'Long struggle' with Iran seen ahead

WASHINGTON --The State Department is preparing for a ''long struggle" against Iran and has opened a special Office of Iranian Affairs inside the department in Washington and a miniature embassy-in-exile in Dubai to help ''defeat" the Iranian regime, Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns told Congress yesterday.

The new post in the United Arab Emirates -- home to 560,000 Iranians -- will help funnel funds and support to dissidents and antigovernment activists both inside and outside Iran, according to a leaked March 6 State Department cable.

The move comes as an Iranian diplomat warned that Iran could retaliate against the United States for pushing to bring Iran's nuclear program before the UN Security Council next week.

''The United States has the power to cause harm and pain," said Ali Asghar Soltanieh, a senior Iranian delegate to the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency, said in Vienna yesterday. ''But the United States is also susceptible to harm and pain. So if that is the path that the US wishes to choose, let the ball roll."

Iran, one of the world's largest producers of oil, has influence in Iraq and with militant Palestinian and Lebanese groups.

For the past three years, the United States and its European allies have accused Iran of secretly attempting to build a nuclear weapon. Iran insists that it is only trying to generate civilian nuclear power. In recent months, Washington has worked hard to build a fragile coalition with Russia and China to bring Iran's program under the spotlight.

Washington has also broadened its accusations against Iran, saying it is attempting to further destabilize Iraq and is frustrating the democratic ambitions of its own people. The United States recently announced $85 million in aid to promote democracy and television and radio broadcasts inside Iran.

''The problem of the Iranian regime has become entrenched over the course of an entire generation," Burns told the House International Relations committee in a hearing yesterday. ''It may require a generational struggle to address it, but we have no choice but to do so."

Since the United States cut off diplomatic relations with Iran after the 1979 Iranian revolution that saw American diplomats taken hostage for 444 days, the State Department has devoted few funds toward Iran, Burns said.

The State Department trained few Persian language specialists and stationed almost no diplomats in the region to handle Iranian affairs.

In Washington, the State Department's three Iran desk officers shared an office with countries of the Arabian Peninsula. A few weeks ago, they moved into their own office, with a new, Iran-specific office director.

In the coming months, the State Department intends to increase the number of diplomats in Dubai that monitor Iran from one to at least four, creating a diplomatic presence that Burns said would be similar to the US listening post in Riga, Latvia, that monitored the emerging Soviet Union in the 1920s.

The State Department will also open Iran-specific posts in the Azerbaijan capital Baku and in Istanbul, Frankfurt, and London -- all cities that have sizable Iranian expatriate populations, according to a State Department cable advertising the posts obtained by Think Progress, a blog associated with the Center for American Progress, a liberal Washington think tank.

''This initiative will enhance our capacity to respond to the full spectrum of threats that Iran poses," the cable reads, adding that the new diplomats will help find ways to fund ''Iranian political and civic organizations" and ''locate pro- democracy groups inside and outside Iran."

''We must defeat Iran in its pursuit of nuclear weapons and its sponsorship of terrorism and its subjugation of the people of Iran," Burns told the hearing, which was attended by former American hostages.

Charles A. Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the new moves by Washington suggest ''a clear effort to make regime change a more central part of US policy."

But he warned that working with Iranian exiles to undermine the Iranian regime also has risks.

''We learned some tough lessons from Iraq in relying too heavily on the advice and the activities of ex-pats because they are often out of touch with the realities on the ground, and they are often resented as people who parachute back in, are tainted by close association with the United States," he said.

Next week, the pressure on Iran will continue to rise, as Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the IAEA, is slated to send his report to the Security Council.

But it is unclear how swiftly the international coalition against Iran could impose tough measures that officials in Washington hope to see.

Yesterday, at the United Nations, Russia's foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, told reporters that Russia did not support imposing sanctions on Iran.

''I don't think sanctions as a means to solve a crisis have ever achieved a goal in the recent history," he said after meeting with Secretary General Kofi Annan.

But Burns told Congress the opposite. He said yesterday that if Iran failed to respond to Security Council resolutions, ''we believe that the world community should entertain the possibility of sanctions against Iran."