A U.S. Office In Iran? Not Yet.

By Mark Hosenball | NEWSWEEK

Score one last win for the Bush hard-liners: the White House appears to have nixed a plan to open a diplomatic office in Iran. Factions within the administration had been debating the proposal for two years, and just before the Nov. 4 election, senior Bush officials told NEWSWEEK that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice wanted to proceed with the opening of a U.S. "interests section" in Tehran, with an announcement likely to come before Thanksgiving.

But the holiday came and went with no announcement, and last week, a senior official familiar with White House views, who would only speak on the condition of anonymity, said the idea had been scuttled. The reason: Iran's continuing bad behavior. During a meeting in Geneva last summer with State Department official William Burns, this official said, "the Iranian representative was totally unserious" and moving ahead with the plan to open an interests section "would ... have been perceived as the regime being rewarded." Other foreign policy experts have suggested that a renewal of limited diplomacy with Iran would've been one favor too many toward the incoming Obama team.

The decision to nix the Tehran office comes amid scattered reports about Iranian mischief in the Middle East, though the timing is almost certainly coincidental. U.S. commanders and local officials near Afghanistan's Iranian border say a recent weapons seizure from Taliban militants included a surface-to-air missile that could threaten U.S. air operations. But a Washington official familiar with counter-terror assessments, who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive information, said the missile might have been stolen from the Russians before they left Afghanistan. U.S. officials are also playing down Iran's support for Hamas in the ongoing war with Israel. While Hamas has certainly received moral and financial support, current and former U.S. officials say the sophisticated rockets Tehran has supplied to Hizbullah forces in Lebanon are too large to fit in the tunnels Hamas uses to smuggle weapons into Gaza. They also dismiss reports that Hamas might soon have weapons capable of hitting Israel's nuclear weapons factory at Dimona.