Iran Rejects U.S. Offer to Visit

CRAWFORD, Texas —  The Iranian government Friday rebuffed a U.S. offer to send a high-ranking humanitarian delegation to Tehran, a proposal seen as a quasi-diplomatic overture to a country that President Bush has labeled a member of an “axis of evil.”

The proposed mission was to have been headed by Sen. Elizabeth Hanford Dole (R-N.C.) and to have included an unnamed member of the Bush family. It would have followed the arrival this week of U.S. aid and rescue workers to assist with the aftermath of a catastrophic Dec. 26 earthquake near Iranian city of Bam that killed more than 30,000 people.

“We have heard back today from the Iranians that, given the current situation in Bam and all that is going on there now, it would be preferable to hold such a visit in abeyance. Therefore, we are not pursuing it further at the moment,” State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said.

Ereli insisted that there was no “political undertone” to the U.S. offer. “Our motivation is purely humanitarian, purely compassionate,” Ereli said at a news briefing in Washington. “That was the spirit I believe in which it was received, and the spirit with which we’ve been discussing it in subsequent stages.”

In Iran, however, there were indications that the Tehran government saw the proposal differently. On state television, Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi was quoted as suggesting that Iranian leaders believed that the delegation would have been too political a gesture during a humanitarian crisis.

“Offering relief to survivors of the earthquake must continue without turning into a political issue, because it’s a humanitarian issue,” Asefi said, according to Reuters news service.

The Iranian rejection appears to end the latest episode in a long series of gestures and behind-the-scenes dialogue between the two governments, which have variously expressed -- and withdrawn -- interest in rapprochement.

“Both sides are obviously waiting for the other to make a more decisive move,” said Marvin Weinbaum, a scholar at the Middle East Institute, a Washington think tank.

U.S. officials said the latest offer was made Tuesday to Iran’s representative at the United Nations in New York after Dole, a former president of the American Red Cross, asked the White House whether it would have any objection to her heading a Red Cross mission to the country. Dole’s suggestion came as the president asked his staff if there were any further steps the United States could take to assist Iran, and White House officials decided to sponsor her proposed trip.

The Iranian U.N. representative informed the U.S. mission to the United Nations on Friday that Iran had decided to decline the offer.

The proposed delegation would have been the first public U.S. mission to Iran since the 1979 hostage crisis. The U.S. broke off diplomatic relations in April 1980.

Iranian leaders have sent ambivalent signals about U.S. overtures since the quake. On one hand, they accepted humanitarian relief; on the other, they insisted that the Americans -- both civilian and government rescuers -- were participating as “volunteers” and not as official representatives of the U.S. government.

Additionally, the Bush administration is divided over whether a warming of relations is desirable. Those who favor engagement argue that the United States could use Iranian cooperation to apprehend Al Qaeda terrorists and insurgents in Iraq. But administration hard-liners distrust Iranian leaders, and insist they must change their policies -- primarily their support for Islamic militants and their alleged nuclear weapons program -- before any diplomatic rapprochement.

The president appeared to embrace the latter position Thursday, when he told reporters during a hunting trip in southern Texas that “the Iranian government must listen to the voices of those who long for freedom, must turn over Al Qaeda that are in their custody and must abandon their nuclear weapons program.”

Shaul Bakhash, an Iran expert at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution, said those comments by the president may have triggered the Iranian rebuff.

“Iran’s leaders are very sensitive to the suggestion that they are being browbeaten into changing their policies,” Bakhash said.

“Whether it was a conscious pulling back on the Americans’ part, or just off-the-cuff remarks, I can’t really say.”