On trip to Europe, Bush will seek leaders' resolve on Iran
Aims to sway nations critical of US efforts
LJUBLJANA, Slovenia - President Bush's weeklong tour through Berlin, Rome, Paris, and London appears every bit the glamorous old-style farewell tour with a leisurely schedule, jaunts to country castles and lavish dinners.
But it's actually a high-stakes diplomatic mission, spurred by Bush's fear that Iran is an increasingly urgent threat and that Europe may not take it seriously enough.
Bush has never been popular in Western Europe after the US invasion of Iraq. "A lot of people like America. They may not sometimes necessarily like the president but they like America," Bush told a reporter from Slovenia.
So it was puzzling that he decided to buzz through all of Western Europe's Big Four nations this week, risking large protests and pointed questions, instead of choosing, as he usually does, to stop in formerly communist, newly democratic Central and Eastern European countries where he always gets rock-star welcomes.
Iran helps solve the mystery.
Bush started his trip yesterday in Slovenia where he will take part in the annual US-European Union summit. He also is staying in Italy to see his old friend, Premier Silvio Berlusconi, and for his third meeting with Pope Benedict XVI, visiting Germany to chat with Chancellor Angela Merkel, spending two days in Paris with President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, going to Windsor Castle to see Britain's Queen Elizabeth II, and stopping in Belfast to hail the power-sharing agreement between Protestants and Catholics .
But mostly, Bush is visiting nations and leaders critical to a stepped-up US effort to get new and harsher measures aimed at preventing Iran from proceeding with a suspected plan to build a nuclear bomb. Britain, Germany, and France, along with the United States, Russia, and China, are developing a package of fresh penalties and incentives aimed at reigning in Tehran's alleged atomic ambitions. Italy wants to join the effort, too, and Bush told a television interview that he was open to it.
"He is going to try to stiffen European resolve on Iran," said Stephen J. Flanagan, director of the international securities program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "If anything else is going to happen . . . those are the countries that are going to deliver."
It's a high priority of Bush's, and he is running against two quickly ticking clocks.
One is his own. His presidency is set to end in a mere seven months.
The other is Iran's. In defiance of the first three rounds of mostly symbolic UN Security Council resolutions, Tehran has not only continued its enrichment of uranium, producing material that could be used to power an electricity plant or make a nuclear bomb, but also has expanded and improved it. Assessments vary widely, but it is widely presumed Tehran will have enough fissile material for a weapon within a few years.
A US intelligence report in December said Iran once had an active warhead program, but shelved it in 2003. But the administration believes that is nowhere near the last word on Tehran's desire for a nuclear weapon. It argues that the continuing enrichment means the military program could be restarted at any time, and without the knowledge of the outside world.
Those competing to succeed Bush, Barack Obama, a Democratic senator from Illinois, and John McCain, a GOP senator from Arizona, have differences on whether to talk to Iran's leaders. But both have pledged to be as tough as Bush - including holding out the threat of force - to prevent Iran from becoming nuclear-armed.
Still, either administration will take some time after the January inauguration to gear up, both in personnel and policy development. And that is time that Bush and his administration fear cannot afford to be wasted.
"It's just this sense of how much time can, in a sense, be lost before the Iranians do something very significant?" Flanagan said.
So the president is on a tour of persuasion.
"I will continue to work on this trip to talk about the dangers of a nuclear Iran - not civilian nuclear power, but a program that would be aimed at blackmail or destruction - and that we've got to work to stop them from learning how to enrich," Bush said in an interview with RAI TV of Italy.
He preceded his European trip, not coincidentally, with a Washington meeting with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel. The session, with the leader of the nation most afraid of Iran and most hawkish about curtailing its influence, became a platform for tough talk on Iran by Bush.
The president promised that the United States takes seriously the "existential threat to peace" that Iran poses. And his national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, spoke cryptically afterward about whether Olmert had asked for the promise of military action. "All I can say, really, is that we've talked a lot about Iran and about the options that are available," Hadley said. 