Another crack at the Persian Puzzle

Burns argues that those are defensive steps that are not intended to provoke Iran, though there has been a vigorous behind-the-scenes debate in the administration over whether the more aggressive policy could provoke Iran to strike back. The State Department has tended to counsel caution, while some more hawkish aides in the Pentagon and the White House say the increase in American forces in Iraq could be neutered unless the American military forcefully pushes back against the Iranian aid to the militias.

To many in Washington, especially Bush’s Democratic critics, the new approach to Iran has all the hallmarks of an administration once again spoiling for a fight.

Some see an attempt to create a diversion, focusing the country’s attention away from a war gone bad in Iraq, and toward a country that has exploited America’s troubles to expand its influence. Others suspect an effort to shift the blame for the spiraling chaos in Iraq, as a steady flow of officials, from the CIA director to the new secretary of defence, cite intelligence that Iranians are smuggling into Iraq sophisticated explosive devices and detailed plans to wipe out Sunni neighbourhoods. So far, they have disclosed no evidence. Next week, American military officials are expected to make their most comprehensive case — based on materials seized in recent raids — that Iran’s elite Quds force is behind many of the most lethal attacks.

But as they present their evidence, some Bush administration officials concede they are confronting the bitter legacy of their prewar distortions of the intelligence in Iraq. When speaking under the condition of anonymity, they say the administration’s credibility has been deeply damaged, which would cast doubt on any attempt by Bush, for example, to back up his claim that Iran’s uranium enrichment programme is intended for bomb production.

“It’s never stated explicitly, but clearly we can’t make the case about Iran’s intentions,” said a senior strategist for the Bush administration who joined it long after evidence surfaced that Iraq had none of the illicit weapons that the administration cited as a reason to go to war.

It has not helped that even as the administration is making its case against Iran, the perjury trial of I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, was opening just a few blocks away.

The early testimony in that trial has laid bare again how Cheney, among others, carefully selected intelligence for use in a political campaign to make the case against Iraq. Now, several years later, the administration is paying the price in dealing with a country whose ability to project power and to build a sophisticated nuclear programme is far greater than Saddam Hussein’s was in 2003.

The administration does not have definitive evidence that Iran is moving toward producing a nuclear bomb, but next week it will unveil what officials say is evidence of Iran’s meddling in Iraq.

In interviews over the past several weeks, officials from the Pentagon to the State Department to the White House insist that Bush’s goal in Iran is not to depose a government, Iraq-style, but rather to throw a series of brushback pitches.

Officials familiar with the intelligence prepared for Bush say American assessments conclude that Iran sees itself at the head of an alliance to drive the US out of Iraq, and ultimately out of the Middle East. Other briefings have included assessments that Russia and China will never join meaningful economic sanctions against a country that they do business with, so if Bush wants to apply military and economic pressure, he must do so outside the UN.

One result was a strategy that Bush approved in the fall to push back on all fronts and to force Iran to recalculate what administration officials call its cost-benefit analysis for challenging the US. The effort to stop European and Japanese banks from lending money to Iran’s oil sector is part of the equation. So is pushing down the price of oil, though administration officials grow silent when asked whether Cheney or others have discussed with Saudi Arabia the benefits of pumping enough oil to push the price down and deprive Iran of revenues.

But it is the military component of the strategy that carries the biggest risks. Two aircraft carriers and their accompanying battle groups were sent into the Persian Gulf, a senior military official said, “to remind the Iranians that we can focus on them, too.” American military forces in Iraq were authorised to move against Iranian operatives, though it is unclear what kind of evidence is needed, if any, that they are conspiring against American forces before military action is authorised. American officials describe those measures as purely defensive. “We are definitely looking to protect our interests in the Gulf, in Iraq itself, and to protect the lives of our soldiers,” said Burns, who insisted that there was no effort to stop Iran from ordinary exchanges with Iraq.

Yet administration officials clearly worry that the Iranians may not back down, and that a confrontation could build up — especially if a midlevel American commander or a member of Iran’s military or paramilitary forces in Iraq miscalculated. Both Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defence Secretary Robert M. Gates have warned against that risk, officials say.