ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia — The Bush administration scrambled Wednesday to hold together a global alliance of suspicion against Iran, saying the clerical regime still has much to answer for despite a U.S. reversal of its claim that Teh ran is seeking nuclear weapons now.
President Bush opened a trip to Nebraska with a warning about Iran — his second in the two days since U.S. intelligence agencies jointly concluded that Iran had long ago dropped active military nuclear ambitions.
Vice President Dick Cheney admitted the National Intelligence Estimate might make it harder to build international support to persuade Iran to give up its uranium enrichment program.
“There’s nothing in the NIE that said we should be — not be concerned about their enrichment activities,” Cheney told , an online political magazine, in an interview Wednesday at the White House.
Asked whether the intelligence report made that task more difficult, Cheney replied, “Perhaps, but it wasn’t easy to begin with.”
Bush’s top diplomat, who must explain and sell the shifted U.S. position among European allies later this week, pushed anew Wednesday for international solidarity on Iran.
No allies have told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice they want to back out of a U.S.-led drive for sanctions, but the administration worries the new assessment weakens its leverage and drains the urgency from efforts to roll back Iran’s nuclear program.
The re-evaluation of the Iranian threat has overshadowed diplomatic meetings Rice attended in Africa.
“It is the very strong view of the administration that the Iranian regime remains a problematic and dangerous regime and that the international community must continue to unite around the Security Council resolutions that it has passed,” Rice said in Ethiopia.
Bush demanded that Tehran detail its previous program to develop nuclear weapons, “which the Iranian regime has yet to acknowledge.”
“The Iranians have a strategic choice to make,” he said before a political appearance in Omaha. “They can come clean with the international community about the scope of their nuclear activities” and accept U.S.-backed terms for new nuclear negotiations, “or they can continue on a path of isolation,” he said.
The response from European partners who would lead any talks has been modulated but generally supportive.
European and U.N. officials said that the U.S. report bolsters their argument for negotiations and that the world should not walk away from years of talks with an often-defiant Tehran that is openly enriching uranium for uncertain ends.
