Bush Heads to Mideast with Iran atop the Agenda

WASHINGTON — President Bush leaves Tuesday for an ambitious Middle East trip, hoping to rally oil-rich Gulf states around his efforts to isolate Iran.

He will also seek to reassure regional allies of the U.S. commitment to the region, update them on the war in Iraq and lend symbolic support to efforts to revive long-stalled Arab-Israeli peace talks.

During the week-long trip, Bush is scheduled to visit Israel, the West Bank, Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

He leaves amid growing concern over rising crude oil prices and heightened U.S.-Iran tensions.

Crude oil briefly topped a record-breaking $100 a barrel last week. And three U.S. Navy ships nearly fired on five Iranian speedboats on Sunday, Pentagon officials said, after the Americans were surrounded and threatened in the Straits of Hormuz, a strategic choke point critical to world crude oil supplies.

The encounter prompted a sharp warning Monday from State Department spokesman Sean McCormack.

"We are going to confront Iran's behavior where it threatens us, where it threatens our allies, where it threatens the integrity of the international systems that have been set up to facilitate international commerce and finance," McCormack told reporters.

Bush, who moved last summer to tighten U.S. economic sanctions against Iran, has been urging his partners in the region to follow suit.

"There's no question the president wants to maintain and expand an anti-Iran coalition; it's just incredibly difficult for him to do that," said Joseph Cirincione, director for nuclear policy with the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning Washington think tank.

"If the president is going there still hoping that he can win support for his former strategy of coercing Iran into compliance or collapse, then he will fail," said Cirincione. "But if he's in the process of developing a new strategy that combines pressure with incentives, then he has a much greater chance for success."

Bush concedes that he faces an uphill diplomatic battle in trying to harden regional attitudes toward Iran given a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate in December that concluded that Tehran abandoned a covert nuclear weapons program four years ago.

"The fact that I'm having to explain it means it's harder after the report, but I believe I'll be able to convince them," Bush told Al Arabiya TV, a popular Dubai-based satellite television station that broadcasts widely across the region.

"Nobody wants to be dictated to, and I'm certainly not going to do that," Bush said in an interview released Sunday. "I am there to reassure and to look people in the eye and say, 'I believe Iran is a threat; we have a strategy to deal with it; and we want to work with you.'"

The U.N. Security Council has passed two sets of economic sanctions against Iran for its insistence on pressing forward with its uranium enrichment program. Bush had hoped to secure a third, and tougher, round of sanctions last fall, but the NIE undercut those efforts, strengthening the hand of Russia and China, veto-wielding members of the security council that have resisted further sanctions.

He's likely to face a reluctant, and not altogether receptive, group of leaders in the Gulf region.

"We need a lot more coordination on Iran with the Gulf states than I think we have," said Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington policy group. "The Gulf states can seriously undermine U.S. efforts to isolate Iran."

Bush has long accused Iran of trying to produce nuclear weapons. While the recent NIE concluded that Iran had such a program, perhaps for decades, it also said the program was halted by the fall of 2003, months after the U.S.-led invasion of neighboring Iraq.

Iran continues to try to enrich uranium, however. Enriched uranium can be used as a fuel for civilian nuclear power plants. Highly enriched uranium, however, can be used to make nuclear bombs.

U.S. struggles in Iraq have shaken the confidence of some regional players, said Cirincione, adding to an inherent reluctance to confront Tehran.

"Most of the countries of the region see Iran as a rival or a threat, but they also recognize that, like it or not, Iran is an emerging power in the region and they're going to have to come to terms with it," Cirincione said. "Many in the region share the Iranian perception that Iran is getting stronger and the United States is getting weaker."

Uncertainty over long-term American intentions in the region, particularly amid the heated political rhetoric of a U.S. election year, has further clouded the regional outlook.

"If we can make clear where we're going, and get them to come along with us, that's very important for whatever it is that we're trying to do with Iran," Alterman told journalists in a briefing last week. "Their ability to trip us up, either by errors of omission or commission, could really make it very, very difficult for us to pressure Iran in the kinds of directions we're really trying to pressure them in."