, look, we shouldn't deny nuclear energy to the Iranian people, because their (ph) energy -- despite the fact that they're an oil producer, they need more energy domestically -- and that we ought to make an offer to set up a consortium of countries that would supply nuclear fuel and take away the nuclear waste from a nuclear power plant system in Iran. But we would deny Iran the sensitive aspects of a nuclear fuel cycle -- enrichment, reprocessing -- so they couldn't produce fissile material and they couldn't produce a nuclear weapon.

And President Bush publicly agreed with President Putin in late October of last year. And since then, we've been pretty much locked up with the Russians. We've found them to be a good partner. They have kept their agreement with us in most respects.

I think Russia and China entering this coalition, with the three European countries and the United States, strengthened it. And it really caught the attention of the Iranians.

We knew what the Iranians were trying to do diplomatically. From 2003 until summer of 2005, they were trying to separate the U.S. from Europe. That didn't work. Then they tried to prevent Russia and China from joining this coalition.

And I think -- my interpretation would be frankly out of frustration, the Russians and Chinese not getting anywhere with Iran, they joined the coalition and we passed this series of IAEA and U.N. Security Council resolutions.

So, we're at a key moment now, where if Iran accepts the condition of suspension of enrichment, we're going to have negotiations. Secretary Rice said this morning, she will be at those negotiations should that happen -- the United States, first time in 27 years. But if that doesn't happen, then we're going to have to pass sanctions.

I have heard nothing from the Russian government -- and I've spoken to them every day for the last two weeks -- that would indicate that they will not uphold their commitment under Resolution 1696 for sanctions.

So, we're working well with the Russians. We don't have identical interests and views, but we're working well.

OBAMA: But you feel confident that, should the Iranians not take advantage of the opportunity, I think, to work something out here in the final hours, you feel confident that we can persuade Russia to follow through on some sort of sanctions framework.

BURNS: I do. As well as China. The key question will be, what type of sanctions?

I don't think there's any argument among the P-5. If Iran doesn't meet this condition of suspension, we must pass a sanctions resolution, or else the credibility of the U.N. Security Council on the leading issue of our day -- and we consider this to be the leading security issue -- is going to be called into question.

So the question is, how tough will that first sanctions resolution be? And can we then agree to a series of graduated sanctions measures to increase the cost to Iran, should that down the line they not come forward with suspension of enrichment and agree to negotiations.

OBAMA: Give me a sense of the differences in terms of how -- without getting into all the dirty details -- give me a sense of how U.S. and Russian and Chinese perceptions might differ in terms of what that sanctions regime might look like.

BURNS: Here's where we agree, and I'll tell you where we disagree -- I think we may disagree.

We all agree that you won't put everything in the kitchen sink into the first sanctions resolution. You're not going to put oil and gas sanctions or comprehensive economic sanctions, because we agreed when we made the offer back on June 1, these should be graduated, incremental sanctions. And so we'll start there.

I think all of us agree that there are some sanctions that have to be directed at the core of the problem; dual use exports that currently can go from any country in the world, except those already into sanctions, like ours, to Iran, that the Iranians can use for their nuclear research programs.

Can we -- the United States would say, shouldn't we restrict the ability of Iranian scientists to study at MIT? Nuclear physicists, for instance, were studying there.

Shouldn't we restrict the ability of officials who work in the nuclear industry to be taken -- to be invited to other countries to conferences?

So, to close off some avenues of support, or loopholes that the Iranians are currently taking advantage of, frankly, as they seek, in our judgment, to build behind the guise of this civil nuclear program that they say they're constructing, on nuclear weapons systems.

So I think there's a core of agreement, that that's probably the area. But there is no present agreement on the exact sanctions.

I was in Berlin two weeks ago. I spent two days talking to the Russians and Chinese about this. I was with them twice last week, and we still don't have an agreement on the specific sanctions, but I think we do have an agreement that the sanctions should go forward should Iran not step forward with its suspension.

OBAMA: A last question, and I'm running short on time here. And this goes to, I guess, a broader issue, and that is, our posture towards Iran regarding their own security concerns.

In this month's edition of "Foreign Affairs" magazine, Professor Scott Sagan of Stanford argues that the U.S. should be pursuing a deal along the lines of the 1994 Agreed Framework with North Korea. And part of the argument he makes is that the most important factor in changing Iranian behavior is reducing the security threat to Iran that they see from the United States.

He recognizes that there are other issues -- satisfying parochial, domestic interests or acquiring status in the Islamic world and being able to reassert Iran's self-perceived role as the major regional power. But that the single biggest factor is their concern that the United States is going to try to do in Iran what it did in Iraq.

I'm curious as to whether you agree with that analysis. You worked in senior levels for the State Department during the Clinton administration. Do you think that there are any lessons to be learned from the Agreed Framework that are applicable to Iran?

And did you think that external security concerns are at the heart of the Iranian nuclear problem, in which case, would it make sense for us to try to figure out a more effective way to address those security concerns?

Or, to put it differently, is there any way that they are going to actually come to the table and negotiate, if they believe that, regardless of negotiations, the prospect of the U.S. attempting regime change is still on the table?

BURNS: Senator, thank you for that question.

First, we are not modeling the present solution for the Iran nuclear crisis on the Agreed Framework of 1994 -- very different countries, different times. I think all of us have learned a lot from how the North Koreans failed to implement that Agreed Framework.

So we're trying to build in to what we do in Iran -- and we talked to the Russians and Chinese and Europeans about this -- verification, and also positive and negative incentives that would encourage the Iranians to adhere to an agreement if they make it.

The Iranians may feel insecure based on the last 27 years, but they've really done nothing to relieve the source of that insecurity. They are supporting terrorist groups that strike at Israel and at us.

There's a lot of evidence that the Iranians were involved in terrorist attacks against the United States, not just in the 1980s -- the Marine barracks bombing, the bombing of our embassy in Beirut -- but Khobar Towers in the mid-1990s, during the Clinton administration.

Our concerns about that haven't been relieved, and they haven't relieved them. In fact, I would say that Iranian support for terrorist groups has accelerated under President Ahmadinejad's direction, as they've worked with Syria, Hamas, Hezbollah and the other groups over the last year.

They also haven't done anything to alleviate our concerns about the fact that everybody in the world believes they're trying to build a nuclear weapons capability.

And they're steaming ahead with this research they say -- Ahmadinejad said -- they want to have 3,000 centrifuges in the cascade at Natanz in their scientific research by December of this year. And they are experimenting with P2 centrifuge technology.

No one else in the Iranian government ever said it. He said it publicly. So he's revealing quite a lot about their intentions.

The best way for me to answer your question would be to say this. The most significant offer, in my judgment, that the United States has made to Iran since the end of the hostage crisis in January of 1981, was the offer we made with the P-5 on June 1st of this year.

There's a positive package of incentives waiting for you -- scientific, technological, economic -- if you would just agree to suspend your nuclear programs and work with us and negotiate.

There is nothing in that positive package that entails security assurances. We have not given them. No American president has since 1991.

And in the interest of furthering our diplomacy in general with Iran, I think we're quite right to say that the president of the United States should have all options at his disposal, depending on what happens in the future.

At the same time, we are clearly on a diplomatic path. We can't say it enough. We are focused on diplomacy. We want to make that work.

We would much prefer a diplomatic solution to this problem, and a multilateral diplomatic solution to this problem. That's where our energies are.

OBAMA: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

LUGAR: Thank you very much, Senator Obama.

Senator Dodd has asked to raise one question, and, of course, we will (inaudible).

Senator Dodd?

DODD: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I apologize to my colleagues here and the witnesses, as well as, Mr. Secretary, to you, for being late getting in here this morning.

But I just wanted to raise very quickly, if I could. There was a report the other day from a David Fickling, regarding a U.N. response to the House Intelligence Committee report regarding the level of advanced activity by the Iranians with regard to their nuclear programs.

Many of us here, obviously, recall how flawed intelligence led to some pretty rough decisions with regard to Iraq. And I'm very concerned that we may be heading down a similar road here with Iran, if we're not careful.

I'd like you to comment, if you could, just briefly on this House intelligence report that has been, I think, responded to by the intelligence community here, as well as the U.N. The U.N. the other day, the IAEA took very strong exception to where it called it erroneous, misleading, unsubstantiated information.

It took strong -- and I'm quoting them -- exception to the incorrect and misleading claims in the report by the House Intelligence Committee, and went on further to particularly criticize the captions (ph) and the report's claiming that the Natanz plant in central Iran was enriching uranium to weapons grade.

What is the department's response to the House Intelligence Committee report?

BURNS: Senator Dodd, we have tried to be very careful and prudent in putting forward information to you and to the public that we believe is absolutely verifiable and accurate. And that's our standard.

We're not going to put forward facts that we can't verify. And we think it's important in this debate that we have in this country about how we deal with the Iranian nuclear threat, that we be measured and prudent. And I believe we have done that over the course of the last year or two as this has intensified.

I make that commitment just personally, that if I'm -- any of us testifying here, we're going to testify on what we know, and that's the only way to present facts publicly.

I have not had the pleasure of reading the House report. I guess I should do that, and I will do that. I did see the press reports. Of course, we were informed by the IAEA that they took great exception to certain aspects of it.

And, of course, our advice would be that we should now have a dialogue between the IAEA and the administration, as well as those in the Congress that are interested, to see if we can all agree on a common set of facts.

DODD: Well, it would be very, very helpful to all of us here, because we rely -- I would like to rely. We get that much contradiction from responsible committees -- or hopefully responsible committees -- then it's exactly the kind of trouble we can get ourselves into, that many of us feel we did in the past.

So, I would hope we can get a response fairly soon as to whether or not the administration agrees with this report, or if it disagrees with the report and we have some clarity on that.

BURNS: Well, I'd just like to say, we have no reason to question the intentions of the framers of the House report. We just haven't -- I haven't read it, and some of my associates haven't read it in full to give you the answer that you need.

But obviously, if the IAEA is concerned -- and the IAEA has great credibility on this issue of Iran's nuclear industry, because they've been on site -- then we'd like to establish a dialogue to see if we can all agree on one...

DODD: Well, the language was pretty strong. So, if you can get back to us on that, I'd appreciate it very much.

LUGAR: Thank you, Senator Dodd.

Our very sincere thanks to you, Secretary Burns, for your testimony today, your forthcoming responses to our questions and your representation of our country in some very difficult areas. Thank you for sharing this time with us.

BURNS: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you.

LUGAR: The chair would like to call now our second panel today: Dr. Ray Takeyh, senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies, Council on Foreign Relations; the Honorable Ashton B. Carter, co-director, Preventive Defense Project, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University; the Honorable Martin S. Indyk, director of Saban Center for Middle East Policy, the Brookings Institution.

Gentlemen, thank you very much for coming to the hearing today. All of your opening statements, your prepared statements will be made a part of the record. I'll ask that you proceed in the order that I introduced you. That will be first of all Dr. Takeyh, then Secretary Carter and then Ambassador Indyk.

We'll ask that you summarize your remarks. We want to hear from you, as opposed to summarizing to a fault (ph) before we question, because we appreciate the wisdom that you bring to this subject. But if you could sort of compact within maybe a 10-minute period or so, and the chair will be lenient in the event that you need a little bit more time.

We look forward to hearing from you, and then we'll raise questions of you around our panel.

Dr. Takeyh?

 

STATEMENT OF

RAY TAKEYH
Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies,
Council on Foreign Relations

 

TAKEYH: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for inviting me back to the committee. I'll stay well within my 10-minute limitation. I have submitted my full testimony for the record.

Since I was here last, I try to bring up the subject matter that today the United States confronts a fundamentally different Iranian leadership. It's not unnatural, after 27 years in power, that the complexion of the Iranian regime is changing, and the elders of the revolution are gradually being displaced by a younger cadre.

The debates are no longer, frankly, between pragmatists, such as Ayatollah Rafsanjani, and the more austere reactionaries. And Iran no longer views its international relations through the prism of strategic or economic vulnerability.

Rising oil prices, America's entanglement in Iraq have led the new generation of leaders to perceive unique opportunities for their country. Iran views itself now as an indispensable nation in the Middle East with its own claims of hegemony and dominance.

It is tempting to view Iran's new leaders, or the new right, as a sort of monolithic, united clique of ideologues, driven by the same impulses and objectives. But as with most political movements in modern Iran, there are obviously divisions and factions and power centers, even in the new right.

The current divide in the theocratic regime is between those who seek a revolutionary foreign policy and more tempered realists emphasizing nationalism and Iran's national rights. This delineation is perhaps best exemplified by examining the global views of President Ahmadinejad and the current head of the National Security Council, Ali Larijani.

I would say a combination of sort of a bitter experience and Islamic ideology tends to animate Iran's new president. If you look at President Ahmadinejad's speeches, particularly those focusing on international relations, he often suggests the notion of Iran's Islamic state as a model for the region to be emulated.

Beyond such Islamist aspirations, it is Iran's own war with Iraq, that was, I think, mentioned by Senator Biden, that continues to condition Ahmadinejad's strategic assumptions. A pronounced suspicion of the United States and the international community that tolerated Iraq's war crimes against Iran characterizes the perspective of those who fought on the front lines, and those veterans have now, in large measure, entered politics.

The lessons that these veterans-turned-politicians drew from the war was that Iran's independence and territorial integrity cannot rest on international legal compacts or, for that matter, international opinion.

After decades of tension with America, Iran's reactionaries perceive that conflict with the United States is inevitable. And perhaps the only manner that America can be deterred is through their possession of the strategic weapon.

However, I think it is too facile to suggest that it is the fear of America that is driving this faction toward acquisition of the bomb. As with some in the theocratic regime, Ahmadinejad and his allies perceive that nuclear weapons capability is critical for consolidation of Iranian hegemony in the Persian Gulf. It is only through the attainment of the bomb that Iran can negate the nefarious American plots to undermine its stature and power.

President Ahmadinejad's rhetorical fulmination and presence on the international stage, including today at the U.N., should not obscure the fact that he is not in complete command of Iran's foreign relations.

One of the more important actors to emerge is, of course, Ali Larijani. And he brings to this his own allies. As the leader of a generation of realists that evolved actually in the intelligence communities in Iran in the 1990s, this cohort has significant influence over the direction of Iran's international relations.

Through their presence in the key institutions, their link with the traditional clerical community, intimate ties to the supreme leader, they chart a course of Iran's foreign policy that is somewhat different.

For the realists, the Islamic Republic is offered a rare and unique opportunity to establish its sphere of influence in the Persian Gulf. For centuries, really, Iran's monarchs and later mullahs perceived that, given their history, given their civilizational standing, given their geographic location, it should emerge as a preeminent state of the region.

However, those ambitions were unjustly thwarted by global empires -- British, American -- and local hegemony powers -- Iraq (ph).

Today, as Iran's leaders gaze across the Middle East, they see a more humbled America, frankly seeking an exit strategy out of its predicament, and Iraq preoccupied with its simmering sectarian conflicts, and a Gulf princely class that, in my view, is eager to accommodate rather than confront Iranian power.

Therefore, a judicious and reasonable Iran can go a long way toward achieving its long cherished aspiration of domination of the critical waterways of the Middle East. It is important to stress that for this camp, they are driven not so much by Islamist ideology, but Persia's historic aspirations.

Again, an examination of Larijani's speeches reveals sort of a peculiar insistence on India as a model for an aspiring regional power. India's detente with America has allowed it to both maintain its nuclear capability and dominate its neighborhood.

In contrast, a Russian Federation that at times finds itself at odds with the United States has seen its ability to influence its "near abroad" checked by a skeptical Washington. Although the United States presence is bound to diminish in the Middle East, for Iran's realists, American power can still present a barrier to projection of their influence and Teheran's resurgence.

For this cohort, a less contentious relationship with the United States -- hardly an alliance and hardly even normalization -- but a less contentious relationship with the United States may ease America's distrust, paving the way for projection of Iran's influence.

For the realists, the nuclear program, therefore, has to be viewed in the larger context of Iran's international relations. Once more, Larijani points to the example of India, namely, a country that improves relations with the United States may obtain American approbation of its nuclear ambitions.

Iran and India are not the same countries, obviously, but nevertheless, that is a perception that is emerging. Thus, they don't seek to dismantle the nuclear program, but offer confidence-building measures and improved relations with the United States as a means of alleviating international concerns.

Hovering over this debate, as with all debates in Iran, stands the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and his relationship with these competing power centers. In my view, Khamenei's instincts would be to support the reactionary elements in Iran and their call for defiance in pursuit of the nuclear option.

However, in his role as the guardian of the state, he must consider the nuclear program in the context of Iran's national priorities. Thus far, despite his ideological compunction, Khamenei has pressed the state toward some degree of restraint.

The fact that Iran continues to call for negotiations, and even has expressed their willingness to suspend potentially critical components of this nuclear program for a brief duration should meaningful discussions begin, reflects a willingness to tentatively and grudgingly subordinate ideology to pragmatism.

So, where that leaves us is that we're essentially dealing with a country today -- as a result of what has happened in Iraq and the changes in geopolitical alignments of the Middle East -- a country that is assertive, determined, and is essentially insisting on maintaining what it views as its national priorities and national prerogatives.

I'll stay at this point and defer to my other colleagues.

LUGAR: Well, thank you very much, Dr. Takeyh.

Will you please proceed, Secretary Carter?

 

STATEMENT OF

ASHTON B. CARTER
Preventive Defense Project,
Belfer Center for Science & International Affairs,
Harvard University

 

CARTER: Yes, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Chairman and members, thank you for inviting me be here today to discuss the alternative courses of action, if the diplomatic course that the United States has been on, and its European partners have been on for the last three years or so, fails to stop Iran's progress towards developing the wherewithal to make nuclear weapons.

These alternatives I will call Plan B. What is Plan B, in short, if Plan A fails?

There are three, broad varieties of Plan B. All of these varieties were discussed at a workshop that former secretary of defense and my partner, academic partner, William Perry and I convened here in Washington. That was an off-the-record workshop of distinguished experts, civilian and military, of both parties -- all Americans.

And I draw upon the report of that conference, which Bill Perry and I co-authored, and which, with your leave, I will make my written statement, and ask that you insert it in the record.

That said, everything I say I will draw upon that report, but I'm responsible now for everything I say, and not the participants in that workshop.

Let me begin by saying, while I think it's important -- and everyone in our workshop did -- for the United States and its partners to design all three versions of Plan B now, I believe it would be premature to move to Plan B at this time, that is, to abandon the diplomatic path, particularly to move to a coercive path. And before I get to the paths, let me say why.

For one thing, a very important thing, Iran's known nuclear program is several years away from being able to produce its first bomb's worth of highly enriched uranium. The unknown program is by definition unknown, but everybody that I talk to believes that the unknown program is on a still slower schedule than the known program.

Therefore, Iran as a whole is several years away from being able to produce its first bomb's worth of fissile material, and therefore, unlike the case of North Korea, which has already obtained fissile material and producing more, there is time, purely from the point of view of the technical development of the threat, to let diplomacy play out in the case of Iran.

Second, and again, unlike North Korea, the Iranian government has exhibited at least a smidgen of sensitivity to international opinion, and to the possibility of further isolation and punishment if it persists, and acceptance and trade if it stops, i.e., to diplomatic and carrots and sticks. You see less of that -- Secretary Burns made that point -- in the case of North Korea. And so, there is a chance that if this fish is played for longer, it can be landed.

Third, if the United States brings this matter to a head at this moment, I'm concerned that we will find that Iran is playing a comparatively strong hand, and the U.S. a comparatively weak hand at this time.

Iran's influence -- as Ray Takeyh has indicated, and others in this discussion this morning have indicated -- Iran's influence in the Middle East is at a recent historic high. Its unstinting backing of Hezbollah and the latter's clash with Israel this past summer has added to its perceived luster and its boldness.

It has about as much sway -- and here I would agree with Senator Hagel -- within the borders of its historic enemy, Iraq, as do we at this time. And to top it off, Iran's president, Ahmadinejad, is enjoying what I guess I would call a sort of rock star faddishness in much of the Muslim world.

We, by contrast, are weighted down by important, ongoing and unresolved conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, a runaway North Korean nuclear program, as I mentioned earlier, our need to adjust cautiously and prudently to China's political and military rise, and above all, to the sprouting of post-9/11 versions of Al Qaida. We have a lot on our strategic plate.

The U.S. has only in recent months seemed to get in the game on the Iranian problem, also. And our erstwhile partners in helping us combat Iran's nuclear ambitions -- Europe, Russia and China -- are not always inclined at this time to follow where we lead.

All these circumstances could change, and the U.S. could find itself in a less adverse position strategically sometime in the future, but now may not be the moment to bring things to a head. And that would be a third reason not to move to at least a coercive version of Plan B at the moment.

And fourth and finally, before you change horses, you need to saddle the new horse. And that would mean preparing the way for the three alternatives I'm about to describe. And as you'll see when I describe them, I don't believe we've done that yet.

So, for all these reasons, it's not yet time to switch to Plan B, but it is time to consider and devise Plan B. And the time that is available for diplomacy is only valuable if we use it effectively.

We addressed, as I said, three distinct versions of Plan B. The first would add direct U.S.-Iran contact to the E.U.-3-led diplomacy the U.S. has supported from the sidelines for several years.

The idea of this plan was broached by a number of influential observers and leaders -- Republican, Democratic and foreign, to include Senators Lugar, Biden and Hagel -- in the very weeks before our workshop, and shortly thereafter, the Bush administration adopted a version of this plan, which has not been implemented, because Iran, as we all know, has refused to satisfy the condition that it suspend enrichment before we do so.

The second version of Plan B would use coercion to obtain the outcome that diplomacy seeks: a non-nuclear Iran. Coercion is the political, economic or military pressure that the U.S. and other nations could bring to bear on Iran in an attempt to discourage or physically delay it from acquiring nuclear weapons.

And the third version of Plan B prescribes what the United States should do if Iran succeeds in going nuclear, and the U.S. needs to make strategic adjustments to protect itself and its friends from a nuclear Iran. Strategic adjustment requires the U.S. to develop a long-term strategy to respond to Iranian possession of nuclear weapons, if diplomacy and coercion fail.

Mr. Chairman, with your leave, I'd like to just make one or two points about each of these options, and then I'm prepared to discuss all of them in more detail, as does the report I referenced earlier.

First, direct contacts between the United States and Iran. There were a number of views, at least four different views by knowledgeable people at our workshop, and let me just tell you what they were. They all head in somewhat different directions.

One view was that direct talks are the only way to test whether there can be a breakthrough in U.S.-Iranian relations, including the nuclear issue, if such a breakthrough is possible.

A second view is that a breakthrough is unlikely, but direct talks, conditioned on a freeze, will buy further time, and that itself is valuable.

A third view is that direct talks won't succeed, but they will effectively prepare the way for coercion, since coercion can only be effective with international support, and the U.S. can only win that support after it has shown that its best efforts at diplomacy have been tried and failed.

And a fourth view was that direct talks will only play into Iranian hands. Since the Iraq war and other developments have strengthened Iranian influence in the Middle East, direct talks will legitimize the Iranian government. The U.S. administration is divided within itself and cannot negotiate shrewdly, or the Iranian government has so many factions that it can't deliver on a real deal anyway.

So these were the views that participants had of the prospects for direct talks. Direct talks, secondly, come in several flavors. You have to ask yourself how you want to conduct the direct talks.

Are they purely bilateral? Are they with the E.U.? Are they in some form of six party talks, including Russia, China, the E.U.-3, us and Iran?

The second thing you need to decide is, what do we talk about? Do we confine the talks to the nuclear program, or is anything on the table?

If anything's on the table -- to include other concerns like terrorism -- then, some participants warned us, you will have on the Iranian side other factions in the leadership participating from their side in the talks. And that may make it more difficult to get agreement on the nuclear front.

Moreover, if we're going to discuss other issues besides the nuclear issue in this larger setting, we're going to have to deal with Russia, China and the Europeans on those other issues, and it's been hard enough to corral them into a common view on the nuclear issue. So, there are pros and cons to a broad agenda versus a narrow agenda.

And then finally, there are the conditions under which direct talks are held, and those conditions have to do with the Iranians and with our allies. The conditions on the Iranians we've imposed so far, and I support this, is that they suspend enrichment.

The condition that we imposed on our friends and partners was that, if the talks didn't work, they'd be prepared to go down the path of sanctions. And both of those conditions are in doubt as we sit here today.

Let me say something about coercion. Coercion can be political, economic or military, and just a couple of points.

The first is that -- a point that has been made several times in the course of this hearing already -- economic coercion is not within the power of the United States to effect unilaterally, for the simple reason that we essentially don't trade with Iran now anyway, and therefore, there's nothing to take away. And so, economic pressure is only possible if somebody else goes along with us in doing so.

The second point to make about economic pressure is that the general view of people who study sanctions is varied as far as their assessment of the effectiveness. But there is an issue of time scale, which does not seem to be controversial, and it goes like this.

The political effect of the imposition of sanctions would be immediate. The Iranian people would feel their horizons constricted by the act, and that may have some effect on them. But it takes years for the economic effects of sanctions to bubble in, and we may not have that kind of time.

With respect to political pressure, I would only note the $66 million, or whatever it is, of assistance that the United States government is going to give to the cause of splitting the Iranian government from its people is, it will be, in my judgment, more than offset by the $55 billion of oil money that goes into the coffers of the Iranian regime this year, in this calendar year 2006, which will have a thousand times the effect of drawing the Iranian government and their people together. And I think we need to be realistic, whatever you think of our effort, that it's small in comparison to that.

Military coercion. Military coercion's been much discussed in the press, was much analyzed by our workshop. The proposition is very straightforward. It's about air strikes on the main facilities at Bushehr, at Arak, at Esfahan and, of course, especially at Natanz.

I'm not going to add to what I'm sure members of this committee know perfectly well, which is that the consequences of an act of this sort would be very grave, both in terms of unifying the Iranian people behind their government, and giving the Iranians opportunities to retaliate. That may still be worth the risk at some point, but the risk is very substantial.

The point I'd like to make that I think is also important is that, a strike of this kind does not eliminate, would not eliminate, the Iranian nuclear program. It only buys you time. And you need to do the math about how much time it would buy.

So, let us do a hypothetical here. Let's suppose that our intelligence judgment at the time a strike like this was mounted was that, if we broke off talks and Iran was unconstrained, and just raced to the bomb, it would take them four years. Let me suppose that that's our assessment.

And that we further assess that if we continue to pretend we think the talks are going to succeed, but we know they're not, we can add two years to that, for a total of six -- but we believe that talks are a losing game.

Let's suppose further that if we were to eliminate in an air strike the known facilities that I enumerated earlier, it would take Iran two years to restore them to their current state. These numbers are not entirely made up, but they're obviously -- each one of them is arguable.

Well, under the assumptions I just gave you, the attack wouldn't buy any time relative to continuing the negotiations. So one needs to do the math and ask how many years one's getting.

Obviously, if you're prepared to go back again and again and again, and attack facilities are they are reconstituted, you can continue to buy time. But a single strike, which is so much discussed, buys a certain amount of time, but one needs to calculate how much that is. And depending upon the assumptions, it can be a short period of delay.

A final point on coercion. Coercion is properly seen not as an alternative, in my judgment, to diplomacy, but is a complement to diplomacy, that is, you show the Iranians what you're prepared to do if they are not prepared to agree.

Plan A and Plan B reinforce each other. The specter of Plan B strengthens your hand in Plan A. And likewise, you can't be effective at Plan B unless you have tried Plan A and shown it to have failed.

Finally, the third option was, what do we do if Iran succeeds in getting the bomb? And I'll just say that our recommendations, our thoughts about that, which is obviously a circumstance none of us wants to be in, divide into three categories according to the three reasons why Iranians having the bomb is such a disaster.

They might use it. And therefore, we need to figure out how to protect ourselves and our friends in the region against a profound new threat, and that takes you to deterrence, to defenses, to counter force -- all of the familiar military tools.

Second, an Iranian bomb might be diverted to other parties via direct transfer to groups like Hezbollah, a black market sale by a corrupt scientist, like an Iranian version of A.Q. Khan, seizure by extremist factions of a future Iranian government, or loss of control in a new Iranian revolution.

All of these are eminently plausible and fearsome dangers. And one needs to consider what one will do to protect oneself in that circumstance. And again, I could say more; I won't now.

But the third, and the point on which I'll close is, even if they don't use them, and even if they don't divert them, the simple possession of the bomb by Iran creates a new fact in the region. It gives Iran a shield behind which it can be emboldened to try to extend its sway in the Middle East, export extremism, support terrorism and strike out at friends and allies of the United States.

Iran's success in getting the bomb with impunity might also give encouragement to others seeking the bomb, or cause others in the region to feel compelled to follow suit. And we'll have to think about -- and we did discuss and it's in the report -- the countermeasures, possibly, that the United States could take to try to limit the damage to nonproliferation from this unfortunate development, and to contain and encircle a nuclear-armed and emboldened Iran.

Mr. Chairman and members, this then constitutes the look ahead at the alternatives, if diplomacy fails. Obviously, none of them is terribly attractive.

And to repeat myself and close -- to repeat what I said at the opening -- in my personal judgment -- now, I'm not speaking for the workshop participants -- it would be premature at this time to move to coercion from diplomacy. Thank you.

LUGAR: Thank you very much, Secretary Carter.

Ambassador Indyk?

 

STATEMENT OF

MARTIN S. INDYK
Director, Saban Center for Middle East Policy,
The Brookings Institution

 

INDYK: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. (inaudible) for the opportunity to speak to you (inaudible) statement for the record. Since time is passing so quickly, I will try to summarize it very quickly.

Mr. Chairman, you pointed out that I'd tried to deal with the Iranian issues when I was assistant secretary in the Clinton administration. There were two lessons that I drew from that experience that I'll reference now, and a third later.

The first is that I agree with you completely on the point that you made in your opening remarks, that multilateral sanctions are the way to go, if we're going to use sanctions.

Unilateral sanctions are very destructive of any effective effort. And the ILSA legislation that we had to deal with in those days was proof in point. It divided us from our allies, as you pointed out.

The second point is that we did try to engage with the government of Iran during the Clinton years. And it's not true -- as Secretary Burns mentioned, and as newspapers, from the New York Times to The Washington Post on, continue to assert -- that the United States since the revolution has never offered to negotiate with Iran.

It's in fact been the policy of Republican and Democratic administrations before this administration, that we would negotiate with the government of Iran, provided they understood that we were going to put on the table all of the issues of concern to us, which included sponsorship of terrorism, pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and opposition to the Middle East process.

That was true of the previous Bush administration. It was certainly true of the Clinton administration.

What was also true was that the Iranians would not talk to us. And so, the shoe was on the other foot.

But the experience in the Clinton administration -- when President Khatami, a clear moderate and reformer, had been elected with a large mandate -- was, nevertheless, we were unable to achieve any form of negotiation with that government. And that leads me to be quite pessimistic about the chances that we will succeed in the effort to try to negotiate a way out of this nuclear situation with the current regime in Iran.

I want to run through quickly the reasons for that pessimism. Some have been mentioned already.

First, and I think most importantly, is that Iran has a very strong incentive. Whether you're the radical president or the realist nuclear negotiator, both of them -- as Ray Takeyh has pointed out -- have a very strong desire to acquire nuclear weapons, either for security reasons or for prestige reasons, or for the furthering of their regional ambitions.

So, in the first case, it's going to be extremely difficult to head them off from that.

Secondly, distrust permeates the relationship between the United States and Iran since the revolution there. And facing that the United States wants to overthrow them -- and they have good reason to feel that way -- we think they want to dominate the region, subvert our friends, block the Middle East peace process, promote terrorism and destroy Israel. And we have good reason to believe that that's their intention.

And on top of that, as Secretary Burns pointed out, we don't have a feel for them, because we haven't dealt with them for 27 years, and they don't have a feel for us, for the same reason. So, the ability of us to actually overcome this distrust and find a way to communicate, is going to be very problematic.

I am sure you noted the way in which Secretary Burns underscored that Secretary Rice has indicated that she's prepared to sit at the table. I think that's an interesting idea, but the idea that we should have direct, bilateral engagement with the Iranians, if we actually get to the table, is going to be critical in terms of overcoming this distrust.

In other words, rather than a multilateral forum, I think it's very important that we shrink that down to a bilateral engagement.

The third reason for pessimism lies to the dysfunctionalism on their side, and the impatience on ours. We've seen in the three months they took to respond, and the response that actually came up to the offer that was made, a good deal of confusion and conflict within their own system.

Larijani, their negotiator, has suggested that perhaps they'll suspend for two months. That's now being repudiated by Ahmadinejad's spokesman. And so we have to understand that things don't function very well on their side.

And it's going to be very hard to establish what the real position is on our side. I think there are many within the administration and within its supporters, particularly in the neoconservative camp, that see the whole idea of negotiations as a real trap for us, and opening up the possibility for the Iranians to drag out the engagement, so as to better further their nuclear ambitions under the cover of negotiations.

And then there is the simple problem that we also confronted in previous efforts, is that we seem to be ships passing in the night. When they're ready, we're not. When we're ready, they're not.

And in this particular case, given the sense that they feel that the wind is at their backs, that they are on a roll, and that we are short of breath in the Middle East, means that their willingness to compromise on these critical demands that affect their national security and their concept of their role in the region -- their willingness to compromise, I think, has gone down considerably, because of those circumstances.

And finally, there is the question of, is there an acceptable outcome of these negotiation? Beyond the question of whether they would really be prepared to give up their nuclear weapons is the question of what they will demand in return.

We talk about economic incentives. What they're talking about is getting the United States to recognize their regional hegemony. And that is something that I don't believe that we could agree to. And even if we did, I don't think that our regional allies would accept to be under the domination of Iran.

And, therefore, when we actually -- if we actually get down to the negotiations themselves, I think it's highly problematic as to whether we could find some common ground here. The simple assumption that we'll buy them off is one that I would caution you against.

That said, I do think it's extremely important that we give it our best shot. I think that Secretary of State Rice and Burns deserve a good deal of praise for their perseverance and their patience in this effort.

But we are playing a weak hand in this situation. Threatening sanctions that our allies don't really want to go along with, putting ourselves in a situation where the hint of negotiations seems to be enough for many of our allies to begin to talk about jumping ship from this agreed strategy, means that I think it's going to be very difficult to hold them together, as well, and maintain our position of leverage over them.

Finally, I would just like to point out that, having said all of that, I do think that there is a broader strategic opportunity that emerges from the recent war in Lebanon that we should not ignore as we go forward in this effort to engage the Iranians.

As I said before, one of the problems is that they feel that they are now on a roll in the region. And what that has done is produce a reaction, which I think we can develop.

The reaction comes from the Sunni Arab leaders of the region, who fear the Iranian dominance now. And there is a potential in the threat that they perceive, and the threat that Israel perceives, for these Sunni Arab leaders to come together and work with Israel in an arena that we pay very little attention to when we focus on Iran, but it affects Iran's calculations.

If we can make progress in the Arab-Israeli arena and build a virtual alliance of interests with our allies there, we will find ourselves in a better position to pressure and deal with Iran. This is not a simplistic argument that, solve the Palestinian problem and everything else will follow. But it is to point out that everything in the Middle East is connected.

And as the Iranians become more dominant, that sets up a reaction -- an equal and opposite reaction -- amongst the Arab countries there that we can use to increase our leverage on Iran.

And that's the final lesson of the Clinton years. When we were making great progress in the Arab-Israeli arena, the Iranians were isolated and felt much more pressured to take into account our interests.

Thank you.

LUGAR: Well, thank you very much, Ambassador Indyk.

Let me just say procedurally now, we are about three or four minutes away from a roll call vote. What I would like to suggest, if he's amenable, is that Senator Hagel might chair the committee and raise his questions, and then recognize Senator Biden, because he will probably return. Absent Senator Biden, he would recognize Senator Dodd. And I will be back to try to conclude the hearing and raise my questions at that point.

So, if you would proceed, Senator Hagel, I would appreciate it. And perhaps we should adopt maybe a five-minute rule for these questions of these witnesses.

HAGEL: That's a risky proposition leaving me in charge, but we will proceed in spite of that. It will not be voted on. Thank you, Senator Dodd.

Gentlemen, thank you. You have made significant contributions, as you have done over the years, to not just this issue, but others, as well. And we appreciate it very much.

I would like to pose this question to each of you.

You all touched upon the sanctions issue and examined it with some clarity.

If I would have had another opportunity to address Secretary Burns in response to a question that Senator Obama asked. If you recall at the end of his testimony in the question-and-answer period, he went into some detail about the graduated sanction regime.

And I think he said it would not include oil and gas in the first tranche of that regime, but if I recall correctly, he said it would involve exchange programs. Specifically, I think he mentioned professorships at MIT. I mean, nothing personal, Secretary Carter, but he used MIT, if I recall.

What struck me about that was, at least I thought was a bit of an inconsistency, when on one hand Secretary Burns was talking earlier about great strides and progress we were making on the diplomatic exchange front, and he spoke specifically about education exchanges with students and professorships.

But yet, that would be included, according to the secretary, in the first round of sanctions.

I'd like each of you to respond to that, because, again, it's a bit unfair for Secretary Burns, because he's not here and I didn't have a chance to follow up.

But I'm puzzled by that, at least, again, my perception of an inconsistency there. You can't have it, I don't believe, both ways, and especially if we're trying to develop some trust and confidence among our allies, and if we are trying to lay down -- if, in fact, that's the point here -- a legitimacy for some engagement, finding some form for that engagement.

So, I would appreciate each of you responding to that, and any other element of Secretary Burns' testimony and his responses to those questions, specifically on sanctions.

Ray, to begin with you. Thank you.

TAKEYH: The incongruity of having exchange programs while imposing a travel ban. I think that's what we are talking about. I don't know how that works. I can't explain that contradiction, other than acknowledging it.

In terms of having the United Nations being used, and the Security Council as a venue for progressively more coercive sanctions on Iran, I think that's farfetched.

It wasn't so much what the French president said, is on that very day, France signed a $2.7 billion oil and gas deal with Iran -- at the day when you begin discussion of sanctions.

And throughout the E.U.-3 negotiations with Iran, the French were among the more resolute. It was the Germans that were -- just (ph) backed off, actually not wanting a resolution on coercion on (ph) Iran.

So, there's a lot of reasons to believe that in a national solidarity, in terms of imposition of rigorous multilateral sanctions on Iran is a nonexistent one. It's nonexistent among our allies, and certainly I would say the same thing about the Chinese and the Russians. So, the idea of having escalating coercive measures enacted through the United Nations, is farfetched.

Now, whether exchange programs are going to be suspended or not, that's neither here nor there.

Some of the measures that are contemplated, that can be enacted, are not necessarily punitive. You know, a travel ban on Iranian officials dealing with the nuclear issue -- that's about four people. And whether that's going to be adhered to, I'm not sure.

Prohibition of cooperation between international, between other countries and Iran's nuclear industry -- that's every bank in Russia. And frankly, the Treasury Department did have that provision before. It just never enacted it, because it knew it would be difficult to enforce.

So, these measures are, in my judgment, are not likely to succeed.

HAGEL: Thank you.

Ash?

CARTER: Senator, I can only put the following interpretation on what Undersecretary Burns said, because I agree with you that getting an education in the United States is an aspiration of many Iranians. It is in our long-term interest to satisfy that appetite to come here and to learn and to take back what they see and learn here.

And I believe that the restrictions referred to by Secretary Burns are on engineering education that could result in the kind of training that would provide assistance to the nuclear program, that that would be hived off from other forms of educational exchange.

On the general question of sanctions, I'll just note something that people frequently ask me, and that members of the committee surely know full well, which is that the most effective sanction, theoretically, against Iran, of course, would be to refuse to buy their oil, which is $55 billion in 2006, and which certainly bonds the government to its people, because that $55 billion is, I think, 85 percent of Iran's exports, and it is 65 percent of the federal government's budget in Iran. So, it would absolutely cripple Iran.

On the other hand, Iran's production, which is 2.5 million barrels a day, exceeds the slack in the international production system. So, interrupting Iranian supply, that supply could not easily be made up by -- even with effort -- by Saudi Arabia and other suppliers that have some excess supply.

And so, there would be a price spike. And so, this falls in the category of sort of mutually assured destruction. It would certainly destroy the Iranian regime, but it would have repercussions in the rest of the world, as well.

And that's why one takes that off the table and cascades down to these much lesser measures, which, as Ray suggests, aren't -- short of comprehensive sanctions imposed, especially by Japan and Europe -- likely to have much effect on the Iranian people and, therefore, on its government.

HAGEL: Thank you.

Martin?

INDYK: Well, Senator Hagel, I think you really put your finger on a larger problem, which is a contradiction in the administration's approach when it comes to sanctions, because there is a belief -- I think a justified belief -- that the Iranian people are actually friendly towards the United States, much friendlier than many others in the Muslim world these days, and that we want to try to reach out to them.

President Bush broadcast this message through an op-ed, an interview with David Ignatius, which he published in The Washington Post.

But on the other hand, we want to punish the regime. But how do we punish the regime and still reach out to the people, because sanctions are going to affect the people?

And so, sanctions don't work very well, so we talk about targeted sanctions. You remember the administration started off with targeted sanctions towards Iraq, and that didn't get anywhere either.

What we discovered in the case of sanctions in Iraq is that they hurt the people a great deal, and in fact, a great deal more than we had understood, and didn't hurt the regime that much at all. And so, you try to find targeted sanctions and you end up with these kinds of contradictions and tensions.

Of course, Ray didn't mention, but when you focus on nuclear sanctions, it's not just the Russian banks that are going to want an exception, but the Russian government is not going to want to affect the Bushehr reactor, which they are building.

So, even in the case of these targeted sanctions we're going to have a problem, because, as I understand it, the Russians are asking for an exception in the case of Bushehr, which then kind of guts that particular sanction of any real meaning.

And it goes to the broader problem of sanctions are really not an effective weapon to achieve this objective.

What is effective, what I do think managed to concentrate the minds of the Iranians, was the way in which the administration very effectively managed to concert international opinion against Iran's nuclear program. And it's that isolation of Iran that is, I think, the key.

And the problem when you get into sanctions is that you tend to divide, and they are able to play divide-and-rule. So, I really think that that's the key that your question has highlighted.

How do we find a way to isolate Iran politically, diplomatically, while not allowing them to divide us from our allies?

HAGEL: Thank you.

Senator Biden?

BIDEN: Thank you very much.

Do you both agree with that last statement, that the attempt to -- that the most effective thing is to isolate them diplomatically? And that almost any configuration of sanctions is likely to split that consensus, to isolate diplomatically?

Did I accurately...

INDYK: Yes, you did.

TAKEYH: I think we are all in agreement that the sort of a sanctions regime that is contemplated, for it to be effective multilateral, is unlikely to be enacted through the United Nations, because of the divisions, and so forth.

Whether Iran can be diplomatically isolated, I suspect it can be from the Western Bloc. But increasingly, the Iranian leadership are talking about an Eastern orientation, namely, having a relationship with countries where the human rights records and proliferation tendencies are not that bothersome -- the Chinese, the Russians -- and those that they have commercial relationship with, particularly in the oil and gas industry.

Can Iran be isolated regionally?

Well, not long ago, the deputy national security adviser of Iraq went to Iran and said, there is absolutely no evidence that Iran is interfering in that country.

(LAUGHTER)

In the last July resolution when 15 Security Council members voted against Iran, Qatar was not one of them.

Ahmadinejad is very popular on the Arab streets. Martin is absolutely right. There is concerns in palaces and ministries. But that doesn't read down to the street.

And even in non-representative regimes, public opinion counts, as you saw in the case of Lebanon. When initially, Egypt and Saudi Arabian officials came out in criticism of Israel, they quickly retreated when the popularity of Hezbollah became known.

Iran today is the second-most important country in Afghanistan, the second-most important country in Iraq, perhaps destined to be the most important in each.

It has -- the Gulf Cooperation Council is not likely to congeal against Iran. That is not its temperament. That is not its behavior.

It has a relationship with Syria of longstanding, and it is increasingly becoming an important player -- even more important -- in the emerging Lebanese civil war.

So, can a diplomatic arrangement be made to isolate Iran? I think privately, most Arab officials would complain about Iran's behavior, just because they board the plane to Teheran and shake hands with the Iranian officials.

You know, I don't see diplomatic isolation within the region. I think it's possible to sever Iran, to some extent, from Western Europe, in terms of diplomatic presence, but not necessarily from the Eastern Bloc that Iran is beginning to appeal to, and not necessarily about the non-aligned community, which actually is supporting Iran's stands as a country that has nuclear rights within the confines of the NPT and the traditional North-South (inaudible).

BIDEN: Thank you.

Ash?

CARTER: Just very briefly, I agree with your contention, Senator Biden, with my two colleagues.

There is a sense, however -- and I noted this earlier -- in which economic sanctions have a political effect. They do express universal or some degree of consensus.

And as I mentioned earlier, the experts on sanctions will tell you that the political effects kick in immediately, and the economic effects actually kick in over a long period of time. So, sanctions do have a political effect.

The other thing I would say is, I completely...

BIDEN: Excuse me. I'm not asking whether they have a political effect. I'm asking whether or not it's possible to get the sanctions.

In other words, this notion was, we diplomatically isolate, but to the degree to which we seek sanctions that are not unilateral, it splits that diplomatic consensus.

CARTER: I'm sorry, then. Then, that I also agree with. The sanctions we can get will not be effective, and the sanctions you can imagine being effective, we will not get.

Ray is absolutely right. The expression Martin used was "Iran's on a roll." And I think we all recognize that. We're looking in a kind of funhouse mirror at the Middle East at the moment, and places that are smaller than they really are look bigger at the moment.

And I think Iran's bubble is destined to -- I don't know whether burst, but certainly reduce in size. There are fundamental things that go against the Iranian government.

The people are uncertain about its ability to deliver what they want. The rest of the region might be in appeasement mode at the moment, but fundamentally, they're looking for an opportunity to put Iran back where it belongs.

And so, these are things that over time will play out in our favor. And that's one of the reasons why I said that the moment isn't quite right for us now, because they're doing so well and we're so preoccupied elsewhere.

And that's why I take some solace in the fact that they're not about to build the bomb.

BIDEN: Do you all -- that, to be, without ruining your reputation, I agree with you completely. That's been the thesis of which I've been operating.

That there, A, is more time than is asserted by the administration, before there's an imminent threat. B, that time really plays to us, not to them. And C, that if you could divine a way to do it, the place to play is internally in Iran -- if you could. I don't know how to do that. I don't know how to do that.

But if you take a look at Syria, if you look down the road and you assume that Bashar Assad, or the Syrian leadership, that Iran was destined to become the hegemonic power in the region and the dominant power, I don't think that would bode too well for you, especially if you buy the argument of our right, that it is a radically Islamic- driven, you know, bunch of crazies who are in the position that they are attempting to extend the influence of Sunni power in this internal revolution that's going on, and the clash of cultures within Islam, et cetera -- all these sort of nightmarish scenarios that are set up.

If you're sitting in -- it's a question -- if you're sitting in Syria, it's kind of a -- you know, you're kind of making a Faustian bargain with an outfit that doesn't like you very much, and from which you don't have a whole hell of a lot of future, it seems to me.

And so I'm wondering, Martin, along the lines that you suggested about -- and I apologize, I had to take a call, but I'm told by staff that you indicated -- the possibility of a Sunni Arab state fear combined with an Israeli fear, that maybe this is a time to try to jumpstart the Arab-Israeli peace process.

I assume -- maybe I shouldn't assume -- wouldn't that require us to them, and us as interlocutors, to engage Syria relatively soon I that process, if there was going to be an attempt to do that?

INDYK: Well, first of all on the timelines, Senator Biden, I think it's important to bear in mind, while you and Ash are correct that there's time, that the Iranians appear to be, as far as we can tell -- you have to always say that -- five years away, at a minimum.

Israel keeps on making the point that what matters is the time it takes them to cross the nuclear know-how threshold, meaning when they actually know how to enrich the uranium, know-how to build the bomb and put it on the missiles, which they've already developed.

And their estimate is that Iran crosses that nuclear know-how threshold within a year.

BIDEN: Well, let's assume that's true. There are not many options anybody has laid out to do anything about that.

In other words, I mean, we have all these projections, but I don't know anybody -- I don't hear any of you recommending that there is military action that was taken (ph) place. You've all acknowledged that the likelihood of getting coherent and cohesive economic sanctions that would make a difference by the world community is not in the cards.

We acknowledge that Iran's on the ascendancy momentarily, and that we are, to say the least, bogged down in Iraq and in Afghanistan.

And that there don't seem to be a whole lot of options available, other than trying to figure out, A, how we get straightened out in Iraq and Afghanistan as quick as we can -- we have no plan, in my view -- and try to figure out, as well, how to put strange bedfellows together who have a common concern -- even though it may only be the leadership -- a common concern with regard to Iran, and deal with the reality that the real, fundamental threat comes when the capacity has been realized when it actually -- something's done with that capacity.

Because, you know, we kind of -- anyway.

INDYK: Well, we're left with a choice between bad options. But...

BIDEN: Well, I haven't even heard any option that is not bad. We're left with a choice between disastrous options.

INDYK: Well, no, I wouldn't go that far. I mean...

BIDEN: Well, military force, use of military force in the near term. Is that an option that does anything to generate or benefit our short-term interest?

INDYK: I'll let Ash answer that. But, I mean, we should not abandon the diplomatic option, just at the moment when it's going to be really tested. So, obviously, we have to...

BIDEN: Well, I'm not suggesting that.

INDYK: ... have to pursue that, first and foremost.

Then there is the military option, Ash has laid out. I think there are a lot of problems with that.

But, I think, ultimately, we are going to be left in a situation -- this is the reason for my pessimism -- where we're going to have to end up deciding whether we can live with Iranian nukes, like we live with Pakistani nukes and North Korean nukes, or not. And Israel, of course, is going to make its own decision about whether it can.

But ultimately, Senator Biden, that's where I think we end up here.

BIDEN: Well, I would argue there's an interim step in there, within the timeframe we're talking about, but that's a different issue -- another different issue. But that's for another time.

Let me conclude by asking the question -- and I should know the answer -- how much oil do we import from Iran? And would it make a difference, if, in fact, we unilaterally ceased and desisted from importing Iranian oil? I assume it would just be picked up by other countries immediately.

CARTER: I'm not an expert, senator, on oil markets. But my understanding is that we would end up buying oil from Venezuela, and somebody who's now buying oil from Venezuela would buy it from Iran. It's a fungible commodity and...

BIDEN: Yes. That's what I...

CARTER: ... the world supply would just...

BIDEN: I think it's important for the record that that be stated, because that's a question...

CARTER: Yes. And so it would. It would have no effect on Iran or on us...

BIDEN: ... that we -- something that (inaudible).

CARTER: ... for that matter.

May I touch on this question of the Israelis and the knowledge? I've heard Israelis say that, and I want to say as a scientist, that I really think that that is a misleading metric.

You can have all the knowledge you want of how to build a bomb, and if you don't have highly enriched uranium or plutonium, you're not going to have a bomb. So that's not the important threshold.

BIDEN: Thank you all...

CARTER: A second thing I would say...

BIDEN: Oh, I'm sorry.

CARTER: ... is that, particularly with highly enriched uranium -- less so with plutonium -- but with highly enriched uranium, I think that everyone who is knowledgeable about bomb design will tell you that anybody can assemble a uranium bomb. It is sadly not difficult.

You know that we had no doubt that ours would work, our very first one, would work. It's trickier with plutonium. These people are using highly enriched uranium, and any knucklehead who has enough highly enriched uranium can make it, it'd go off. So, it's just not the case.

What the pacing item here is getting the metal. And if they're going to make it, they have to make it in those centrifuges. We know how many there are. We know how effective each one of them is at making, at enriching uranium.

Even if they get to the thousand centrifuge, pilot plant level, that pilot plant running full time with non-enriched fuel, I think the number is 2.7 years to the first bomb. That's once they get the pilot plant going of a thousand centrifuges. So, these are things that people can work out the numbers.

And why the Israelis are saying this, I don't know. But I say, from a technical point of view, it's just not true.

BIDEN: Well, I noticed that the new head of Israeli ministry of intelligence has stopped using the phrase "point of no return."

(UNKNOWN): (inaudible) a red herring.

BIDEN: And I'm at the point of no return. The vote on the floor is up, and I'm going to leave. Thank you, gentlemen.

LUGAR: Thanks, Senator Biden.

Senator Dodd?

DODD: Did you have a chance to go?

LUGAR: Well, I'll raise questions after you have.

DODD: Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman. And thank all three of you for your continuing help and support and shedding -- trying to shed some light on a very, very difficult and complex foreign policy challenge, about as serious of one as I can think of we've had.

I wonder if you might just -- the senator (ph) was trying to decide what options we hear. I wonder if you might, each of you, take a moment out and describe, if you could, what a successful end game would look like to you, in a process here, which would leave all of the principal parties satisfied. I mean, satisfied is a vague enough word.

But envision, if you will, or share with us your thoughts, on an end game here that would leave everybody saying, well, that's a pretty good result.

And is it possible, in your view, that such an end game would allow us to -- would allow Iran to attain its enrichment capabilities?

TAKEYH: I'll just begin.

In terms of negotiating options with Iran, I think Senator Biden was referring to that. What are the options to negotiate?

First of all, this is not a unique historical moment for the United States. We've been in this position before.

If you look back in the late 1960s, early '70s, we were in a position in East Asia, where our power was declining, because of the Vietnam War, and the Chinese power was increasing, because of China's own capabilities and declining American power.

And then there was certainly antagonism between the two countries. They have gone to war with each other in Korea. And, obviously, Chinese were very much involved in the Vietnam War.

The negotiations with Iran, I think, as being contemplated today, suffer from a conceptual divergence. Iranians are going into these negotiations, as Martin was saying, in order to offer confidence- building measures that will allow them to continue their nuclear program.

The Europeans -- and now, I gather, the Americans -- are going into these negotiations in order to arrive at an arrangement that will cease those nuclear activities. These are conceptually divergent perceptions of what the negotiations are for. And ultimately, it was this conceptual divide that undermined the E.U.-3-Iran negotiations after 2.5 years.

How do you negotiate with Iran? I think you have to accept certain basic realities. Iran is an important power with influence in the region. And the purpose of negotiation would be how to establish a framework for regulation of this influence.

Therefore, in a perverse sense, negotiations is a form of containment. We're negotiating as a means of containing Iran's influence, surely, as we negotiated with the Chinese in the early 1970s, as a means of coming to some arrangements to rationalize U.S., Sino-American relations as a means of regulating Chinese power.

So, what you can do -- and I think I alluded to it in my written testimony -- is actually having negotiations with Iran, as I think Martin was saying, a comprehensive negotiations on all of Iranian concerns and all of our concerns -- our concerns like human rights, terrorism.

They have their own grievances, and so forth. And these negotiations would take place, ultimately without precondition.

In 1970, when the United States negotiated with the Chinese, there was no precondition to those negotiations. We didn't say, we want 250,000 Chinese troops that were active in North Vietnam to be withdrawn. But the purpose of those negotiations was essentially to establish a framework where Beijing's relationship with Washington was more important to it than its relationship with Hanoi.

The purpose of these negotiations would be to foster an arrangement where Teheran's relationship with Washington is more meaningful to it than various gradation of uranium, or, potentially, its ties with Hezbollah.

So, therefore, although suspension of nuclear activities is not the beginning point, you hope to get to that at the end point, by creating a new framework and a new basis for U.S.-Iran relations.

But in all these discussions and negotiations, we have to appreciate that, in a sense, we are legitimizing Iran's -- at least Persian Gulf is not larger -- regional aspirations.

DODD: Ash?

CARTER: It's an excellent question. It's the key question. What would we be satisfied with?

Ray has given a version of it, which I think is quite cogent. I'm going to take a different cut at it.

When it comes to proliferation, you never really win finally, because people never renounce forever. Whether it's Taiwan, South Korea, South Africa, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, they could all reverse course. So, there's a buffer in time between where they stand now and them having a bomb.

And what you want in the case of Iran is a sizable buffer. But you'll never make that buffer infinitely long.

We judge that, if they are making their own fuel, even for a civil nuclear program, that buffer is too narrow. And that is why we have opposed Iran having the capacity to enrich itself, even if that enrichment capability was inspected.

That has been the American view. I share that view.

I don't share the view that them having nuclear power of any kind is too dangerous -- nor, evidently, does President Bush -- for the reason that that buffer can be made long, if the fuel comes from outside of the country -- the enriched fuel, the enrichment is not done there. And then the spent fuel goes outside of the country.

But what we need from Iran is a buffer that's long enough, that we don't feel that we're up against an Iranian bomb that's only one or two years away, or some uncertainty about whether there is an Iranian bomb at all. And that's what we're looking for, a buffer of some years.

There are various ways that that can be worked out, and that's one of the reasons that I think that, from a technical point of view, these negotiations could succeed. The Iranians could be satisfied that they were close enough that they hadn't renounced for all time a Persian bomb, and they could have a civil nuclear power program. But the buffer could be long enough that we're satisfied, and our allies are satisfied, that they're not on the cusp of proliferation.

That's the end state I think both sides could be looking for in this negotiation that would satisfy them both.

DODD: You think that satisfies Iran? I mean, I was intrigued by Martin's point earlier. And I was telling the chairman on the way over to vote, without a forum like this sharing with you, who specifically said this.

But I was in the region in April, and had a long meeting with a very high-ranking Arab official from a very strong ally of ours, who expressed to me great reservations and fears about an Iranian-U.S. diplomatic conclusion that would exclude them in some way, or would in some way leave them out of the equation.

And, Martin, you made the point earlier that you think there is going to be an ask coming back from the Iranians to us -- assuming we could be satisfied with the result that Ashton has talked about here -- that may include a very significant and dominant role in the region

And so, can you give me some idea before I turn to Martin, what you think the Iranian ask is going to be, other than the satisfaction here that they've somehow been able to maintain their nuclear option here without taking the position that they would forebear forever from acquiring that weapon?

CARTER: The result I described, which was purely a nuclear result, is unlikely, in my judgment, to be attained in isolation. It'll be part of a some larger package.

DODD: Right. A larger thing.

CARTER: And the larger package will cut both ways for the Iranian leadership. To some extent it will legitimize them and reward the roll they're on. On the other hand, it will constrain their behavior in the future.

DODD: Yes.

CARTER: The other response I guess I'd give, Senator Dodd, to your excellent question is that, when one says, will the Iranians accept it, the answer is, there are several different flavors of Iranians.

DODD: That's true, yes.

CARTER: And I'm sure there are some who want to have the bomb, and nothing can turn them around, others who want to have nuclear power, and others who don't care about one or the other.

We do know that the nuclear power program is what they say they want. And we know that that's popular with their people. And so, it's possible that they could be satisfied with some version of that, and not the bomb. But who knows?

DODD: Ambassador, do you want to add anything to this?

INDYK: I don't think I spoke to that same high-level leader, but I did hear one of them here just recently speak in what I would assume would be the same terms.

He said, there should be no negotiations with Iran, because, if you negotiate with Iran, you are allowing it to become the arbiter of Arab interests, and that is unacceptable to us.

DODD: And, in fact, that was the same message, yes.

INDYK: And that's a very real fear that they have in the region.

But I just want to come back to what I thought was a very useful explanation on Ash's part of what the nuclear deal would need to be, because, I think what I heard him say was that enrichment is not something that would -- Iranian independent enrichment is not something that would give us sufficient confidence that the buffer would be long enough, correct?

And that's precisely what the Iranians are saying is a red line for them, that they insist on their right to enrich.

And so, if you just focus it down to the nuclear issue, that's where the rub will be. That's where the real problem will be.

And I suspect that the scientists are going to have to work out a way -- if we really think we could get a nuclear deal, the scientists are going to have to work out a way to allow Iran to do low-level enrichment under strict controls.

And we're going to have to decide whether that's acceptable, or that runs too high a risk, because I don't see that if -- I don't think we're going to get to that point anyway.

But if we go up to that point -- to answer your question -- that's where it would have to be worked out.

Can we live with low-level Iranian enrichment? Because that's the locus of the deal that would have to be done.

But on the much broader question of what their ask would be, I think it's very clear that what they're looking for is recognition by us of their regional role. And that is a minimum. We can't accept that.

And the question is, what do they really mean by that? How do we posit? We can only figure that out in a negotiation -- a direct negotiation -- in which we're obviously going to have to be talking about a security structure in the region that takes care of the security concerns, as well, and takes care of our security concerns and the concerns of our allies.

So, it's possible. I'm a diplomat, so -- I like to think I'm a diplomat -- so I think it's possible to work out compromises for all of these things. But it's very difficult to see how we're going to get there.

Theoretically we can do it. Practically, it's very difficult to see how it would (inaudible).

DODD: Someone suggested that we take some sort of a bold action here to try and break through, at least to start the process.

I like, by the way, the analogy going back in the late '60s with President Nixon and Henry Kissinger's opening toward China, which has been articulated. Peter Beinart has talked about this in a conversation, of just doing the unexpected and changing the game. It changed the game dramatically with that very clever defensive move, I thought, in that time.

But just even opening up an interest section, offering Iranians to open up an interest section here, in return for one being opened up in Teheran.

Is that something that you could imagine?

INDYK: I think we would love to do that. I think even the Bush administration would love to do that. The Iranians have never been prepared to allow us -- they have an interest section here. Sorry.

We would like to have American diplomats on the ground in Teheran. They are not prepared.

DODD: Have we made a public offering? Because, I mean, I don't recall ever seeing that kind of a public expression of offering that exchange of interest sections being made.

Do you know if that's been done?

INDYK: Well, our interests are represented by the Swiss. I forget who represents their interests here.

(UNKNOWN): Pakistan.

INDYK: But in terms of actually being able to -- I think the real benefit to us would be if we could actually get in on the ground there in a diplomatic capacity.

And that's not something they're prepared to do.

DODD: Been resistant to it.

Mr. Chairman, I've got a dozen more questions, but I can see the look on your face and the look on these.

I have an opening statement, which I obviously was not here for. I'd ask unanimous consent to put that on the record.

LUGAR: It will be placed in the record.

DODD: If you don't mind, there are a couple of other questions I'd like to send to you, if I could. And if you could respond, it'd be very, very helpful.

They get into the nonproliferation issues and the wait-and-see look, which is another whole aspect of all of this, watching how it would go with (ph) with India, and so forth.

I'm sure there's not -- well, and then the internal. I'm very interested in where we stand today, where the U.S., in the wake of the events over the summer with regard to the population in Iran itself.

So, those will take a longer time to answer, and I'll just submit them in writing and look forward to your answers.

LUGAR: Thank you. We appreciate the panel responding to the senator for the record.

Let me just conclude with a couple of questions.

One is, just theoretically, why would it not be a good idea -- aside from the fact that it seems to be a great change in course. But leaving that aside, we indicated that we want to have, as a country, a very open relationship with Iran, that for 27 years, as you pointed out, we haven't had very much of a relationship at all, officially, really (ph) unofficially.

But we've decided -- as a matter of fact, just adopting the buffer idea that you have, and maybe not labeling it that -- that if we are going to get along in this world, that immediately, we suggest scholarship exchanges -- sports teams has been mentioned -- but business people, tourists, curious people, whoever, and ask the Iranians to admit all these people to the country.

And at the same time, we'd admit all sorts of Iranians here, as opposed to there being a huge issue when a distinguished Iranian comes to Washington, and which there are editorials as to whether anybody ought to meet with the person or not.

I can understand the current diplomatic situation. But we would say, well, indeed, we should, on the basis, for example, that our country has taken this position in the past with the former Soviet Union, now Russia.

You traced sort of the developments in China over the course of time that have led to a very different kind of negotiation when our secretary of the Treasury goes there, presently, and talks in sophisticated ways.

So, you could say, well, my goodness, what a change in course. What's happened to this administration, or to whoever is responsible?

And we would say, well, as a matter of fact, we suspect that this is probably a better course, all things considered. And we'd like for the Congress to consider it. Throw some of the burden over to us, so that all the contradictory factions in American society come in here and say, don't touch those Iranians. But others say, well, we ought to (inaudible).

I just have the impression that, not that we're flying blind here -- a lot of very sophisticated people, and yourselves, are so helpful in our respect.

But one of the questions often raised about Iraq -- and it was raised in this committee, long before we got into hostilities, but long (inaudible) up -- is that frankly, we didn't know very much about Iraq. We were just barely aware of its origins, who was there, what sort of -- what relationships they had with Iran or Saudi Arabia, or anybody else.

And it's very painful to have so much discovery for years afterwards, which we all go to school. But I just have a feeling, this is of the essence presently.

Now, I ask that sort of coupled with this aspect, so that you can try both at the same time.

We do have, obviously, a very large United States presence in the area, in Iraq and in Afghanistan. Much larger in Iraq than Afghanistan these days, but our European allies under the NATO reach- out are in Afghanistan.

Is this likely to be helpful or harmful, using the buffer situation again? Notwithstanding whether we finally have lots of exchanges of other people, but right now we have a lot of people that are in the area.

We haven't discussed today what would be the implication on our negotiations with Iran if, for example, we were to withdraw a substantial number of forces fairly rapidly from Iraq. Or, the other side. If we simply said, well, as a matter of fact, in order to get that situation under control, we need to send another division to Iraq, as some suggest.

But how does that affect, even the negotiations or the nuclear development or any of the above? Is there something salutary in our position by having Americans there to offer credibility?

If they were not there, would Iraqis take the position that the United States, when it finally comes down to it, is interested in this area for a while, but only for a while? Sort of a short time space, all things considered. And we may do a little development work, but not much of that is going on either, as a matter of fact.

So, would any of you comment on these ideas of sort of using, once again, the time span or the buffer idea, or however else you want to develop it?

TAKEYH: Ash can talk about his buffer plan. I'll briefly say something that has been alluded to in this hearing and others.

I always view studying Iran as comparable to studying China in the 1950s. We just have no access to that country. We have no real way of understanding it. It is a country that is very difficult to work in, given the fact that they often equate research with espionage.

So, it's an enclosed country in many ways in terms of actually trying to decipher the internal deliberations within the regime.

In all countries there's a gap between public declaration of officials and their private perception. In the case of Iran, that gulf is the Atlantic Ocean. I mean, they -- you know, when an Iranian official says "yes," he could mean yes, he could mean no, he could mean maybe. I mean, there's just no way of assessing it.

So I think a greater degree of American interaction with Iran -- going there and talking to people, particularly at official level and even non-official level -- will be extremely salutary.

But the problem, frankly, hasn't been from our side. There are lots of Iranians who are willing to -- there are lots of Americans who are willing to go. I was supposed to go this summer; I was denied a re-entry (ph) permit.

Ken Pollack, Martin's deputy, had tried to go many times, and he was denied a visa. So, not every problem in U.S.-Iranian relations is the fault of the United States.

Part of the reason why we fail to understand their country is they're not providing us with an ability to do so. And there has to be a change of mind on the other side.

I mean, if all three of us applied for a visa to go to Iran, I doubt if any of us would get it -- certainly not Martin.

(LAUGHTER)

LUGAR: But it might be important to publicize...

(CROSSTALK)

CARTER: Before my security officer has a stroke, I would have to say that I would have to ask, and I would probably not be allowed to go.

LUGAR: But it might be important to publicize the fact that you are attempting to do this.

TAKEYH: Yes, we...

LUGAR: In other words, Americans who actually want to...

(CROSSTALK)

TAKEYH: Actually, once (inaudible) and I went through months of negotiations to go, and they never -- ultimately, their final response was no response, which we took as a "no."

LUGAR: Yes.

TAKEYH: The role of Iraq -- increasingly I think the presence or absence of Americans troops in Iraq does not affect Iran's negotiating posture, because I think they arrive at a position that they're confident that those troops are not going to be used against them.

And it's important to recognize that when Iranians are talking about security issues, we often misinterpret that as they're asking for security guarantees.

Increasingly, they're asking for negotiations with the United States over the security environment of the Persian Gulf, which is, in some way, recognition of their rights and prerogatives in that particular region. So, they're coming at this with some degree of invulnerability (ph).

Should American forces begin to leave Iraq, I think -- I mean, Iranian influence, I think, in Iraq is intact. It's operational, not just through the Shia allies that Iran has, but also has a close relationship with the Kurdish population and Kurdish leaders, and so forth.

LUGAR: Ash, do you have a thought?

CARTER: Just two observations. They're both excellent questions, and Ray has given excellent answers to them.

On the question of the troops in the region, it hasn't turned out at all the way the Iranians probably expected. It certainly didn't, of course, turn out the way we expected at the time the war began.

Many people were telling me that, if things went well, this would strengthen our hand with respect to Iran. We would have a military presence in the region that might be semi-permanent, right on their border. And notwithstanding the fact that we had eliminated their historic enemy and balancer in the region, we would be able to assume that role.

The Iranians, I think now -- certainly the Iranians I have spoken to have said to me -- they're pretty happy with the current situation. They have a big hand in what happens, but we're keeping the lid on. They don't want the lid to blow off entirely.

It is, unfortunately, even if it were the optimal thing to do, to put more troops, U.S. troops in Iraq, the reality is that that's not physically possible for us, given the size of our current military, or the Army and the Marine Corps at the time, and the rotation we've already put them through -- now on their third rotations.

Materially to increase our presence there, even if we felt that another 50,000 or 100,000 troops would spell the difference, we couldn't do it.

INDYK: I would just say, first of all, on the issue of exchanges, I think, in principle, it's a very good idea and we should encourage it. But we shouldn't have any illusions that it's going to make a major difference (ph). We did have experience with this in the 1990s. We had all sorts of exchanges going on.

But what was happening in Teheran was that the hardliners were effectively establishing their control, undermining and thwarting the reformers. And in the end, all the exchanges didn't change that dynamic, and we are where we are.

But I still think we should do it, if only because it will give us a better understanding of what's going on. I think one of the things that everybody has agreed on in this hearing is that we don't have that feel. And that's very problematic.

As far as Iraq is concerned, I mean, I think, to put it crudely, Iran is on the ascendancy in the region, not because of anything they've done in particular, but because of what happened in Iraq.

We've, in effect, taken Iraq out of the balance of power equation now, and it's going to be a hell of a long time before it's back in that equation. And that makes them dominant in the Gulf, because, you know, the old Iraq-Iran balance doesn't exist anymore.

Were we to put another division in, I think the Iranians would be very concerned. Were we to pull out our forces, they'll also be concerned, because descent into chaos on their borders, with their involvement there with the Shias, could easily drag them in.

So, the ideal situation for the Iranians is the one that exists now. We're bogged down, but we're keeping enough of a lid on it that it just enables them to build their influence, including in Iraq and in the border region, gratis, courtesy of the U.S. Army.

LUGAR: Well, lots of optimism.

(LAUGHTER)

But a lot of wisdom. And we appreciate very much your thoughtfulness, your patience, your stamina. But we feel we've had a good hearing for ourselves and for the people who have shared this hearing over C-SPAN.

So, thank you for coming. We look forward to seeing you again soon, and the hearing is adjourned.